Reset

by Sarina Dahlan

  “No one’s going to make you.” She smirks. “Unless you misbehave.”

  Benja laughs. “I’d like to see them try.”

  “Yeah, you’re very vicious.”

  “I can be. I could have ripped Thane’s face off. But I didn’t want to ruin that beautiful dress you’re wearing with the spray of blood.”

  Aris laughs.

  “How was your date last night?” he asks.

  “Disastrous. He was as interesting as the sidewalk.”

  Benja makes a face. “So was mine. What’s wrong with men? Why can’t the good-looking ones be as fascinating as me?”

  Aris guffaws. “It’s because you’re so exceptional.”

  “That’s why I’ve decided to save myself for something more existential.”

  “Like the Dreamers? That’ll be the day.”

  “You’ll eat your words when I find them.”

  “If they actually exist. You have a better chance of finding a mountain lion than finding them.”

  “Mountain lions did exist,” he says, “Seriously. Don’t you ever wonder about your past cycles?” he asks.

  “Even if I did, what’s the point? An experience is only valid if you can verify it. And if there isn’t a way to authenticate, did it really happen?” she says.

  “Ah, the old tree-falling-in-the-forest argument.”

  “Is it any different?”

  “The tree knows it fell. Just because no one was around to hear it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” says Benja.

  “But what if the tree doesn’t even remember itself falling?”

  “The act of falling happened.”

  “But did it? If the tree can’t remember and no one else was there?” she asks.

  “There would be a mark on that tree, the physical consequence of its fall. A gouge on its bark. Or a broken branch. A trace,” he says.

  Aris lifts her arm, turning it side to side, studying it. “Nope, no marks.”

  “Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  “An invisible trace. Now we’re talking.”

  “I think we’re going to be here a while,” Benja says and drops his head onto her lap. It surprises her, but she does not move. She leans back and follows his gaze to the fluffy clouds above.

  He sighs. “There has to be more to this life than the four years allotted.”

  “There is. Just because you can’t remember the past cycles doesn’t mean you didn’t live them.”

  “Oh, so she changes her argument. So fickle,” he says.

  Aris rolls her eyes. “I’m not. I didn’t say the past cycles didn’t happen. It’s just pointless to try to remember your old life, because you can’t prove it. There’s evidence of the past cycles, just not yours specifically.”

  “People do try. When I moved into my apartment, I found a couple of ink drawings hidden in a cabinet,” he says.

  “Was there a name?”

  “Yeah. But that’s useless, isn’t it?”

  “You finally get what I mean,” she says.

  Benja scoffs.

  Creativity is celebrated in the present, but since everyone gets a new name after Tabula Rasa, authorship is futile. Works of art, books, music, technological and scientific advancements are collected after each cycle and become the property of the system. Innovations are shared for the benefit of all.

  She bites into a strawberry. Somewhere nearby is Strawberry Field, where there are no strawberries—only the memory of a musician and black and white mosaic tiles encircling one simple word.

  Imagine.

  It fascinates her how a song can birth an ideology that governs lives. Without it, there would be no Four Cities or their way of life. She wonders if the musician who wrote it thought his lyrics would ever become reality.

  Aris hums its melody and watches the clouds make patterns against the bright blue desert sky. A big cloud that resembles a sheep runs into a smaller one, absorbing it in the slow way a carnivorous plant would a fly.

  “I wonder what it’d be like to not have Tabula Rasa’s curse,” Benja says, disturbing Aris out of her reverie.

  “It’s not a curse. It did what nothing else could. It brought us peace.”

  No memories. No attachment. No possession. No one has a need to fight because nobody owns anything. The things they acquire in a cycle become meaningless in the next because they will not remember owning them.

  “It takes away all reasons to fight,” Aris says, “All grudges. All prejudices. Each cycle we’re assigned a place to live. Our basic needs are taken care of by the system. The Distribution Council is responsible for equal distribution of goods, Dwelling Council for housing, Police Stations for peace management, Center for Disease Control for hospitals. Everyone gets equal access to education. The same amount of entertainment points. The service industry is entirely managed by AIs and droids. We are free to explore. To create, to invent. Yet we are each a productive part of a whole.”

  Benja scoffs. “Sounds like heaven.”

  She scrunches her face. “Hardly.”

  “Oh? Does someone have an opinion on this matter?”

  “I don’t like the term heaven. It implies we can’t make this earth, this present, into a wonderful place. That humans only deserve it after death—and only if we follow some predetermined set of rules. I think the act of striving for an idea instead of living it is ridiculous.”

  “Well, that’s harsh,” he says with a laugh.

  “I mean, you’ve read history. How many wars were waged because one group wanted to save the souls of another in the hope of attaining paradise?”

  “The human paradox,” he says.

  “You end up killing those you want to save. That’s genius.”

  “But human nature is what it is. We want to own and expand. We want to compete to be on top. We want to be right.”

