Spinetinglers Anthology 2008

by Nolene-Patricia Dougan

  Seven of the one thousand SB Sim humans were deleted from the program when ProMem was administered to them. Each time the Sim was run, the same seven “people” failed to materialise at the other side. This had never happened before. These disappearances were not the software’s way of indicating death. They were not a feature of the programming at all. In the end, they were interpreted as a bug. The continued, healthy existence of 993 other members of the SB Sim population was considered good enough.

  ProMem got the green light.

  After the third “death” (Tal’s) I decided to run the SB Sim one final time. Rather than dismissing the result, I started to analyse it. You see it hadn’t occurred to anyone, myself included, that the previous result might have been a valid one, the code attempting to tell us something that wasn’t on its list of output options.

  So I looked. At first, there seemed no connection between these virtual seven – four males, three females, a broad spread of ages and ethnicity, various degrees of good health, and varied medical “histories.” But they did have something in common, a very high level of (virtual) intelligence.

  I knew this must be significant but had no idea why. In hindsight, I can forgive myself at least that.

  So I started digging. Turned out that Brand, Reinman, and Tal all had very high IQs. As more reports came in, I studied those too. Each one was the same. What the hell?

  Predictably, the company didn’t want to know. By the time I told them what I’d discovered, the number of “cover-ups” was in triple figures, and ProMem had gone “platinum” (to borrow a musical analogy). The number of takers in the US alone was, by then, over seven million, and it had become one of only a handful of prescription drugs advertised on Holovision. I‘d tried anyway. At least, that’s what I told myself. (Only, of course, I didn’t really try that hard. “Trying” would have meant alerting the media and that was something I wasn’t prepared to do. I knew it might cost me rather more than my riches and I’ve never been much for bravery.)

  2035 was the year that I realised just what I had done. Two things happened that year – ProMem was given “off-the-shelf” status, and someone rewrote the SB Sim code.

  I heard about the code update first on April 17th and immediately downloaded the new version onto my work terminal. I ran the ProMem simulation again and almost instantly had the results.

  I can’t remember how long I sat there looking at them. It’s a cliché, I know, but time just seemed to stop. I sat, and sat, and sat. Gradually, I realised what I was seeing, and why. I remember abruptly vomiting, as though my body had finally caught up with my mind and was making its feelings clear.

  The former version of SB Sim had not run its full course. The code had detected an anomaly, the loss of seven virtual humans, and the program had terminated early. It was incredible that no one had noticed. But then, it had never happened before, so why should we have considered it? Rather than run a ten-year term, the former simulation had halted at three months.

  The new code had undergone several revisions. Among them, it had been taught to recognise a phenomenon of human behaviour that the older code had interpreted as an error.

  This “phenomenon” was suicide.

  Seven virtual humans had self-erased during the simulation; therefore, the old program had assumed there was something wrong and halted.

  The new simulation was not halted, but it ran its full term.

  The result summary was what I sat and stared at for so long. Six words – “All Virtual Humans Have Committed Suicide.”

  All of them, one-thousand individuals out of one thousand (hence, the vomit).

  I arrived home that day in a daze, barely aware of what I was doing. It was then that I found the communiqué on my home terminal. “Congratulations. ProMem has been approved for general, nonprescriptive release.”

  Fate has great comic timing.

  This time, I had to tell someone. Even my greed and sense of self-preservation did not extend so far as to ignore the impending deaths of over seven million people. Can you guess how far I got? Do you think the multitrillion-dollar company that owned my work (and me) were not watching my every move? No, because, as I said, you are an intelligent individual and you know how these things work.

  They didn’t threaten me. They didn’t bribe me. They simply stopped me. I could contact no one – go nowhere – do nothing, without their agreement.

  I stopped going to work – I couldn’t face it. That gave me plenty of time to think. Naturally, I reran the new simulations, hoping and praying that maybe they would turn out differently. They never did. I analysed the results, to see if just maybe I could figure out why this was happening. I couldn’t. ProMem should have been safe. There was nothing in its chemical make-up that could have had such an effect. The simulation offered me the results, yet gave me no insight at all that could explain them.

  There was just one pattern, one aspect that stood out. The suicides had an order, one that was virtually identical each time the simulation was run.

  IQ.

  The virtual humans had “self-erased,” roughly in order of intelligence – the “smartest” individuals first, the “least gifted” last. Always, that same seven were the first seven. The final suicide, with a virtual IQ of 78, had not occurred until the third year.

  Still, the cover-ups continued. I had lost count by now. Thousands of real people were no longer alive because of a drug I had created, and most of them had taken others with them. (Homicide was not something that the SB Sim would ever have identified, as it was not a virtual society. Its virtual humans were isolated.) All I could hope for now was that someone at the company would finally realise what was happening out there in the real world and pull the plug.

  I hoped. I waited. I started drinking.

  I woke up one morning with no memory of the night before and found myself staring at an empty ProMem packet. I realised at once what I had done. I was very philosophical about it. At least now I would find out exactly what it was to have ProMem in your system.

