The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  “Alive,” the Navigator said.

  All along First Avenue, the newsies were still handing out wanted posters for Parker’s old body. The elevated train rattled by overhead, the noise deafening, before it veered off at Twenty-Third Street toward Second Avenue. Shopkeepers and laborers began to filter off the omnibus as they continued north, until only the domestics were left on board. At the cusp of the modern age, the roads were a strange mix of transports. Small, two-seater surreys and carriages clattered by carrying the Park Avenue crowd while an electric car sped by with a gong.

  Parker paid his fare and jumped from the omnibus at Sixty-Fifth Street. He walked quickly west toward Fifth Avenue until he found himself at Central Park standing in front of The Hyacinth, an elaborate sandstone apartment house that stretched almost the entire block.

  A doorman, hands folded behind his back, stared out across the park. His eyes narrowed as Parker approached. He had a muscular build, his neck bulging over his collar, the faint mark of a tattoo visible below his ear.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Here about a placement,” Parker said, his voice completely feminine.

  “What placement?”

  “Lady’s maid.”

  The doorman stepped back, looked Parker up and down, then jerked his head toward the lobby. “Take the back elevator.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Parker nodded, then entered the public foyer. The doorman followed close behind and together they boarded the small service elevator.

  The top floor of The Hyacinth was a sprawling, richly furnished apartment house. Parker was led through a well-decorated sitting room and into the kitchen.

  “I’m looking at the building plans for your location now,” Charlotte said. “Ten rooms. Two elevators. Takes up the entire floor. From the kitchen, there’s a staircase leading up to the roof.”

  The kitchen was large and devoid of people. A large, wooden table took up the middle of the room, with a zinc-lined sink and a hooded range. The black handles of knives protruded from a wooden block.

  “You have papers?” the doorman asked.

  Everyone in the system had papers. In his new body, Parker had nothing. He made a show of patting down the front of his dress.

  “You’re going to have to kill him,” the Archivist said.

  Parker ignored the comment.

  “Do it now before he puts out an alarm,” the Navigator said.

  “I’m not sure if I have my papers,” Parker said to the doorman. “I might have dropped them in the omnibus.”

  The doorman took a step forward. His hand reached beneath his jacket and rested on something hidden there.

  “Do it now, Parker! Take him out!”

  Parker thought of his hidden pistol. He would never have time to get to it. He cursed himself for forgetting to get identification for the body from Moeller. Nobody moved inside the system without papers. The doorman took a step closer to Parker. Parker’s hand flashed out and his fingers wrapped around the handle of one of the butcher knives. The doorman stepped back. A pistol appeared from beneath his jacket. Parker stabbed the man in the chest. The knife slid between the doorman’s ribs while Parker gripped the pistol with his free hand.

  The man’s weight sagged against the handle of the knife. Parker lowered him to the floor.

  “That’s a kill,” the Navigator said. “Alarm is going out. Get moving.”

  Leaving the dead man on the floor, Parker unstrapped the pistol from his own leg and moved quickly out of the kitchen. He passed down a long hallway, opened a set of double doors, and walked into the music room. A maid knelt before a large, marble fireplace emptying ashes into a metal bucket. She looked up as the door opened, and Parker shot her once. She fell back. The metal bucket overturned and spilled ash onto the floor.

  Everyone who saw him now had to die. Any of them could be guards. Parker couldn’t take that chance. And it didn’t matter. The alarm had already gone out.

  Parker entered the library at the same time as one of the valets, a young man with dark curly hair and bright green eyes. He stopped short at the sight of Parker.

  “Ma’am, is everything—?” the valet began. Parker shot him twice and walked into the dining room.

  “Multiple alarms going out now,” the Navigator said.

  “Got it.”

  Parker found the target in the master bedroom. He was a small man, narrow shoulders, a thin, fragile face. He had a slightly twisted upper lip, the deformity of a cleft palate. His hair was neatly groomed and parted on the side, shining with oil. He stood, arms raised, half-dressed, his dinner clothes laid out on the bed. Through the window beyond, an electric airship powered over Central Park, filled with guards coming for the intruder.

  Parker checked his pistol. The last two rounds were silvers. One for the target and one for his own exit.

  “What do you want?” The target’s eyes were wide. His mouth hung open. Parker could tell he had no idea of the truth.

  “Is your name Donald Lancaster?”

  “Yes. Do I know you?”

  Parker ignored the question. “You’re the investment banker?”

  “I’m a banker, yes.”

  “What year is it?”

  “It’s 1880,” Lancaster said, his mouth parted slightly. He licked his lips and blinked nervously. “I have jewelry and money in the cabinet here. Take what you want.”

  “I’m not here to rob you,” Parker said. “I’m here to set you free.”

  “Free?”

  The Navigator shouted in his ear, “Just do it Parker. He’s never going to understand. He has no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re in a prison right now. A prison of the mind.”

  Lancaster shook his head. Parker studied the room. The clothes laid out on the bed were expensively tailored. The room itself, beautifully furnished. Even on the inside, Lancaster lived richly. If he didn’t know he was a prisoner, he would never want to leave.

