The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  Prohibition had dried me out. But now I felt the pull of those bottles again, so strong I could almost feel the burn of straight whiskey right down into my belly. My mouth went dry and my fingers tapped a beat on the glass counter.

  Slowly, reluctantly, I turned away.

  A wine-colored carpet threaded with vines along the edges spread across the floor. I followed this for a few steps, kept my eyes down, until the pull of those bottles made me turn. I swung my eyes back with expectant greed. My tongue worked itself over dry lips soon to be wetted.

  The shelves were empty now.

  I blinked to clear my eyes, my disappointment almost rising to the point of rage. Of course the shelves were empty. I was in a movie theater. What movie theater stocked booze? But still, I saw what I saw. The bottles had been there. And somehow I was sure that if I had reached for them, they would have all been full, the liquid inside sloshing against the glass.

  I turned away from the shelves, then back again. Hoping some trick in the light or movement would bring back my bottles. Nothing. I stood by the counter and listened. No sound. Slowly, I dragged myself away from the counter and through the darkened lobby. A second glass door past the ticket counter swung shut behind me with a frightening finality. My lantern held ahead of me, I moved down a long hall that ended with a gray steel door stenciled Employees Only, leaving the empty shelves behind me.

  Through the door I walked up a set of stairs and found myself inside a small projection room. Movie posters for films I’d never heard of were tacked to the wall or lay curled on the floor. Casablanca. Raging Bull. Out of Africa. A projection machine pointed out across a vacant theater. In the distance I could see the faint white glow of the screen. On a wooden table, a metal film canister with a handwritten note posted to the top. Play Me.

  I turned my lantern toward the wall and found a light switch. The overhead bulb flickered to life and I began to inspect the projector. The machine seemed in good order, clean of dust and well oiled. With a clatter of metal, I flipped open the film canister. A reel looped with a short amount of 35 mm film was inside.

  I made an educated guess on how to mount the reel. I fed the loose end of film through the projector, depressed a lever, and locked the film into place, then flipped a metal switch at the base of the machine. The machine whirred to life with a burst of light. The two projection wheels began to turn, feeding the film through the lens.

  Through the projection window, across the empty rows of seats, I watched the screen light up. I saw a blur of color and an unrecognizable flash of motion. Then the image focused. Onscreen, a man in his late 50s with salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes, and a deeply lined face sat in a white lab coat, his hands folded on a large wooden desk. He smiled pleasantly, blinked, and tilted his head slightly.

  Beside me the projector continued to whir. The man onscreen said nothing, still staring forward. Only I had the uneasy feeling he wasn’t simply staring blankly. His eyes seemed focused with purpose. He unfolded his hands in a way that was distinctly impatient. And then he spoke.

  “I only have until the film runs out,” he said. “So I don’t know how much time we have to waste here.”

  I continued to watch, waiting for him to say more.

  “I’m talking to you, you know,” the man said. “You up there in the projection booth.” The man gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, we won’t get very far if we just stare at each other all day.”

  Next to me the roll began to whine. The film had almost reached its end, the black 8 mm strip running quickly through the machine at a blurring speed.

  “Bye now,” the man said. The projection roll whirred to empty. The projector shut off and the theater descended back to darkness. Strange. I rethreaded the film and turned the projector back on. There was the same flash of unfocused light on the big screen, and then the man in the white lab coat appeared once more.

  “Why, hello again,” the man said.

  This wasn’t what I had seen before. Somehow the film was different.

  “It’s all right to talk to me. You’re in an empty theater. Nobody will think you’re crazy.” The man onscreen looked directly at me. I was sure of it. I could feel his eyes focus on mine.

  “Are you talking to me?” I asked.

  “Ah, finally you understand,” the man said. “Yes, I am talking to you.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “How is any of this possible? How is it possible that you’ve found an entire model of New York City buried beneath the Earth? Is that any more or less possible than you talking to a movie screen?”

  “Who are you?”

  “That’s why we should talk,” he said. “There’s a door just below the screen. See it?” I looked down into the darkened theater and saw a single door with an illuminated red lettered EXIT sign hung over the top. “Go through that door.”

  “What’s there?” I asked, but a moment later the film reel ended. The projector clicked off with a final snap of electricity and once again, the theater descended into darkness.

  I made my way by lantern light back down the stairs from the projection room and into the theater, passing rows upon rows of empty seats. I approached the single metal door below the giant screen. I hesitated, thinking of my experience in the subway station. If there was something in this abandoned theater that wanted to harm me, it certainly could have done so already. I was far from the rest of my crew and completely alone. I didn’t need to walk through doors for something to track me down.

  I made my decision and turned the knob. The door was locked. I tried again, harder this time, but the door refused to budge. And then I remembered the key Clayton and I had found in the marionette theater. I still had that key in my pocket. I fitted the key into the lock and turned. The door swung open easily and I stepped forward.

  A bright white light seemed to surround me. The light grew in intensity until the theater was blocked out. I shut my eyes against the brilliance, but I could feel it filling my brain. And then it was dark again.