  And I had discovered a new calm, the calm of a man who gets what he knows he deserves.

  So, what does ProMem feel like? What does it do?

  This will be difficult to relate, but I owe it to you to try.

  It does work, let me make that very clear. The mind fog clears almost at once.

  How can I explain it? Imagine that you are standing on the peak of a mountain with its summit in a cloud. You know how high you are because you have laboured every upward step of the way. You know the surrounding landscape and have an idea of the view that is being denied you, because you have travelled to the mountain and seen that landscape from ground level. Perhaps you are not even disappointed that you cannot see. Perhaps you believe that the point of the climb was the sense of achievement you now feel as you stand there. Then, suddenly, the cloud lifts. You see further and clearer than you have ever seen before, and although everything you see is familiar and explicable, somehow it still takes your breath away to witness it all. Images bombard you, assault you from all sides, making you dizzy with perception.

  When starting ProMem, it is quite impossible at first to focus exclusively on any particular memory. Then the drug wears off and leaves you feeling simultaneously elated and drained. The overwhelming sensation is claustrophobia – you cannot believe that you have been content to live such a myopic existence. In this sense alone, ProMem is addictive. There is no chemical addiction but an equally compulsive, psychological one.

  I became utterly indulged in my own new-found sense of identity. Everything else seemed irrelevant to me. Discounting my concerns, I took the second ProMem dose the second day, and the third, the next. By this time, I found myself more in control of what I saw and where I looked.

  It gets painful here. And funny. And sad. And personal. Those bittersweet memories, the ones that make you laugh and cry – have you ever wondered how many such moments are stored in your cerebrum? From my new vantage point on the ProMem
mountain, they were everywhere I looked. I could elaborate, tell you about family and holidays and pets and friends almost forgotten. I won’t. It would be a digression and you would not be interested, trust me.

  But ProMem was working as intended. Unlike Alzheimer’s, it provided stability. I could choose when to look and when to feel. I could turn off the pain before it did me any damage.

  Days and nights blurred during that first week, spent in isolation at the villa. I can appreciate why Robert Brand (the first casualty of ProMem) found it impossible to hold down his job (not that I thought about him, or much else at the time). My mind was so busy being liberated that even the pursuit of food and water became a discipline.

  I realised that the “view” was broadening, the horizons drawing ever further away.

  Memories are the galaxies of the mind – the further away they are, the older they are. I came to remember things from a time before I started nursery school, at four-years- old. Then, I could remember my third birthday. Even my second birthday.

  When I realised that I could remember the day I started walking, at fourteen months, I became concerned. The accepted wisdom is that the brain undergoes so many complex changes during those early months that conscious memories are irrevocably lost, even to hypnosis.

  They aren’t.

  I see my mother laughing as she catches me, and I hear her yell to my father in the next room.

  “He did it, Huey! You missed it!” And all the time, I’m looking at her red, hoop earring because that’s what I’d been trying to get to, legs under me or not.

  It didn’t stop there. Maybe you think you know where this is going. I suspect you’re half right, but only half.

  I am staring at an object I can’t make sense of. It is a confusion of different shapes, symmetrical, yet wildly organic and individual.

  This is how I recall the few moments after I was born. The object I was staring at? My mother’s face.

  I am crying now, because something has just struck me across the ass. Tears are filling my virgin eyes and oxygen my virgin lungs. Yet my brain is running in the background – sensing, cataloguing, remembering.

  You know what’s next?

  Darkness – a red/black, comforting darkness, filled with the rhythmic pulse of my mother’s heartbeat. I am aware of my body, weightless somehow, and completely without discomfort or any sense of restriction.

  I knew as a foetus that I would be born. I remember knowing.

  Evolution has a lot to answer for – making a species so smart in the pursuit of effective hunting skills that it is self-aware and logically cognitive before it is even born. Or, that’s what I would have thought before ProMem educated me.

  I have missed a lot in this account, such as the new ProMem culture that had sprung up around the planet. People had embraced the drug as a lifestyle choice, as a voyage of communal self-discovery. As a religion (and there’s some irony coming there, let me tell you). In such a climate, the total number affected might be enormous.

  But I had convinced myself that this was no cause for concern after all.

  After I had relived those moments in the womb, I was certain that the voyage was over. During the previous few days, I had come to believe that those suicidal individuals, who after all represented a very small fraction of the ProMem takers, had simply been too unstable emotionally to cope with their own past. And, as for the SB Sim result? A flaw I thought, one that a future rewrite would uncover and correct. The IQ thing? Well, perhaps smarter people tend to be more emotionally unstable than others do. Oh yes, I had it all figured out. I was even looking forward to the next pay cheque.

  This changed. Everything has changed since then.

  So here we are, at the rub. What exactly did I remember next? What had the others remembered before me that had sent them over the edge?

  It began almost immediately after the foetus thing. I regressed to the point where my memories became hazy. I realised that this was no lack of recall, but rather evidence that my foetal brain had become more adept at storing memories as it developed. As I probed ever further back so I saw less and less, and eventually I reached the end of the line.

