The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  “I’m not a bad guy,” said Jack.

  “Just a little abduction now and then?” the woman said with a bitter smile.

  “We’re not going to hurt you. As soon as you explain everything about the Great Forgetting, we’ll let you go.”

  “I’m a day trader. I work for Nu-Day. I don’t know anything about a Great Forgetting. Who were you hoping to kidnap?”

  No, thought Jack. No, no.

  “What were you doing on the thirteenth floor then?”

  “Thirteen? I don’t know what you’re taking about. There is no thirteenth floor.” Her eyes widened a little. “The elevator stopped for second on the way down. It’s been doing that. A short or something. They warned us about number two earlier in the week. Davis sent a memo.”

  This can’t all be a mistake, Jack pleaded to himself. He looked at Cole. Oh, Christ. Oh, holy hell.

  “She’s lying,” the kid said simply. “Did you think she’d just admit to everything?”

  “Cole,” said Jack. “Shut up a minute.”

  “Cole?” the woman said. “Wait. Oh, my God. Cole. What are you doing here?”

  “You don’t know me,” the boy said.

  But the woman seemed sincere. “Cole, honey. I worked with your father. I almost didn’t recognize you. You grew up!” She turned back to Jack. “His father. It was terrible. Car accident. Right out front. He died. The boy was shook up, I remember. Taken to a hospital. I heard he was in a psychiatric facility.”

  The Captain sunk into the bed.

  “No!” Cole shouted. “She’s lying. You’re lying!”

  “No, sweetie. I’m sorry.” She looked at Jack, pleading with her large brown eyes. “Whatever he’s told you, it isn’t true. I don’t know how he got the both of you so worked up. Worked up enough to kidnap a woman in broad daylight. But this kid is sick. He needs help. I know that much. We all pitched in to help the mother some. Davis passed around a collection hat. I gave her two hundred dollars.”

  Cole was seething. The kid stepped into the bathroom. Jack figured he needed to throw up or something, that his nerves had gotten the better of him. But then he returned with a glass of water. He set it calmly on the end table next to the woman.

  “Drink it,” he said.

  She laughed. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You put something in it.”

  Jack understood. There was fluoride in the water here, as in every other city in the country. Only the Collectors really knew it was a poison capable of bending the mind.

  “Watch me,” said Jack. He picked up the glass, emptied it into the sink, then moved so the woman could see him fill it from the spigot. He returned it to the table a moment later.

  “Drink, please.”

  “I’m not going to drink it.”

  “You saw me fill it.”

  “You’re crazy. Both of you.” She turned to the Captain, who watched with interest. “Help me,” she said. She started to cry.

  “Miss,” said the Captain. “Maybe the boy’s crazy. But what seems crazier to me is that you won’t simply drink the goddamn water to get it over with.”

  She sobbed into her hands.

  “I’ve been to a few interrogations,” the Captain continued. “I haven’t felt my middle finger since 1973 because some slant-eyed dink pushed bamboo under my nail. He didn’t get what he wanted, either. Got to where I can tell a liar from a saint better than any machine. You’re good, lady. Real good. You’re not just a liar, you’re a trained liar.”

  She stopped crying. When she brought her hands down, Jack thought, for an instant, that he was staring at a different woman. Gone was the gentleness he’d seen inside her. Gone were the tears. Her cold eyes regarded them, in turn, with something close to pity. It was Jack, now, who was afraid.

  In a flash, Cole was at her side, the slim blade of a pocketknife pushed into her neck hard enough to dimple the skin. The woman didn’t flinch. “I borrowed twenty bucks to buy a Swiss Army knife while I was out looking for pizza last night,” he said to Jack. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “As I recall, you won a bet,” Jack said. His voice sounded like it was coming down a long tube.

  “Empty her pockets,” said Cole.

  Jack reached, expecting the woman to pounce, but she remained still. Her breathing had slowed and he thought that was probably a bad sign. There was something in the pocket of her suit, cold to the touch. He brought it out. It was a stainless-steel object shaped like a bat’s wing, with a red button on top.

  “What’s this?”

  “A lighter,” she said.

