Pushing up the digits

by Pascal Inard

  Stephen touched the identification pad with his right index finger, and his DNA was matched against the security database to verify his profile. After the all clear was given, he exchanged his smartphone for a site-only tablet. As an additional security measure to ensure nothing could be leaked out, the area was in a cone of silence. No device that could communicate with the outside world was allowed inside. The researchers didn’t mind, but to keep the technicians happy, a fitness centre complete with swimming pool and a relaxation room with the latest immersion games and cat videos had been included in the building.

  Five minutes later, the shuttle arrived and Stephen entered the QPT facility. He was surprised that the decorations for the opening ceremony had already been taken down. He walked over to get a closer look at a new picture that had been hung next to his favourite, a representation of the Higgs boson. It represented a particle made up of eight purple strands shaped like an irregular infinity symbol arranged to form a sphere. According to the caption, the unitron was discovered at the Quantum Particle Transformer on the 15th of August 2045. How could the artist predict that Stephen was going to prove the existence of this new elementary particle, which was at the heart of his theory, in four months?

  He walked briskly to his desk, looking around him for signs of other anomalies.

  He sat down and consulted his schedule for the day. The first meeting was with the experimental team led by Andrew Frawson to prepare experiment Goanna at ten in the operation room. He didn’t remember booking that one. It didn’t make sense. The transformer wasn’t ready to operate yet. A number of calibration tests were scheduled over the next week, and the entire team was mobilised to check the results. And only then the fun could begin.

  Stephen scratched his head.

  “Morning Stephen, how’re you going?”

  He looked up at Andrew; with the physique of a rugby player and the demeanour and blond hair of a surfer, you would never suspect that he was one of the brightest experimental physicists in the southern hemisphere, a worthy partner in Stephen’s project to prove his universal theory.

  “Ok, I guess.”

  “D-day at last! Aren’t you excited?”

  “I will be once we’ve run all the calibration tests and we can get Suzie going.” Andrew had started calling the Transformer Suzie and the name had stuck. He hadn’t given any clues as to whom he had named it after, but some suspect it was the name of his first and only love who had perished in the 2038 Queensland tsunami.

  “Stop stalling, we’re waiting for you! You told me yesterday morning that you’d worked out how to solve the issue with your model. You know, the renormalisation Lagrangian of the twenty-fifth constant. You were confident that you would be ready today to go through it with the team so that we could rerun experiment Goanna.”

  Stephen frowned.

  “Hey, what’s wrong? Did you come across another snag?”

  “Were you dreaming? How could I have done anything yesterday, with Bob Fultrow and the media touring the place? We haven’t even started calibrating Suzie, and my model has only got twenty-four constants, not twenty-five.”

  Andrew flinched. “Are you sure you’re alright Stephen?”

  “The champagne didn’t agree with me, but apart from that, I’m fine. Why?”

  “You sound like you’re living in the past. You spoke about the celebration as if it was yesterday, and you’re referring to your model and Suzie as they were then.”

  Beads of sweat formed on Stephen’s forehead. “Wait, there’s something I don’t understand. You’re telling me that Suzie is ready for an experiment, and you’re waiting for me to adjust my model that has a twenty-fifth constant.”

  Andrew nodded; Stephen continued. “What is this constant?”

  “You introduced it three months ago. Has your prodigious memory let you down?” Andrew asked.

  “Just answer my questions, and then if I can, I’ll answer yours.”

  “Alright, the twenty-fifth constant is the elliptical mass of the unitron.”

  “And what is this experiment you called Goanna? Is it to create a murkon?”

  Andrew laughed. “That was nine months ago! Come on, you’ve got no excuse for forgetting that one, as usual you didn’t drink a single drop of booze when we celebrated!”

  Stephen considered Andrew’s reply; the murkon was the particle that made up dark matter according to his theory. He had been waiting for the transformer to be built to prove its existence, but Andrew was saying that the experiment to observe it had already been successfully conducted.

