In My Memory Locked

by Jim Nelson

  I pounded on the door with a panicky balled fist. The door was unlocked. I pushed inside and mounted the stairs two steps at a time. On the top floor, Rod stood among the field of equipment studying a computer screen. Melody lay stretched out on the futon couch, arms above her head and wrists touching. Her thin T-shirt was stretched taut across her breasts.

  Cline took me by the upper arm and led me to the bed. “We're glad you're here,” she told me. “We’re ready for the next scene.”

  I stood over Melody with my shirt off. One knee on the futon mattress, I gently lowered myself until I was on top of her. My body weight caused the wood frame to creak and groan like an old pier resisting the tide. Her arms gently coiled about my neck. Cline urged the camera closer. Rod brought the lens in tight on us. Melody’s painted fingernails tickled the ridgeline of my jaw.

  Before I knew it, I was standing on the front stoop again moaning how I’d thrown my life away again. Racing upstairs to confront Cline, another iteration began. Each cycle began with me joining Melody on the futon bed. Each cycle concluded with my disappointed, debased self atop the stairs outside, sweaty and putrid.

  Hours—days—a full week I cycled through this hell. Finally, a wash of pure white filled my vision. I went numb. I was dead to the world and I welcomed it. I did not force the general fault this time, but somehow I scrambled free of the rabbithole and its temptations. I emerged into cold reality like a newborn gasping for air.

  17.

  I lay sprawled across the floor of the closet. The carpet’s tight pile had left a mild burn on my right cheek and chin, agitating my bruises from the night before. Rabbitholes will cause the victim to twitch and spasm throughout the run of the software, involuntary reactions to the events spooling out in their cerebrum.

  Gasping for air and hangover-dry, I checked the back of my neck. My memex was burning hot to the touch. Its fleshy cap was about to burst, like a boil. I reached to tap the DISCONNECT button on the transformer’s screen and discovered I was already disconnected. I scraped the memex loose from my neck and tossed it aside. The disk of skin around my spinal socket was inflamed. Clear liquid oozed from the engorged socket, white blood cells and leaking spinal fluid. My brain burned like it had been soaking in a bath of paint thinner for weeks. With each pulse of blood spurting through my temples, my eyes pressed against their sockets. Writhing on the floor had left my shirt and tie and trousers a twisted wet mess. Wet because I’d sweated enough to carry away Noah’s Ark.

  My equipment lay about the floor of the closet. The desk chair Lotte had dragged in was at my feet, but Lotte was nowhere to be seen. I powered off the engram predictor and the rest of the equipment. Whatever I’d done or not done that morning, the safe’s failsafe mechanisms never triggered. It had not gone into hibernation, but it wasn’t unlocked either.

  Before I removed my memex, I’d noted the time of day floating in my visual periphery. I’d been out for a mere three hours. Trapped in the hole felt like six days. Time is an illusion in a rabbithole. Hours in the software world translates to mere minutes in the real world.

  Unable to find my legs, I stumbled out the closet door and put my shoulder into the sheetrock wall opposite. At the end of a side hall, a blue sign indicated an all-gender bathroom, which for me meant a toilet to vomit in and a sink to soak my face in. I stumbled to the door and pushed. Lately, I’d been pushing through a lot of doors. This was the first in hours not to move at my insistence.

  Something soft and weighty inside blocked the bathroom door. I tried forcing it open, but something on the floor kept it shut. With what meager muscle I could assemble, I strained with continuous pressure to push the blockage aside. The door eased open a few inches, enough space for me to reach my fingers through and touch the light switch.

  A full head of brown hair was against the inside of the door near the floor. The smell of salty blood wafted up. A pre-vomit lump formed in the back of my throat.

  I crouched and got my right hand under the head. The hair was damp with warm blood. I pushed the head up and away and continued to force the door open. Fortunately, the body lay on its side. I was able to roll it back enough to slip through the opening and into the bathroom. Stepping awkwardly through the narrow gap, I almost put my foot into an umber pool of caking blood. I half-tripped over the body to avoid the blood and went into the rear wall of the bathroom. The automatic hand dryer kicked on.