  “Please,” Lancaster said, “just put the gun down.”

  “Just kill him and move on,” the Navigator said. “You’re wasting time.”

  “I can talk to him,” Parker responded, his voice sharp.

  Lancaster frowned. “Who are you talking to?”

  Parker shook his head. “I’m trying to explain things to you. The truth of things. So you know. So you’re not shocked. If you don’t understand what’s happening before it happens, it can be too much to handle.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You were convicted of crimes. You were sentenced to prison. Your family wants you out. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I help people like you escape back to real life. I find them, and bring them out. The world you think you’re living in, you’re not. The year you think it is, it isn’t.”

  “I can assure you, ma’am. I am in no need of help.”

  From behind, angry voices, the clatter of boots, the splinter of an axe into wood.

  “They’re at the door,” the Navigator said.

  Parker sighed and cocked his pistol. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Lancaster screamed once, then Parker shot him. Outside, the door broke open and feet ran down the hall. Half a dozen guards burst into the bedroom dressed as nineteenth century brawlers. They fanned out.

  One of them held out a hand. “Easy now, ma’am. Put down the pistol.”

  A thin curl of smoke still wreathed from the barrel as Parker held the pistol against his temple and pulled the trigger.

  3

  I stumbled back through the saloon doors like a drunk, my mind reeling. My foot caught on something, and I fell forward. I crashed hard to the floor, where I rolled over on my back and covered my eyes, a wave of nausea rising up from my stomach and threatening to spill out.

  “Pretty wild ride,” a voice said. I turned over on my side and opened my eyes a crack. Dr. Valenstein sat on one of the barstools looking at me.
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br />   “Oh my God,” I said. “What was that?”

  “That was your most recent prison break. This is what you and your team do. You enter the Panopticon. Find your target. And break them out.”

  I crawled along the floor and propped myself up on the bar. The spinning in my head began to slow. That world had felt so real. So full of life and detail. I could still feel the pain of it. The fear. Smell the layers of filth and horse shit and food. It had become a part of my memory now. I understood why the Panopticon had to use different time periods. The only way I knew what I had experienced wasn’t real was because of the era. A marker for reality.

  The nausea slowly passed. I rested my head on the bar.

  “So now you know how it works,” Dr. Valenstein said. “You understand the principles of the Panopticon machine.”

  With my eyes still closed, I nodded. “It’s like the world’s most expensive hangover.” Dr. Valenstein chuckled. Or maybe my own subconscious chuckled. Or a lost memory. I had begun to lose track of what was happening. “So what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Can you walk?” Dr. Valenstein said.

  I nodded. My eyes opened and slowly, I stood up. The spinning in my brain had slowed to a gentle rocking. I found that I could walk, my arms outstretched for balance, and with each step my coordination improved.

  “I want to show you something else,” Dr. Valenstein said. “Follow me.”

  I walked behind him as we passed through the first doorway of the saloon and back into the long corridor. Valenstein counted off doors, then stopped before one with a large letter C stenciled on the front.

  “The brain’s filing system is amazing,” Valenstein said. “Now, these memories are laid near each other in this small space, because they needed to be hidden.”

  “Hidden from who?”

  “From the Panopticon program security.” Valenstein pushed open the door. We entered a dimly lit warehouse space the size of an airplane hangar filled with what looked like giant museum display cases. Thousands of them. Rows upon rows, stacked on top of each other. Inside each case was a human. The humans were vacuum sealed inside clear plastic bags with air masks over their faces. The cases rose toward the ceiling, some ten stories above us.

  “This is a memory taken from your tour of the Panopticon storage facility,” Valenstein said.

  “My God,” I said. “These people are all prisoners?”

  “Every one of them,” Valenstein said. “This is where they actually store the physical living bodies.”

  “How many people are in here?”

  “In this particular storage unit, about eighty thousand. Each prisoner in a deep state of suspended animation, all connected to each other, all sharing the same virtual reality. In your memory, when you assassinated the client in the system, you woke up his physical body in one of these storage facilities.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He had people here waiting to remove him,” Valenstein said. “You never took part in that aspect of the missions. You only hacked into the system and did the executions.”

  Valenstein walked back through the door, the heavy metal slamming behind us, and once again we were in the corridor. We walked to a final door, which opened automatically for us as we approached. This time he led me into a beautiful Japanese garden. A cherry tree in full bloom overhung a small pool while stone benches lined a path of crushed, white stone. Fish swam fat and lazy in a koi pool. We sat together in the shade as distant cicadas hummed.

  “I was sent here to explain to you what’s happened,” Dr. Valenstein began. “Sent here by you, as an insurance policy. To make sure you remembered. To make sure you are aware that you are now inside the Panopticon.”

  “My team that’s here with me. Do they know the truth?”

  Valenstein shook his head. “You are the only one who knows. And right now, you’re in the middle of a mission. A very dangerous mission into the new supermax prison system to break someone out.

