The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  “Now, the storage facility and the supermax system are connected. So we need to start by breaking into this memory storage facility. Security monitors for intruders constantly. The base grid is well defended. So you can have no conscious awareness of the reality. In other words, you can’t know that you’re entering a prison.”

  “So, what, you just happen to stumble on this huge abandoned island of Manhattan? How is that explainable?” Parker said.

  “We would need a cover story. One the mind would accept. Like, I don’t know, there’s been a nuclear war and all the people have been killed off and you’re the lone survivor.”

  “Maybe,” Parker said. “But how do you explain that I can’t leave the island? And what would happen to the people? They would be dead, bodies everywhere. They wouldn’t have just vanished.”

  “It would have to be a closed system,” Blake said. “Not only is the city abandoned, but you can’t leave.”

  Clayton snapped his fingers. “Seattle. They have this city there, all underground. The first city was destroyed in a fire, so they rebuilt on top of the remains of the old city. What if you had something like that, only with Manhattan.”

  “Maybe that could work,” Selberg said. “I like that idea of an underground city. We could keep it enclosed that way.”

  Chan spoke up. “Okay, so what if you’re an archeologist who finds this city under the ground?”

  Parker thought for a moment. He could see how that might work. “You make some grand discovery. Almost like discovering the lost city of Atlantis. There’s precedence for that. Petra wasn’t discovered by the western world until the 1800s,” Parker said.

  “Exactly. A lost city, a Manhattan, beneath the Earth. Not logical exactly. But believable enough. Your brain would hold on to that story, rather than knowing the truth that it’s really the unpopulated framework for a prison,” Chan said.

  “So we enter the framework, believing it to be a lost city, then what would happen?” Parker said.

  “Well, once you’re in the grid,” Chan said, “there’s nothing preventing you from downloading your memory again. The security system checks for conscious recall at the admission to the grid, but not while you’re actually in the system itself. So we would have to store your memories of the mission somewhere in the city.”

  “So how would I find where we hid the memories?”

  “I could leave you Easter eggs,” Chan said. “Hack into the memory storage facility and leave you clues to guide you along.”

  “Of course, the facility is still going to have its own security. The Minotaur system will sweep the grid for intruders. You’re going to have to stay out of its way,” Selberg said.

  “So then what would be the next step?”

  “Well, after you’ve secured your memories, you would need to find a backdoor from the memory storage into the supermax facility of 1953. But you would need to get all your memories.”

  “Where will the backdoor be?”

  “I’ve been looking at the terrain.” Chan spread out a map on the ground. “I think I can get a backdoor from the memory storage facility into the 1953 system here. There’s an old travel agency on Doyers Street in Chinatown where I think I can get a connection into 1953.”

  “How?”

  “Doyers Street was the old pathway they used to get prisoners into the 1953 system,” Chan said. “They stripped their memories, then transported them into the new system. The old coding is still there. I can get it working again. I can get you in.”

  “What about me?” Blake asked.

  “You stay out here with me,” Chan said. “I’ll need help on the outside.”

  “So you and Blake stay here in this system,” Parker said. “You guide us from the outside, and make sure we find our way into 1953.”

  “Once you get to 1953, I should be able to get your memory back,” Chan said.

  “Should?”

  “Should. If I can’t, you’ll wake up in 1953 and have no memory you’re in prison. You’ll just be another resident of the Sleep machine world, walking around not knowing the truth.”

  “And if that happens?” Parker said.

  “If that happens, you’ll be lost forever.”

  7

  “Parker, wake up!”

  My eyes were closed, but in the darkness, I heard someone call my name. The voice was far away and feeble, a sound that traveled over a great distance to reach me. My body rocked gently at first, then harder.

  “Wake up!”

  The cushion of air I seemed to float on hardened suddenly. My mind snapped to attention, and I opened my eyes. I lay on the floor of a hotel room. Charlotte knelt over me, one hand on each shoulder, shaking me, her face concerned.

  I focused on her, then waved my hand. “I’m up.”

  Beneath me, the entire floor trembled. I heard a tremendous roar of anger that seemed to pulse through the walls of the hotel. Outside in the hall, wood splintered and something crashed against metal, the sound of a door being torn from its hinges. My mind was still reeling from the intensity of the memory I had just experienced. I was trying desperately to right myself again, like a gyroscope gone off kilter.

  “Something’s outside,” Charlotte said. “It’s searching the rooms.”

  Whatever it was that had attacked me in the subway tunnel and that Blake had taken a shot at was here now. I smelled that horrible, rotted odor. My stomach turned.

  There was a strange bluish glow in the room with us. I sat up and inspected the area for the source. It came from a small nightlight plugged into the outlet opposite the bed—a small cartoon cow jumping over a moon. It was a child’s nightlight. The kind a five-year-old boy would have.

  A five-year-old boy like Charlotte’s son.

  Charlotte sensed the absence of darkness too and she followed my gaze until her eyes fixed on the nightlight. Her expression faltered. Confusion. Uncertainty. She walked toward the nightlight as if in a trance.