  Ellis Lotte lay in a pathetic crumple across the floor. A wide smear of dried blood ran down the inside of the bathroom door. His neck was slit wide enough to see down into his wan white windpipe. The hand dryer wailed and wailed.

  With all my attention on Lotte’s body, I’d failed to notice a bloody smeared palm print on the vanity beside the toilet. I’m no forensics specialist. It could have been left behind by his killer. It could have been Lotte’s blood-covered hand. Both of his hands were red with the stuff. He might have reached for the vanity to try and stand. That would be consistent with a man woozy from blood loss but not unconscious trying to stumble out of the bathroom and instead collapsing against the door.

  I searched Lotte’s pockets. His front pants pockets were empty. His shirt pocket was the same. The lining of his right rear pocket was hanging out like a white cotton tongue. It suggested someone had pulled his billfold. His blazer was missing. I recalled he’d hung it in the lobby when we first entered.

  Poking out of the rear of his pants was a dull-black pistol grip with a fine crosshatch pattern across it. Gingerly, hand wrapped in a handkerchief, I extracted it. Lotte had a 9mm semiautomatic on him, a round in the chamber and the clip loaded. The silencer was integrated with the pistol's body. It was illegal to own one of these in the state of California. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t be found, of course. It’s just that there was no need to search him for a permit.

  I lifted his head once more and searched the bloody mess down his back. I found the memex socket drilled into his neck but no memex. He was wearing one when we were running engram predictions. That memex had most likely recorded his death as well as his killer.

  Searching for his memex, I found under his shirt a thin silver chain about his neck. I tugged it up and discovered a brass key on the chain. Hands shaking from the rabbithole—hell, shaking from manipulating a fresh corpse—I managed to unclasp the chain sticky with throat blood. I washed it and my hands and pocketed the chain and the key.

  For the first time since meeting Lotte, I felt sorry for him. In my office, he struck me as arrogant but not bright, a low-wattage bulb who thought he was the spotlight. When I met him this morning, Lotte was jumpy and clueless. I had read him then as a grubby man eager to get the safe open and possess the secrets inside.

  Now I wondered if Lotte had pieced together the enormity of the situation he was embroiled in. Perhaps he was the pawn in all of this. There was no way he’d written or installed the rabbithole in the safe’s software. Hacking an engram-lock's software required serious know-how. Now I wagered his jumpiness was that he was developing an idea of the deadly situation he was luring me into. His motivation for all this trouble eluded me.

  Earlier, Max told me I was a rook in line for promotion. Max apparently didn’t know the rules of chess. Only pawns are promoted. Rooks spend their entire Mondrian right-angle existence as rooks—the same word used for black crows, the cursed birds. Rook, of course, also means to cheat someone.

  If Lotte was the pawn, perhaps he had dreams of promotion. Perhaps someone had put those dreams in his head.

  There was nothing left for me here. The safe was locked. My professional relationship with Lotte had concluded. I’m not proud of it, but I stood in the bathroom over Lotte’s body for a solid two minutes pondering what to do with the burgundy envelope of money in my pocket. I’d not earned a dime tucked inside.

  I extricated myself from the bathroom with as much difficulty as it required to enter it. I collected all my equipment in the closet and pocketed my memex. Focusing on work allowed me to dis
tance myself from the urge to vomit. Wiping away fingerprints seemed a lost cause. If the police searched, they’d find a latent somewhere, along with plenty of my DNA scattered about—a loose hair, most likely, or the spinal fluid and white blood cells I’d leaked into the closet carpet. Exhausted, strength sapped from the rabbithole, I told myself to get out of there and get cleaned up.

  Lotte’s blazer hung in the lobby, just as I remembered. Its pockets were empty save for an autotrolley transfer and a protective memex carrying case, a fine chrome-plated one with a velvet interior. It was empty.