  It didn’t make sense. Had he fallen into a parallel universe?

  “So what is it?”

  “As if you didn’t know, it’s to transform a W boson into an acceleron.”

  “My next question may sound silly, but please humour me. What is today’s date?”

  “March thirty-first.”

  “Of what year?”

  “2046.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Andrew smiled. “Well yesterday was the thirtieth, so unless the decimal numbering system was changed overnight, thirty-one comes after thirty.”

  “No, I meant the year.”

  “I celebrated my birthday last week, it was the big four-oh. Now let’s see, according to my birth certificate, I was born in 2006—add forty and that makes 2046.”

  Stephen twirled his ponytail while he digested the information at hand. The picture in the reception area, the train running to an apparently future-dated timetable, Bob’s seemingly premature election date announcement in the news and what Andrew had just said all correlated.

  He had lost his memories of the last three hundred and seventy-four days.

  Adrenaline flooded his body, making his stomach churn and his skin flush. He felt helpless. His infallible memory, the one thing in his life that he could always rely on no matter what, had let him down

  Andrew put his hand on Stephen’s back and said, “Mate, I think you’ve been working too hard. If I was you, I’d take the day off and rest. It’s no drama, we’ll reschedule the experiment.”

  The headache which had been slowly receding came back stronger than before. Stephen winced, took a deep breath and said, “I think you’re right Andrew, I’m going to go home, and after a good night’s sleep, whatever condition I have will have gone away.”

  As he spoke, he wished that his words were wishful thinking.

 

  Stephen walked out and got on the shuttle train.

  He recalled the morning’s events one by one: he had woken up, as he always did, to the sound of cockatoos screeching and the neighbour's kids screaming that they didn’t want to go to school, but the house was empty. On the trip to work, his smartphone had told him that he had finished reading a novel one year ago when he thought he was up to page 143, and that he had written a novel.

  His good old iPhone 15 wasn’t defective after all, a small consolation. He wasn’t going to have to upgrade it for a model made by JCN, the company that had bought Apple. The JCN models predicted their owner’s wishes and needs based on patterns of behaviour (very useful for a creature of habit like Stephen), and by measuring wirelessly their owner’s biological variables: endorphins, adrenaline, blood sugar level and testosterone amongst others. There was no way Stephen was going to buy a single JCN product; he couldn’t forgive what the corporation had done to his father.

  Stephen felt relieved that his short-term memory was intact. But what about his long-term memory?

  The value of Pi is 3.141592653589793238462643383279

  He stopped at the forty-seventh digit and went straight to the last one he could remember: the 78675th digit is 4.

  The capital city of Pakistan is Islamabad.

  The currency of Botswana was the Pula before the formation of the United Republics of Africa.

  His grandmother’s maiden name was Gordon.

  His grandfather watched the first man walk on the moon on the twentieth of July 1969; he
was sixteen at the time. He met Stephen’s grandmother at a concert of the Rolling Stones in Melbourne on the 17th of February 1973.

  One year since his last memory.

  All he knew so far about that period was that he had been successful in creating a murkon, and that he had introduced another constant in his model. But what else had happened? Where was his wife Cécile? Had she simply gone to work early today? Her down-under French fashion brand was doing very well, but she was anxious that her success wouldn’t last in the fickle world of fashion and she often worked long hours.

  At Ballarat station, Stephen got on the Melbourne train and sat in his usual seat. It was the first time he had travelled this early and the carriage was only half full.

  The train started and Stephen looked out the window. He hadn’t noticed before that the countryside had regained the colours that the four-year drought had drained out of it. Cattle were grazing in the fields again; it was amazing how quickly the recovery had been. Not that he usually paid much attention to the landscape, like most commuters who spent their time ingesting the information that their smartphones threw at them, or trying to get an extra half-hour of sleep.