  “It’s lucky we have Tabula Rasa then,” she says and stretches languidly.

  Maybe Benja’s use of the word heaven isn’t wrong, she thinks. How is this place different from the Old World concept of a paradise where no one goes hungry and peace exists among men? Yes, the price of admission is your memory. But isn’t there a cost to everything?

  “I want to remember,” Benja says. His voice is wistful.

  “I know. I just don’t understand why.”

  “Don’t you ever get the feeling that you’re stuck in a loop? Like sometimes in the middle of doing something new, you find yourself feeling as if you’ve already done it,” he says.

  “You mean like déjà vu?”

  “Yeah. How can you know a new experience isn’t an old one? For all I know I could be writing the same story over and over again and never finishing.”

  “So you want to know the past so you don’t keep doing the same thing?”

  “Yeah—but not just that,” he says, “I think there’s something I’m supposed to find out about the past.”

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know. But I keep getting these dreams.”

  “Dreams aren’t real, Benja. They’re just your mind firing synapses, making connections, cleaning out junk.”

  “They feel real to me,” he says.

  She thinks of her own nonsensical dreams and how they, too, feel real to her. But they are just dreams. They’re not links to the past nor premonitions of the future. And even if one could visit the past, why do it?

  To her, Tabula Rasa is a gift the Planner had bestowed on humanity. Every four years minds are erased of all the reasons to hate so everyone can coexist in harmony. Every time she gives the children a tour at the museum, she is reminded of how fragile peace is. Scattered human skeletons. Scorched sky. Collapsed buildings. She will gladly take this version of reality over the alternative.

  Yet Benja’s foolish
words on dreams and memories burrow into her brain like firefly larvae. She fears what they will do come the night.

  Dreams are not real.

  Metis gazes through the gray haze of the window to the backyard. Blackberry brambles cover the land in its entirety, burying it under their sharp thorns. He almost did not come inside the first time he was here. How different his life would have been had he not set foot in this forsaken place.

  “The Interpreter Center erased Bodie’s dreams,” Metis says. “The police arrested him for public disturbance, and somehow he ended up at the Interpreter Center.”

  By some means that Metis doubts was Bodie’s will, he underwent the Dreamcatcher treatment. All Dreamers know the consequence of dream erasure. Once erased, the memories attached to those dreams are gone. They will no longer resurface. Not even with Absinthe.

  The Crone’s aura brightens, casting white light on his arms, making them look ghostly. He turns to her. The Crone’s ancient face distorts in anger.

  “Their answer to every human weakness is to wipe it from existence. No choice. No learning. How do we move forward if we keep repeating the past?” she says.

  He knows her anger. It is the same one he has toward Tabula Rasa. They are stuck in the web of perpetual forgetfulness—bound to make the same mistakes over and over again.

  “I failed Bodie,” says Metis.

  The Crone turns to him. Her glow dims. “All Sandmen face this at one point. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “Will he be okay?” he asks.

  “There are side effects to Dreamcatcher. Just as all brains are different, they’ll vary from person to person. We can’t know its full impact on Bodie. Until we do.”

  Aris places the now empty picnic basket and the blanket under a tree, in a bin labeled “Take Me Home.” It sits with a collection of things in perfect condition. She pulled this wicker basket out of a similar bin on her way home from work last week. She wonders who its next user will be. Sometimes she ponders the same about her apartment. Who will live in it next? Where will she be?

  She looks up at the blue sky above. It’s an Indian summer day—sunny with a light breeze. Lucy told her there is no rain planned.

  “Let’s go through the forest,” she says to Benja.

  They enter under the shade of giant trees presiding over a primordial forest. Aris’s feet sink into a layer of decomposed leaves, branches, bark, and needles that have fallen from above. The scientist in her knows that underneath are invertebrates, fungi, algae, bacteria, archaea—an ecosystem of decomposers working to repurpose the organic materials to support life. The creative in her feels as if she is cradled by the collective nature. One day her body will join it, recycling into the earth and breeding more life.

  She is not the only one attracted to this area. Here and there hang hammocks of woven rope. Aris hears singing coming from one. She is reminded of old folklore about fairies, monsters, and witches. In the green haze of the forest, it’s easy to imagine magic seeping out of the crevices of the old trees.

  “How long do you think we’ve been living here?” Benja asks.

  “Between two to three hundred thousand years.”

  “No, in the Four Cities.”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a scientist. Give me a hypothesis.”

  She looks up at the giant trees. “Well, if, let’s say, these trees were planted when the Planner created the Four Cities. Judging by size, these must be hundreds of years old. We can’t tell of course unless we cut them and count the rings. There are quite a few factors that could accelerate or decelerate growth. Water, temperature, light, even technology can play a part. So really, there isn’t a way to truly know,” she says.

  “Ugh, just give me a number,” Benja says.

  “No.”

  “Come on!”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no point,” she says. “Except one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To shut you up.”

  Benja mumbles something unflattering about her profession.