  Jack pushed the button. Something shot out of the device. It looked like the wavy air you see around a jet engine when it revs up on the tarmac, that shimmer you catch on the horizon on hot days. And then the lamp on the other side of the room turned to dust. There was no sound, just that wave shooting from the gun, and then the lamp was atomized. He’d missed the Captain by a foot.

  He turned the gun on the woman and nodded for Cole to step back.

  “Now,” he said. “Let’s start with your name. And then you can tell me what the hell this thing is and what it just did to that lamp.”

  4 “My name is Christina Ferris,” she said, that murderous look gradually dissolving from her eyes. “And that thing you’re holding like a toy is a particle agitator. It uses compressed sound waves to pick apart objects at the molecular level. I was his father’s partner. One of the Twelve Angry Men, as they’re called. I was the first woman, so, you know … bit of a misnomer.”

  “My father’s partner?” said Cole. “Why didn’t he ever talk about you?”

  “Everything we do is secret. I imagine your father was protecting you. Or me.” She shrugged. “You know what they’ll do to me when they find out I talked to you? They’ll erase my mind. They’ll put a microchip in my tooth, a little thing that broadcasts new memories just for me. They’ll make me believe I’m a beautician in Iowa or something and I’ll think that was me for the rest of my life.”

  “Christina,” said Jack. “All we need is a little information and you can go. We won’t tell anyone we ever spoke.”

  She laughed and sat back in the seat, regarding the kid. “How do you remember? Why didn’t you forget?”

  Cole knocked on the titanium plate behind his left ear. “I don’t know how, but this thing dampens the signal.”

  “Fantastic,” she said. “I know he loved you very much, Cole. He had pictures of you in his office. For what it’s worth, I had nothing to do with what happened that day.”

  “Let’s not talk about my dad right now.”

  Christina nodded.

  “I want to hear about the Great Forgetting,” said Jack.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What was it all about?”

  “We let something terrible happen and the leaders of the world decided we should forget. ‘Forget the past to make a better future,’ they said.”

  “But what, exactly? A genocide, right? But who? What race did we wipe out?”

  “The Nazis nearly won World War Two. Who do you think they wiped out?”

  “But…” Jack tried to make sense of it. Couldn’t. Came up short.

  “The Nazi gas chambers killed millions of Jews in Europe,” the woman said. “The gas chambers they built in the Nevada desert after they invaded America killed millions more. They killed almost every Jew in the world and we let it happen. There was no Pearl Harbor. No D-day. No Hiroshima. The United States hid its head in the sand until Hitler had the entire Eastern Hemisphere. By the time we acted, it was too late. Ten million Nazis descended through the Bering Strait. Anchorage fell. Then Seattle, Portland, Sacramento. They pushed east all the way to Pennsylvania before the Resistance created the A-bomb, before we started to push back. By the time it was over, it was 1964, and half the population of the world was dead, and an entire race of people was utterly lost. Only three thousand Jews remained, scattered survivors. Endangered. And it was our fault. Wouldn’t th
at be something you’d really want to forget if you could?”

  “Make it make sense with what I know,” said Jack, measuring his words. “I know Jewish people. And what about Pearl Harbor … I’ve seen photographs. My grandfather served in the Pacific Theater.”

  “So, it took a hundred years to build the Great Forgetting machine,” she said. “A hundred years to prepare for it. During that time, we … reconstituted the Jewish people using techniques invented by the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele.”

  “Reconstituted?”

  “Eugenics. A breeding program. On a scale you could not imagine. Baby warehouses on every continent. The antithesis of the gas chambers. We brought them back.”

  “Hubris,” the Captain said. But his voice was filled with awe.

  “By the time we were ready to flip the switch to forget, it was 2065. A new history was written for our minds. Memories of World War Two as it had never been. Pearl Harbor. Our victory over Japan and Germany. They’re stories, a fiction told by the digital code that comes out of HAARP. The algorithm allows each person’s mind to create their own personal memories that correspond with an invented, shared history. Like separate instruments playing the same symphony.”

  “How much of what I know as history is actually true?” asked Jack.