  Slowly I opened my eyes.

  I stood inside a small, somewhat cluttered office. A frayed sofa flanked one wall. The other wall was covered with a large bookshelf, the bindings of books stacked floor to ceiling. To my right, a set of windows looked out across Manhattan. We appeared to be somewhere in Midtown. Sunlight, real sunlight, illuminated buildings and streets.

  The man from the film sat in a chair in the center of the room, legs crossed, in his white lab coat. He smiled at me and indicated the sofa. I sat.

  “Welcome,” the man said. “You finally made it.”

  “Made it where?”

  “To the deepest recess of your own mind.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The man smiled, stood up, walked, and opened one of the windows. Immediately a cool breeze filled the office. Outside I could hear the sound of New York, the familiar mix of horns and rush of tires with the deeper rumble of a subway car passing somewhere beneath us. This felt like a real city. Not the vacant shell we had discovered beneath the sand.

  “Feels pretty real,” the man said. “Doesn’t it? But this world is real only to you. As real as a dream is to any man or woman.”

  “This is a dream?”

  “Not exactly,” the man said as he returned to his seat. “It’s more complicated than that. But let me introduce myself first. My name is Doctor Joseph Valenstein.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “I’m your sixth grade orthodontist.” The man reached into the front pocket of his white lab coat and pulled out a bright blue plastic box. Inside the box was a plaster cast of a set of teeth. “Remember this? Probably not. But this is you right after you got your braces off. We saw quite a bit of each other.”

  I had no memory of what this man said. I ran my tongue across my teeth, feeling their uniform straightness.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Only you know the answer to that. You’re the one who brought me here. And I don’
t actually exist. I died years ago. Car crash I think. I don’t, or should I say, you don’t remember exactly.”

  “So you’re a ghost?”

  The man smiled. “No. I’m a projection. A projection that you are creating from your own memory. I don’t know why you chose Dr. Valenstein. He was always one of your favorite doctors maybe. I don’t know. I could just have easily been this.” The person in front of me changed from a man in a white lab coat to an attractive brunette in a low-cut sweater and jeans. “Recognize me? Mrs. Truvani, your next-door neighbor through high school?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t remember her. Somehow, in this place, I accepted what I was seeing. These faces that morphed and shifted.

  “No? You had such fantasies about me back then. Or here’s one.” The woman changed to become a beefy-looking man with a flattened nose and thick, bushy eyebrows. The man wore athletic shorts and had a whistle around his neck. “Mike Ruben? High school football coach? Anything?”

  I didn’t know any of these people. The man in the white lab coat appeared before me again. Dr. Valenstein.

  “I’ll just stay with your original choice,” he said. “Some of our strongest memories are created in childhood. Maybe that’s why you chose Dr. Valenstein. A trusted parent figure. An intelligent caregiver. Or maybe he’s just the first person that popped into that brain of yours. Who knows why our subconscious does anything? But for whatever reason you chose him.”

  My brain whirled as I tried to catch up. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want to break the bad news to you, kid, but this is what prison looks like,” Dr. Valenstein said. “Somewhere in your lifetime, the crime rate begins to rise. The cost of prisons rises with it, and people find that freed inmates get out and commit more crimes. That is until Panopticon came along.”

  I remembered what Clayton had said about that word. “What is Panopticon?”

  “I’ll show you.” Dr. Valenstein stood and walked to the only door in the room. “Right through here.”

  “But the theater is out there.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Dr. Valenstein opened the door to reveal a long, white, tiled hallway. Dr. Valenstein held the door open and indicated the hall with a sweep of his hand. “After you. I promise there are no monsters here.”

  I walked past him and through the doorway. The hallway led to a large chamber. On either side of me, round windows looked out across water. The floor was dark, polished hardwood, the space the size of a warehouse with the Statue of Liberty visible in the far distance. Artwork ornamented brick walls. A Van Gogh print hung near some sort of classical marble Greek statue. Colorful plastic molded chairs clustered almost randomly around the space.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “This is the inner workings of your brain,” Dr. Valenstein said. “This is where you keep your most important memories. You hide them here so the machine can’t find and strip them away. I am also a memory planted here. To serve as a guide to explain what’s happening. Up until recently, you believed you were some sort of gentleman adventurer. An explorer of ancient Egyptian antiquity. This is not the case.”

  “What am I?”

  “Your name is Parker. On the outside, you’re a professional prison breaker for a unique type of prison. And I’m here to remind you of your mission.”

  We reached the end of the chamber. A set of clouded glass doors remained closed.

  “What type of prison?”

  “A prison of the mind,” Valenstein said.

  The door panes suddenly cleared, and I could see into the space beyond, a hospital room with a twin-sized, silvery metallic bed. A man dressed in loose-fitting, pale blue pajamas lay flat on the platform, a metal halo just over his head. A silver cord stretched from the man’s arm down to the floor and connected with what appeared to be a heart monitor.

  “We are now experiencing your first memory of the Panopticon machine. This was ten years ago.”