  Aris finds his question amusing—not in itself, but in its human-

  centeredness. However long the tenure of humans has been, it is dwarfed by the amount of time prior to them. In the history of the earth, they are but a blip.

  Under the canopy of needles and leaves, she pictures a world where trees are the only permanent structure. Years from now, humans will cease to exist, and nature will take over—just like millions of years ago. Cycle. And recycle. These are the only states of being as true as time.

  “What if I don’t go to the hospital?” Benja asks.

  “When you’re sick? Why not?”

  Benja sometimes speaks to her as if she were a part of his internal conversation. More than once she has been left to hypothesize about the missing words like an archeologist.

  “No, silly. You know, how at the end of each cycle we’re supposed to check ourselves in at a hospital to await Tabula Rasa?”

  “I’m sure there’s a way to collect the stragglers somehow. I don’t think you’re the first person to wonder this, or even want to try it,” Aris says. “Besides, where are you going to go?”

  Her friend does not look capable of surviving in the wild. She doubts he has even set foot outside Callisto. Ahead she sees the steps to the main library. Benja quickens his pace. She trots to keep up with his long legs.

  The temperature is cooler inside the majestic Rose Room, a great hall of marble walls and wooden shelves filled with books. It’s one of Aris’s favorite rooms in the library. And this library is her favorite place in the world. Here, time eases like a raft drifting on a slow-moving river, making her feel like she is suspended inside a mahogany-paneled lockbox instead of racing toward inevitability.

  Sometimes she comes here to just sit and inhale the scent of old books. Woody and earthy, with a hint of smokiness. It is a unique smell. Since paper is rare and books are rarer, Aris equates it to the scent of history.

  “I’m going to walk around,” Benja says. His footsteps echo toward other parts of the library.

  She is not the only one partial to this place. Every table is occupied. Where else can one touch the memories of time? She settles on an oak chair. At the table are two others: a woman and a man. The woman is young, and Aris wonders if this is her first cycle. Not that she would know.

  Natural light shines in through the grand arched windows, supplementing the orange globe lights of the enormous chandeliers overhead. On the ceiling are mural paintings of fluffy clouds and a brilliant blue sky framed by an ornate baroque frieze.

  Aris leans back on her chair, her neck resting on its back. She studies the orange-and-pink-tinged clouds on the ceiling. They look like cotton. Their edges gray, pregnant with rain. She wonders if the mural was painted to capture the moment of rivalry between a storm and a sunset. Perhaps it’s meant to represent the struggle between the beginning and end of one’s lifespan.

  It’s an empty pursuit, she thinks. The beginning and end of a life are not two separate states but one continuous state of being. Everything that lives must die—is that not a law of biology? And does not the principle of mass conservation state that mass can neither be created nor destroyed? Things die, but they do not disappear. Life leads to death, and death to life again. An unbroken circle.

  When she lifts her head back, the man who was there had left. On the table in his place sits a blue origami crane. She reaches over and picks up the folded bird. It’s light in her hand. Paper—an uncommon material no longer used for general purposes as it was prior to the Last War. Only a few specific trades have a need for it. She runs her finger along its lines, feeling its coarseness.

  “Nothing,” Benja says from behind her, his voice laced with frustration. “I walked through the whole
place, and nothing.”

  His eyes zero in on the crane in her hand. “What the hell is that?”

  “A crane.”

  “I know. But why . . . what . . . I mean how did you get it?”

  “A man who was sitting here left it.”

  Benja snatches it from her.

  Before she can protest, he whispers, “O flock of heavenly cranes, cover my child with your wings.”

  He looks at her, his eyes glinting with excitement.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asks and gazes at the crane in his hand as if it were a precious baby bird.

  “Other than it’s a folded paper fowl? Genus Grus. Species japonensis.”

  “The ancient Japanese called the crane ‘bird of happiness.’ They believed its wings carry souls up to paradise,” he says.

  “And?”

  “The Dreamers use it to communicate,” he whispers.

  “What!” she says in a high voice.

  She remembers where she is and looks around to see if anyone is watching. No one is.

  “How do you know?” she whispers.

  “I hear things.”

  “I can’t believe they really exist.”

  “And you thought I was insane,” says Benja.

  “Wait, so if they use it to communicate, and it was left for me . . . But why?”

  He shrugs. “How would I know what they use as criteria? Maybe it’s your face.”

  “What’s wrong with my face?” Aris bristles.

  “It’s that innocent, lost look you wear.”

  “I do not!”

  He laughs. “I’m just kidding. You’re cute when you’re mad.”

  He begins to unfold it.

  “What are you doing?” She jumps up, trying to grab it back.

  He lifts it above his head, taking it out of her reach. People stare in their direction, but Benja does not seem to care. Aris stops trying to take the bird back. The curious eyes make her feel uneasy.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she says and leads Benja out of the room.

  They find a quiet corner behind a column.

  “We have to get to the message,” Benja says and begins to unfold it.