  Only it was not the end at all.

  At first, I thought that the memories which then followed were my own. They were hazy as hell, more like dreams than anything. It took me a while to figure it out, a name here, a reference there. The memory that finally unlocked it for me was of “Sixteen, Six,” the terrorist attack on London back in June 2007. “I” was walking across Waterloo Bridge when all hell broke loose in the sky above. Only, of course, it was not me, because I would not be born for three further years.

  It was my father.

  He had told me often enough that he had been in the city at that time, that he had narrowly evaded the toxic clouds as the bio-shells had landed. It was too much of a coincidence. Besides, in this memory I was wearing his watch, the one he would give me for my eighteenth birthday over twenty years later.

  So, you see, we are not talking about reincarnation here. Maybe that’s what you thought was coming next, that I would start remembering my past lives? No, this was proof of something else I had long suspected might be true.

  This was genetic memory.

  Many scientists have claimed for decades that the nature/nurture debate is a no-brainer. Of course, people are born with certain character traits. Of course, not all behaviour is learned. A spider does not learn to make a web; it already knows how to do it, just as a baby bird knows how to fly, even if its body isn’t quite up to the task at first.

  Some take it further. They contend that human beings are born with more specific knowledge than some suspicion of how to walk or how to wield a club. They claim that DNA has the capacity to store experiences, that somehow the brain is able to reprogram the genetic code, the genome, so that mothers and fathers can pass on to their unborn offspring far more than eye or hair colour. They can pass on experience.

  Memories.

  These memories sit in the subconscious, affecting the behaviour of the offspring but never being a conscious part of its thinking. In this way, these scientists argue, a species builds a genetic knowledge base, a common way of thinking and acting, which helps to ensure their collective survival by combining a million experiences.

  It seems they were right. ProMem has proved it in the most direct possible way.

  The memories I discovered of my father’s life were far, far less extensive than those of my own (and, of course, they stopped sometime before my conception). They were almost exclusively of situations in which his life was threatened, however briefly. From an evolutionary point of view, this makes perfect sense when you think about it. The most valuable memories are those that help to preserve our survival. Most of it he’d told me about, though one or two things he never had, and I could see why. (He had been the typical irresponsible teenager, you can probably guess.)

  The moral? Don’t give your kids ProMem, if you want them to respect you!

  There were one or two other interesting things as well, memories I would describe as “formative.” These focused on occasions when he had learned to do something, understand something, or realised something significant. Each memory (him mastering calculus, for example) was related directly to something that I have a knack for myself. Suddenly the evolution of the human intellect seemed far less mysterious. It must have been a cumulative process, and one that has never stopped.

  But, how far back do the memories go? Is that what you’re wondering now?

  I am about to die. The detonation was so close to the shelter that the garden soil above is raining through the corrugated iron like flour through a sieve.

  Only my great-grandmother did not die as a child during that air raid on Coventry, England, in May 1941. If she had, that memory would not be in my skull ninety-five years later. She passed it through her genes to my grandfather, who passed it to my mother, who passed it to me.

  I could go on. Perhaps I should. But the po
int of this tale, if that’s what you’d call it, would be lost. The memories of my distant relatives will not suffice.

  I will have to go back much, much further than that.

  I will have to tell you what so many before me have already seen — Robert Brand, Sally Reinman, and Rahjid Tal, first of all.

  And, I will have to tell you why, once this account is over, I have every intention of joining them.

  Yes, you read that right.

  The memories continued into the past. It soon became impossible to know whose they were. They became gradually less defined, the details sacrificed in order that the basic message be retained – a warning here, a lesson there. Increasingly, my mind turned inward on itself, refocusing, ever deeper and deeper, like the exploration of a fractal. And as the memories became ever more removed in time, so they became ever more fundamental in nature. Soon, I felt, I might find myself remembering how to swing down from a tree, walk upright, or how to drag myself from the sea.

  It never got quite that far, as it turned out.

  Have you guessed it yet? Do you know where this is headed? Don’t worry. I didn’t see it coming either. I began to sense I had been too hasty in concluding that ProMem is harmless, but I didn’t appreciate why.

  I wonder if Robert Brand guessed with his IQ of 197, or Sally Reinman with her IQ of 201. They would have made it to this point more quickly than I did. Perhaps, for them, this entire process was an inevitable progression.

  Perhaps they knew what awaited them at the bottom of the memory abyss, long before it claimed them.

  Let me tell you what wasn’t waiting.

  I didn’t find myself playing the roles of Adam and of Eve in the Garden of Eden, perhaps succumbing to the temptations of the serpent.

  I didn’t look upon the face of God as he gave us life, as portrayed on Michelangelo’s ceiling.

  Furthermore, I didn’t find that we are all creations of the Devil – the jury is out on that one.

  The memories became the very architecture of my mind. Of our minds. I saw them slot together in well-ordered rows. I remembered the flow of logic that brought us into virtual existence.