  He got tired of playing ‘spot he difference’ and called Cécile’s number. It went to voicemail again; she was probably in a meeting. He dialled the number of her office; Juliette, Cécile’s friend and associate, answered.

  “Cécile Dubontant’s office, how may I help you?”

  “Hi Juliette, it’s Stephen, I’ve been trying to reach Cécile all morning. Is she busy right now?”

  “Maybe she is,” Juliette replied drily. “Why are you suddenly trying to reach her?”

  Stephen hesitated to tell Juliette that he hadn’t seen Cécile for a year. “I was a bit worried, that’s all.”

  “It’s a bit late to worry about her. You should have done that a long time ago, instead of taking her for granted. But if you really want to know, I’ve never seen her better.”

  Stephen tried not to make his bewilderment apparent. “Can you ask her to call me?”

  “Any particular reason why she should do that?”

  “I have some news which may be of interest to her.”

  “I’ll try, but don’t hold your breath. She’s moved on, and the less she hears about you, the better.”

  Juliette hung up.

  That explained the empty bed and Filou missing. It was her cat; Stephen didn’t see the point of owning a pet that was oblivious to the humans with whom it shared the house.

  He closed his eyes to review what he had seen in the house before he left. Cécile’s brushes and make-up were missing from the bathroom, and her painting was no longer hanging in the lounge room. Brighton beach, with its brightly coloured bathing sheds, painted with the brush strokes of an impressionist—Monet was her favourite.

  Cécile had moved out, but why? What had happened in the past twelve months? And where was she living now?

  Stephen called his best friend Mukassa, thinking he would have some answers.

  “Hi Steve, how are you?” Mukassa continued without giving Stephen time to reply. “What did you think of our recording of Birds of Fire I sent you yesterday?”

  Mukassa was a keyboard player in a jazz band and he had often said that he would love to play this song by the Mahavishnou Orchestra, a jazz band from the 1970s, but he had put that project on hold until he could find a violin player that could equal Jean-Luc Ponty.

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t have time to listen to it. I had other things on my mind.”

  “Busy at work?”

  “No, it’s not that. I woke up this morning not remembering anything about the past twelve months.”

  “How is that possible? You don’t remember anything?”

  “Nothing, zip, nada, a complete blank. The last thing I remember is going to bed after the inauguration of the Transformer.”

  “How could that happen? Have you seen a doctor yet?”

  “No, it took me a while to realise that I was no longer living in 2045; I’m on my way home now. I’m hoping it’s temporary and I’ll wake up tomorrow with all my memories.”

  “You and your extraordinary memory, you must have overworked yourself and exhausted it.”

  “Well, I can still remember every detail from the moment I woke up this morning, and everything before the inauguration of the Transformer. The only thing I’ve figured out is that Cécile moved out. I don’t know why or when, and I can’t reach her, she must’ve put a block on my number.”

  “I can answer some of your questions, but I can only go by what you told me.”

  “That’ll be enough.”

  “You went through a bad patch last winter; something happened at work and it affected you really badly. You didn’t tell me what it was, but you were tense and I hardly saw you. Not that I was seeing much of you before anyway, you were completely taken by your work. And then Cécile left you. You told me that it was very sudden, and that it was because you were neglecting her.”

  “When was that?”

  “End of October I think.”

  She had left him six months ago, and she was already with someone else; at least that’s what he thought Juliette meant when she said Cécile had moved on.

  “How did I react to that?”

  “Compared to the incident at work, rather well. I think by that time, you were so involved in fixing up whatever was wrong at work that nothing else mattered so much.”

  “What about Thibault and Félicie?”

  “They moved with their mother and you see them every second week-end.”

  Stephen exhaled loudly; he had heard enough for the day.

  He turned right and walked along Comer Street, with its stylish mansions. The value of the houses dropped every time the sea level announcement was released. Last year, a rise of three centimetres had resulted in a drop of ten percent in house prices on the west side of Brighton. The proximity of the beach that had made the suburb of Brighton so desirable was now its bane. Stephen would have joined the exodus and moved to Ballarat, if it wasn’t for Cécile who wanted to stay in the fashion capital of Australia where she had her office, her friends and her clients. She preferred to wait to have her feet in the water before moving, even if she knew it was inevitable.