  “This new prison has security that you’ve never encountered. To get in, you can have no memory of who you are. The security system scans your mind, searches memories. If people are aware they are going into a prison, they never fully accept their new lives within that system. You can’t pretend to be something you’re not, forever. You can’t live this new life in this system, be fully immersed in it, if you remember that it’s a lie. So to eliminate cognitive dissonance, the impossibility of holding two contradictory beliefs—I am in a prison, and I am free living my life in 1880s New York City—all memories of each person’s past must be eliminated completely.

  “If you know the truth, it will reject you. You won’t be able to hack in. So you had to enter the system in a way you believed. As an archaeologist in ancient Egypt making an amazing discovery.”

  “So I’m in a prison now?”

  Valenstein shook his head. “Not yet. Now you are in the memory storage facility of the Panopticon. When prisoners are brought into the system, their memories are downloaded and stored. That’s where you are now. This entire city serves as a storage area for those memories.”

  From somewhere above us sounded a deep rumbling. The sound of dynamite against rock. The Brotherhood of Anubis was out there somewhere. Trying to get in. Or if they weren’t, if they didn’t exist, then what was happening? A cherry blossom petal shook loose from the tree and twirled slowly down the length of my arm. I caught the petal and rubbed it between my fingers. It felt real.

  I looked at Dr. Valenstein. “What is happening out there?”

  “The Brotherhood of Anubis is attacking.”

  “But I thought you said none of this was real.”

  Dr. Valenstein smiled. “Your perception of being an Egyptologist isn’t real. But the machine itself is very real. It’s a very complicated computer system. And like any good system, it has its own security features. You are under attack. The security system is becoming aware of your presence here. Is looking for you. How you perceive that attack is in your mind. You’ve created the Brotherhood of Anubis because it fits with your belief that you are in Egypt of the 1930s.”

  “So can the system hurt me?”

  “Of course. You are an invading computer virus. And the Panopticon security system is designed to find you and destroy you. If you are killed in here, the mission will fail.” Another deep boom sounded from somewhere above them. The trees shook petals to the ground. Something splashed inside the koi pool. “This is only the beginning of your mission. There is a backdoor here, a way for you to get into the real prison system.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been given that information.”

  “But you’re my memory,” I said. “Wouldn’t I have made a point to remember something like that?”

  “I’m only the memory you have left. The Panopticon works against me all the time. Perhaps at one point I could have helped you more. But now those memories may have been blocked.

  “Memory is almost a living organism. Capable of change. Capable of adapting. The machine does its best to block memories of the past, but the mind adapts, tries to preserve what’s important.”

  I thought back to the wrecked apartment I had explored with Clayton. The photograph of myself I had found inside that apartment. The scene made sense now, if that was some vestige of my past that I was still able to cling to. Something buried deep, which even if I couldn’t consciously recall, still existed somewhere.

  And there was my wife. For an instant when I was with her, at the edge of this world, I had remembered my wife. I remembered the feel of her hand in mine, the view across the Hudson. That had been real. I had seen the small scar below her eye, and I knew that was from when she had fallen against the corner of a table as a child. On her finger, the engagement ring I had saved to buy, around her wrist, the bracelet we had found on our first trip to Paris. These were things from real life beyond this world.

  “So why can’t I remember more?” I asked.

  “T
he memories have been hidden in this world. Hidden from the Panopticon. Look out across the city, all these buildings, all these rooms and apartments and doors. And behind these doors lie the memories you need. The memories of your life. Of how you got here and where you need to go.”

  I thought of the vastness of the entire island of Manhattan. How many apartments there must be. How many doors. How many places to hide something. “How do I ever find anything?”

  “It will all be catalogued somewhere. Your brain is a complicated filing system. Storing away millions of bits of data, simply waiting to be recalled. You must find the key to the filing system. But do not trust anyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your crew down here now, do not tell anyone we spoke, what you are looking for, or that you know any portion of the truth. The Panopticon system creates artificial intelligences that can mimic human behavior. The system may have sent one of your crew here to monitor you. I have no way of knowing.”

  A cherry blossom drifted down and landed quietly at our feet. Dr. Valenstein bent down, lifting the blossom up to inspect it. “Very beautiful. All the details perfect. Each petal perfectly in place. This must have been very important to you somehow,” he said. “To remember something so small in such great detail. I wish I could tell you why.”

  “Me too.” I looked out across the garden and watched as more petals drifted into the pond. The structure of my reality had been pulled apart, and I was left with something so unrecognizable that I doubted my own sanity.

  And yet, this expedition had filled me with doubt. Something had always nagged at me, that this world was out of tune. That it was more a product of fantasy than anything that could have been created in reality. In some sense, the truth was reassuring. Or at least what my mind was telling me was the truth in this current moment. I felt slightly saner, even if what I had just learned was totally and completely crazy.

  “Unfortunately our time here is up,” Dr. Valenstein said. “You can never stay too long in one memory.”

  “Why?”

  “The system will know something’s wrong. It will seek you out. There are dangers here you can’t possibly imagine.”