  From an opposite door, a man in a white lab coat entered the room and stood by the bed. He turned to address an unseen audience. His lips moved, but his voice was muted. Dr. Valenstein spoke instead. “At the time, you were an officer in the New York City Police Department. You were given a tour of the machine that was going to revolutionize the prison system.

  “The Panopticon was designed as a means to control and reform prisoners. Rather than being held in a large cell, subject to the violence of others, and requiring the cost of guards and various monitoring devices, prisoners could be each assigned a machine and placed into this dream state.

  “Prisoners would serve their sentences in virtual worlds of the machine’s creation, interacting with other inmates.”

  I tried to accept what I was being told. To consider it at least. To let it into my mind and play with it, like a new toy. This information. It was no more or less believable than anything I had experienced the last few days. “And the prisoners don’t know?”

  Valenstein shook his head. “Before entry, the prisoner’s mind is erased. New memories are introduced of a new life, scripted by the machine.”

  I looked again and saw that the unconscious man had a full beard, his hair long and shaggy. As I watched, technicians in white lab coats crowded around the bed. They slid the metal halo off the machine, and slowly the bearded man awoke. He reached out for one of the technicians, then twisted his body and collapsed to the ground.

  His entire body shook, and I saw he was sobbing.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I said. But Dr. Valenstein had already moved away from me. I tried to open the glass doors that would lead out onto the main floor. They were locked shut.

  “The doors are locked. They will always be locked,” Dr. Valenstein said. “None of what you are experiencing now is real. It is all a memory. Carefully stored and saved by you. But memory is not perfect. There will always be gaps. Holes. Imperfections. That’s why the door will stay locked. Your memory of this place isn’t strong enough. You can’t recall all the details.”

  I looked out across the room again and noticed that vagueness of the place. The effect was strange. My eyes couldn’t focus on portions of the scene. A frame hung on the wall near the window, the canvas a blurry mess of color. A man in slacks and a sweatshirt reclined at his desk rolling a rubber ball between his hands, his face indistinct.

  But other details were perfect. The machine was especially distinct, every line of metal, each strand of wire, looked perfectly in place. And the man in the machine, I could see his face clearly.

  “Is he a convict?” I asked.

  “No, he’s a scientist. A volunteer to test the machine. This was before it all started. Come this way.”

  We continued down the long hall, then through a set of doors that opened into an old-time saloon. A heavy, oak bar backed by a soot-stained mirror with bottles of hard alcohol shone under the flickering light from gas lanterns. The floor was knotted pine, covered by a thin layer of sawdust. More gas lanterns were mounted on the wall, with a piano in the far corner of the room. Chairs and tables were scattered across the floor like jacks thrown from a child’s hand. Dr. Valenstein indicated the room. “This was a test model of the first system.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Panopticon designers built an entire virtual world to serve as the prison. Each world was populated with prisoners, guards, and artificially intelligent beings who looked and acted human but in fact, served as observers and recorders.

  “The first system was a world set in the 1880s. Later systems were set in different time periods. 1953. 1972. 1986. But what every Panopticon system had in common was that they all used the framework of Manhattan Island. So the first system was Manhattan Island of 1890. Filled with the buildings and fashion and technology of the time.”

  “What was the point of all this?”

  “The prison system was overcrowded and expensive. The average cost of housing a prisoner kept rising. The Sleep machine could do the same thing more ch
eaply. Needed fewer guards, less space. No medical costs. No administration costs. A traditional prison system costs a state billions.

  “And brick and mortar prisons weren’t even working. These prisoners being released were more violent than when they went in. They served their time sitting in overstuffed cells, surviving cruelty from other inmates and guards, only learning how to be better criminals. The justice system was thus creating new super villains, individuals who were learning no life skills, nothing that would allow them to be reintroduced into society. After a series of prison rebellions in which hundreds were killed, society knew they had to find another solution. And so the Panopticon was devised.”

  I rapped my knuckles on the bar. “So they built some fake old-timey world and had prisoners live in it?”

  “Not exactly. This was a virtual world. A world that existed only in the shared consciousness of the prisoners. As real to them as our world, but still, very much happening only in their mind. And in this place, prisoners would live. They would have jobs. They would interact with each other in normative ways. Their personal histories would be erased, placed in a memory storage facility and returned later as a download. Traumas that perhaps led individuals down the path of criminality would not be remembered. Instead, they could start anew. Not tied to a violent past. The idea being that in this way, they would have a better chance of being reformed. This experience, living in this world, would change them fundamentally as a person, and when they were released, they could be reintroduced to real society.”

  “But why set these virtual worlds in the past? Why not just have them in present day?” I looked around at the saloon with its gas lamps.

  “Because the designers were afraid of confusing the subjects. Of making it impossible for the subjects to distinguish reality from fiction upon their release. Memory is malleable. Memory can be distorted. Changed. Blended together. They wanted prisoners to retain the skills they learned in the system, but still be able to distinguish the real from the created. Setting their lives in different time periods allowed for such potential.”