  The lobby of Lotte’s office had a reception behind frosted glass. From the personal effects across the desk, it appeared someone did work the reception but apparently had not been in the office for some time. I located a small tin cash box in the desk, empty save for some pennies and nickels in the far-right coin cups. I slipped Lotte’s money in the box and returned it to the desk. I crumpled the burgundy envelope and stuffed it in my pockets. The key on the chain fit the office’s front door bolt lock. This old building still used the simple technology of my youth. I closed up the office, turned off all the lights, and locked the door from the outside. I deposited the brass key in the moss and soil of a potted tree standing beside the elevators.

  Before I left, I thought to return to the examining room. The Compleat Works of Shakespeare had been returned to the bookshelf. Its bookplate was inscribed to Dr. Daryl Marlene Lund. Twelve blue-gray sticky notes bookmarked pages throughout the collection, each a miniature tombstone.

  18.

  On the sidewalk before the Medical/Dental Building, I hailed a taxi. I was only blocks from the Gerasene Hotel, but I was exhausted. In the backseat, I fiddled with my pocket tablet attempting to get the Wiki on-screen. Agg taught me always to add new information to the Wiki as soon as possible, when it’s still fresh in the mind. My mind, of course, had just been put through a milkshake blender by the nastiest rabbithole I’d ever encountered.

  None of the rabbitholes I’d encountered before were as all-consuming as the one implanted in the safe’s engram lock. This one made it impossible to detect where the rabbithole’s programming ended and where my memories began. The maze of rooms all alike was certainly part of its construction. I could not recall experiencing anything like it before. My audition with Cline and Melody, though, I couldn’t see how anyone could have coded that with such utter fidelity to my personal memories. I wondered if the maze of doors was a staging ground, a shoddy little puzzle to keep me busy while the rabbithole inventoried my more painful memories to echo back to me later. It forced the victim to re-experience them in a vicious loop, thousands of iterations a second.

  Make no mistake, that rabbithole could have killed me. Somehow I’d emerged after only three hours. I’d broken through the maze of doors on my own, but I’d not found any escape from the perpetual hell of auditioning for Cline. The rabbithole could have trapped me for days, held me in a mesmerized state until I fell into a coma. A truly hypnotic rabbithole is a lobotomy performed one brain cell at a time. No one but Lotte knew I was in that office, and with Lotte dead, no one was going to find me. But someone did find me, and they knew enough to disconnect me from the rabbithole holding me in its grasp.

  My pocket tablet could not make contact with my Wiki. I considered trying to contact it via memex. I was still nauseous and not up for linking to the Nexternet, its torrent of voices all shouting to be heard, its cacophony of outrage and platitudes.

  “Driver, destination change,” I announced to the taxi’s onboard computer. “One Taylor Street.”

  As the taxi traversed city blocks I re-experienced decades of life in San Francisco. Time spent in restaurants and bookstores, time spent in barber shops and bars—many, many bars—they all haunted me on that quick ride across downtown. Some memories were sweet, some were fond and nostalgic. Faces and names from decades earlier I thought I’d forgotten came roaring back. Other memories too, less sweet, more foul, emerged. In San Francisco, no one smiled at me on the street. No one looked me in the eyes as they passed me on the sidewalk. When I sat at lunch counters, people would move to a table so they could avoid watching me eat. In the quiet of a bookstore to overhear whispers about my girth or my satellite-dish ears, those moments never left me. Every meal I ate alone, often for months at a time. Days passed without speaking to anyone save myself. This is the San Francisco I remembered in the taxi, the city I wanted to forget. Every sidewalk an anecdote, every hill a torment. And for some damn reason, I came back after escaping to Japan.

  The taxi dumped me off in front of the Golden Gate Theater box office. I made a quick obligatory hand motion to the receptionist behind the glass. He waved me closer, indicating he had something to tell me. He spoke to me through the speaker mounted in the window.