  Stephen thought about what Mukassa had said. It didn’t take much for Cécile to feel neglected. She needed to be reassured constantly—that she was a good wife, a good mother, a good fashion designer. The youngest of five children, she’d had scant attention from her parents, and needed to prove to the world that she was worthy of being loved. When Stephen’s mind was totally consumed by the search for the key that would unlock the universe’s mysteries, Cécile had a way of bringing him back to earth. It made Stephen’s mind blink and for a moment he reverted to his role of loving husband. But this time, his troubles at work had such a grip on him that there had been no room left for his wife’s emotional needs.

  Alone at home, with a headache that came and went, Stephen’s hope that tomorrow he would be back to normal started to wane. He turned to his wall screen and asked for information on amnesia.

  Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease or psychological trauma. Amnesia can also be caused temporarily by the use of various sedatives and hypnotic drugs. Memory can be either wholly or partially lost due to the extent of damage that was caused. There are two main types of amnesia: retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is the inability to retrieve information that was acquired before a particular date, usually the date of an accident or operation. In some cases the memory loss can extend back decades, while in others the person may lose only a few months of memory.

  “Tell me more about retrograde amnesia,” Stephen said.

  Retrograde amnesia is usually caused by head traumas or brain damage. Episodic memory which refers to one’s life experience is more likely to be affected than semantic memory which refers to general knowledge about the world. The damage
is usually caused by head trauma, cerebrovascular accident, stroke, tumour, hypoxia, encephalitis or chronic alcoholism. Retrograde amnesia can also occur without any anatomical damage to the brain. It often occurs due to a traumatic situation that individuals wish to avoid.

  “If I had a stroke, I wouldn’t have been able to go home.” He rubbed his head and said, “If I was hit on the head, I would have a bump. A traumatic situation? That’s very unlikely. So are sedatives and drugs.” Stephen paused. “Unless my food or drink was spiked. I’ll request a full security update of all the personnel tomorrow; there could be a traitor in our midst. What if our competitors knew that I was getting close and tried to neutralise me? A blood test will confirm that. Browser, what about treatments?”

  Many forms of amnesia fix themselves without being treated, but there is no actual remedy for amnesia. To what extent the patient recovers, and how long the amnesia continues depends on the type and severity of the lesion. Improvements can occur with cognitive therapy in which amnesiacs develop the memory skills they have and try to regain some they have lost by finding which techniques help retrieve memories or create new retrieval paths.

  Stephen started pacing the room, trying to clear his head but it only made him feel more anxious.

  And why were his leg muscles painful?

  Fatigue, muscle pain, weight loss and abdominal pain were all symptoms of Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia Type 1, a hereditary disease that had claimed his mother’s life when a pancreatic tumour had spread to her liver. Stephen pressed the measurement button of his wireless Personal Health Assistant: five seconds later, the results were displayed. The interface of the prototype wasn’t user-friendly because his father had been forced to stop the development of the device. It didn’t indicate the normal values of the measurements, but Stephen had memorised them with no effort. His ACTH level was below the upper limit beyond which a medical consultation was deemed necessary. Still, there were things that weren’t measured, like the levels of the thyroid hormones T3 and T4; it was time he got a full check-up.

  He walked around the house, looking for something that would trigger a memory. He started with the lounge room; it was much the same as it was a year ago, minus Cécile’s painting and her magazines which she used to pile up on the coffee table in front of the red leather sofa. In the corner a canvas half covered with paint in various shades of orange that vaguely evoked a sunset stood on an easel. It looked like Cécile had a bad day when she painted it. It was surprising she left it here. When she wasn’t happy with one her creations, it ended up in the bin.