  “I know that light,” she said. Her voice wavered. The sound of someone on the verge of discovering a terrifying truth. “I know it from somewhere.” She bent down before the nightlight, ran her fingers over the cartoonish figure. “There was a room. In another time. A child’s room.”

  “Charlotte . . .” I called her name, trying to bring her back to the present. To save her from the horror of a memory she had been stripped of by the Sleep machine. She didn’t look at me. She was fixated on the light. The smiling cow jumping over the smiling moon had become the center of her world.

  “Something bad happened . . .” She held her hand to her mouth, her eyes slowly widening. She turned and looked toward the bathroom, studied the bathtub. “There was a child.”

  Heavy footprints stomped down the hall. There was another terrible shriek. I wondered where the rest of the team was, if they were still in the hotel with us or if they had fled somewhere else. The creature was checking each room, tearing open the doors. Its claws ready to tear flesh. Its breath reeking of death. We didn’t have much time. I went to Charlotte and crouched next to her. She turned to look at me, wide-eyed, confused. “What’s happening?”

  I put my arm around her shoulder and held her. She burst into tears and buried her head in my shoulder. “What’s happening to me? My brain is splitting. I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  The thing out there was coming closer. Smashing its way down the hall. There were only a few more doors before it reached our room. I turned Charlotte in my arms and looked into her eyes. I had never noticed her eyes before, an enthralling shade of green.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” I said truthfully. “I’ve had the same thoughts as you. The same feelings. You’re not going crazy. But whatever this is, I promise you we will figure it out together.” Outside, another door was ripped from its hinges. “But right now, something is out there coming for us. And we have to be strong.”

  Charlotte nodded. Her eyes lost their softness and a bit of their old shimmer of life returned.


  “Okay?”

  “Yes. I’m okay.”

  She reached out, pulled the nightlight from the outlet, and put it into her pocket. The room returned to total darkness. Outside, the beast was too close. We had no chance of leaving the room now. We were trapped. The duct we had crawled through into the memory of the past had shifted back to a window. Through the glass was a seventeen-story drop to the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlotte said.

  “Don’t be sorry.” I reached for her in the darkness and she found my arms and hugged me back. For a moment we were two people sharing loss and grief together in this strange city. Then she pulled away and I heard the metal click of her rifle.

  “I’ll check the window,” she said. Her lantern came to life and she moved quickly to the window. The glass slid open slightly before a security bar locked it in place. The only other logical place to hide in the room was under the bed. We had guns and could fight, but caught in this tiny space, we wouldn’t be able to get off more than a few shots before that thing was on us.

  Another roar from the hall reminded us that time was running out. We slid beneath the bed and lay as flat as we could, our heads brushing the underside of the box spring. We didn’t have long to wait.

  The door virtually exploded open. Splinters of wood fragmented into the room as the door crashed against the opposite wall. I huddled under the bed, pistol in hand, and waited. From there, I had a narrow range of view across the floor of the room. Two feet entered. They were bare and human in shape, but massive, with streaks of dirt and long nails. A closet door was torn open. The bathroom was next, accompanied by the sound of breaking porcelain. Then the television hit the ground hard and smashed, bits of glass landing near my face. Charlotte’s hand closed around my arm. The air was thick with animal stench. The mattress springs shrieked as something hit the bed hard.

  And then it was gone. I heard it farther down the hall checking more rooms. Quietly, we slid out from beneath the bed. I took Charlotte’s hand and we slipped out into the hall and carefully made our way to the lobby. We could hear these creatures everywhere in the hotel, tearing the place apart, looking for us. The lobby was quiet. The rest of the team was gone, either hiding somewhere or having fled the hotel.

  “We need to get to the travel agency on Doyers Street,” I said. “From the memory. There’s going to be a connection there we can use to get into the system.”

  We left through the front door of the hotel and found ourselves back on Seventh Avenue. To the north was Macy’s. A giant hole was ripped in the side of the building, the skeletal interior visible, racks of clothes spilling out onto the street. The Minotaur was still out there somewhere. I wondered if one of the crew had tried to hide in the department store.

  The avenue was wide and open, no place to hide. It would be impossible to outrun anything here. If we stayed in the open, the Minotaur would find us. We were blocks north of our destination, and I didn’t think we would make it above ground. We needed to travel where the Minotaur couldn’t follow.

  The subway tunnels.

  I thought back to what had been lurking in the tunnels before. But we didn’t have a choice.

  Across the avenue was the marquee for Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. In all my time living here, I had never been inside, but I knew it was one of the larger transit hubs for the city. From there we could make our way through the tunnels, and the Minotaur wouldn’t be able to follow.

  “We need to get to Penn Station.” I pointed across the avenue. “We can take the tunnels and find our way south. We won’t last two minutes above ground.”

  “Looks like it’s about seventy yards away,” Charlotte said. “We can run for it.”

  “Keep moving until we get underground,” I said. I surveyed the length of the avenue. The street was empty. The buildings towered above us in shadows. But I knew the Minotaur was still there.