  “Your safe was delivered,” the young man said. The squawk box made his voice sound like citizen’s band.

  “What safe?” I said. Then: “An engram safe?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with an innocent shrug. “The delivery guys brought it by. They had me sign for it because you were out of the office.”

  My aching mind needed a moment to assemble all this. “You let them into my office?”

  “You weren’t here, so I had to.”

  “Where’s the invoice?” I said. “What did you sign?”

  I thought he meant he’d digitally signed an invoice, a cryptographically-sealed electronic document he could forward to me via the Nexternet. Instead, he produced a folded sheet of paper from his desk. He slid it through the slot in the bottom of the window where play tickets were once dispensed.

  The letterhead on the flimsy sheet of onion paper was as phony as a stripper’s wink and smile. A quick check on my pocket tablet confirmed the delivery company did not exist. The invoice listed a Nexternet site name that had never been registered.

  The doors to my lobby and my office were locked. Nothing appeared out of place until I pulled back the rug over the trapdoor. The lock had been forced. They’d not even bothered to break its encryption. They’d merely melted down the lock, probably with a laser torch. The scorched smell of burnt engine oil lingered in the office.

  I scrambled to descend the ladder to the trap room beneath the stage. With dread, I anticipated full well what I was about to find. They’d not disturbed the boxes of paperwork or any of the locked equipment cases. It took me time and patience, but I located the micro-aperture they’d drilled in the side of the carbon-steel safe. With physical access gained, they could replace the incoming Nexternet signal with their own counterfeit signal. In essence, they could transmit instructions to the server like the enemy radioing phony orders to a surrounded platoon.

  It was a pro job. It required true skill and considerable resources. They’d sucked out of the server all my case files, my Wiki software, all my personal data—and every memory I’d recorded over the past twelve years. My retention server was wiped clean, as fresh and virginal as the day I unpacked it from its shipping container.

  The kid in the box office looked scared as hell when I returned. My reaction to the flimsy invoice he’d proffered had clued him in to the major mistake he’d committed. Now I was steaming.

  “Tell me about this delivery,” I said through the squawk box. He was retreating from the box office window, practically pressed against the rear door, his only exit. “Describe the delivery guys.”

  “There were two of them. They said they were delivering a safe.”

  “Did you see the safe?”

  “Of course,” he said. “They rolled it in on a hand truck. It was about this big.” His hands formed an invisible cube in the air. The cube was large enough to hold a fair amount of burglar equipment and hacking gear. Christ, even the Watergate guys had to sneak in a side door. These delivery men had walked straight through the front.

  “You saw the safe, or you saw a crate they said a safe was in?”

  He nodded and swallowed, mouth dry. “I only saw a crate.”


  “How long did it take?”

  “They left about half an hour after I let them in to your office. Maybe forty-five minutes.”

  Forty-five minutes to wipe a secured retention server clean made this truly a pro job. “I take it you didn’t stay with them inside the office.”

  He shook his head woefully. He was twenty-two or twenty-three years old, good-looking, and freshly-shaved with his full head of hair tousled into place with salon foam. My tone had made his cheeks sink. His eyes were a pair of hardboiled eggs. He looked pathetic.

  “They came out and told me they were finished,” he said. “I went back and locked up your office.” He added, “Look, I peeked inside just to make sure they didn’t take anything. It seemed like everything was still in place.”

  He waited with the woeful silence of a man facing the gallows. He feared the obvious next step, me demanding to speak to management. My complaint to them was a one-way ticket to him losing his job. I was not out for his job, though, and I was not in any mood to sue the management for loss and theft. What dollar figure can a man put on a decade of his unguarded, unedited memories—memories of memories, memories of reliving the past, a man's soul crystallized for perpetuity.

  “What did they look like,” I said to the receptionist.

  “The delivery guys?” he said. “I don’t know. They wore those white jumpsuits that delivery people wear. You know, with the pockets—”

  As though this was a fashion show. “How tall were they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe one was a little under six foot? The other was shorter.”