  We readied ourselves, then Charlotte nodded, and we sprinted out from beneath the hotel awning across Seventh Avenue and headed toward Penn Station. As soon as we hit the avenue, a tremendous roar sounded off behind us. I turned to look back as I ran and saw a massive creature the size of a building come crashing around the side of the hotel. The beast was enormous, twenty stories high at least, with the head of a bull and the body of a man. Its shoulder crashed into the side of the hotel. Shattered glass and stone broke free and cascaded down to the street below.

  Its footsteps were deep and thunderous, leaving spiderweb cracks in the street. I accelerated, keeping pace with Charlotte. We crossed over the centerline of the avenue and kept moving. The Minotaur charged after us. I felt the pavement heave and tremble as it gained ground. We just had to get underground.

  We reached the Penn Station entrance and sprinted down the main stairwell. Thirty yards below, the stairs ended and the main floor stretched out of sight. I had almost reached bottom when my foot caught on something. I fell forward, arms pinwheeling in space. The stairs rushed up at me and I closed my eyes before impact.

  Nothing.

  My eyes still closed, my body curled into itself, I felt nothing. Slowly my lids opened. I stood again at the top of the stairs. I was alone. Disoriented, I looked around the platform and down the stairs again.

  At the bottom stood Charlotte. To my right, a door which led to the elevator. I pulled on the handle, but thick chains rattled and kept the door closed. I looked back down the stairs and realized what was wrong.

  I had never been inside Penn Station before.

  And except for the connections between worlds, I didn’t think I couldn’t enter anywhere I had no memory. This entire city was based upon memory. There was no new creation. These places existed, and if I had never visited them, I had no way to know what their interior looked like. I could only travel where memories existed.

  I turned and saw the Minotaur running with enormous strides across the avenue. It saw me and its snout opened as it roared, exposing lines of sharp teeth stained with blood.

  “Go, just run!” I called down to Charlotte.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t come with you. I’ve never been to Penn Station. It’s not in my memory.”

  “But I have,” Charlotte said. “It’s in my memory. Join me here.”

  I moved down the stairs as she ran up to meet me. The world began to blur. The railings became indistinct lines of black. The sharp edges of the stairs turned soft, wavered. I could feel myself slipping away, like being on the edge of wakefulness and sleep. The Minotaur was almost on me. There was a blast of hot stinking air from behind.

  Charlotte suddenly stood below me on the stairs and reached up to me through the fog. I took her hand. The world cleared as if a giant lens snapped into place. Charlotte kept her hand in mine and guided me down the stairs. The dizziness lifted from my brain and I could focus again. We reached the bottom, and the lower level of Penn Station stretched out before us.

  The large, flat Penn Station marquee shielded the stairwell from above. The Minotaur smashed into it, tearing away metal and glass, roaring and roaring. Charlotte and I sprinted farther into the station, deeper into the safety of the underground.

  I had expected an empty, dark station, like the rest of the places we had visited, but the lower level was filled with life and light. Thousands of commuters flooded past us and stopped in shops filled with snacks and books and newspapers beneath bright fluorescent lights. Loudspeakers rattled off announcements of travel delays and I could feel the distant rumblings of subway trains passing by. The effect was so real, so vivid, I had to remind myself that this too was only memory.

  We were in Charlotte’s memory. And it was so much sharper than mine had ever been.

  “I guess my memory is stronger than yours,” she said. “I must have come here a lot.”

  We moved like shadows through the crowd, ran across the populated causeway, and entered a wide rotunda hived with food vendors on all sides. Stairs and escalators led to different floors. We
followed signs for the subway. I turned to look down the crowded corridors and saw nothing pursuing us. Only thousands of anonymous strangers who formed the crowd.

  A Long Island Rail Road train had pulled into the station.

  Hydraulic doors hissed open, and a stream of people flooded the already crowded causeway. Charlotte’s hand tightened in mine. I followed her gaze deep into the crowd. And there I saw another Charlotte. The same woman I had seen in the Hotel Pennsylvania. She was wearing the same dress from the hotel room, and as she moved toward us, I saw she held the hand of a little boy.

  My Charlotte stopped on the causeway and stared at her own image. The boy practically skipped along with his mother. He was so full of life and energy, it was almost impossible to imagine him floating dead in the bathtub, an inanimate water-logged doll.

  The other Charlotte looked happy too. She had a bright smile on her face, and she bent down to say something to the boy. They passed by us, only feet away in the crowd, so close I could hear her say, “. . . meet Daddy for lunch . . .” and then they were past us, carried off again in the crowd.

  My Charlotte stretched out her arm toward them. Her hand was visibly trembling. The crowd was thick and moved sluggishly along, but soon the other Charlotte and her child were carried from our view. My Charlotte reached into her pocket and pulled out the nightlight.

  “This was my son’s. I had a son. I remember now. I remember this day.” She turned and looked back toward the LIRR. “We took the train in to meet my husband for lunch. My son, Eric.”

  She looked at me, and I had never seen a more plaintive expression in anyone’s eyes before. Never in my life. So filled with pain and hurt but so desperately wanting to know the truth.

  “You know what happens. You saw something in that room. You saw something.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to lie, but knowing I couldn’t tell her the truth. I had worked so hard to find these memories. And now there were things I wish I could forget. I took her hand. “I’m not sure what I saw.”