  “Does it matter?” she said.

  “This is a perversion,” the Captain said.

  “It all happened before I was even born.”

  Jack shook his head. “And your job is to collect evidence of this world that existed before the Great Forgetting. Stuff that might clue people in to what we’ve forgotten.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know where to find these artifacts?” asked Jack.

  “We’re given assignments.”

  “By whom?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “I’d rather you did,” Jack said, gesturing with the atomizer.

  “You don’t understand. Just saying his name alerts the system. It’s one of the code words the NSA listens for in outgoing e-mails and phone calls. Maybe you’ve heard of Echelon? Our data-mining system? Well, what it’s really doing is monitoring any reference to the Great Forgetting. Saying this man’s name brings attention to our conversation. The whole system will focus on us, record our voices, target us as a threat.”

  “Write it, then.”

  Cole pulled paper and a pen from his backpack and tossed it to her. She scribbled something and passed it to Jack.

  The Maestro, it read.

  “Don’t say it out loud if you want to remain hidden,” she said.

  He passed it to the Captain.

  “Who is he?” asked Jack.

  “He’s the man who maintains the algorithm. He lives in the mountains with the Hounds, beyond the Grimpen Mire. I’ve never met him.”

  “The Great Forgetting was only supposed to be a one-time deal,” said Cole. “But now somebody is using the machine to reset the calendar again. Little forgettings. Over and over. Sometimes a day. Sometimes a week or a month. Sometimes an entire year.”

  “It’s true. Someone has hacked into the machine.”

  “Who?” asked Jack.

  “We don’t know.”

  “What? What do you mean you don’t know?” asked Jack. “Who does?”

  “The only one who really needs to know is the Mae—” she stopped abruptly, covering her mouth with one hand. “He writes the code. I just collect things.”

  “We should be going,” said the Captain, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder.

  Jack nodded. He backed up and motioned for Christina to stand. “There’s something else I can’t wrap my mind around,” said Jack. “There must be some things that can’t be manipulated by this algorithm. I mean, if the calendar resets at a full moon, goes back a week, wouldn’t everyone, at least astronomers, realize the moon is full when it shouldn’t be? The moon, and the position of planets and constellations in the sky, that’s not something you can explain away like pages on a calendar. That’s something that can’t be ignored.”

  Christina smiled. In spite of her pathological nature, Jack found himself wanting to like her. “The first day on the job I asked Cole’s father about that very thing,” she said. “You know what he told me?”

  “What?”

  “He told me the moon changes, too. Nobody remembers how the moon works. If anybody knows, it’s the people of Mu.”

  5 Christina waited until they were in the elevator and Jack’s guard was down. He sensed a change, a shift in her demeanor, but was powerless to stop her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Christina. “They scan our minds every month. I can’t just let you let me go.”

  “The fuck are you saying?” said Jack.

  Christina closed her eyes. “The Maestro is in the mountain. The Maestro is in the mountain with the Hounds. The Maestro. The Maestro. The Maestro.”

  “Stop!” screamed Cole. “Shut up! Shut up!”

  Jack pulled her close, a hand over her mouth. But it was far too late.

  When she squirmed out of his grip, he did not fight.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I waited as long as I could. You have a two-minute head start. That’s as much as I can do.”

  “Thanks, lady,” the Captain said.

  “I am sorry about your dad,” she said to the boy. “He was a good man.”

  “He wanted to stop what’s happening,” said Cole. “You should, too.”

  “You can’t stop it. It was built to last forever.”

  The doors opened with a ding.

  “Go,” she pleaded. “They’ll be here soon.”

  They ran down John Street, then north on Nassau. Jack tried to flag a cab, but none stopped.

  “Panama hat!” Cole yelled, glancing behind them as they neared Fulton.

  Sixty yards behind and closing fast was a man in a charcoal suit and a Panama hat. The man’s face was wrinkled in jaundiced creases like the Hound Jack had seen on his jog. Perhaps it was the same one.

  They got across the street in time to cut off the Hound by the changing lights. They watched him across the river of traffic. He marked their passage with a slack face.

  Jack led them down a thin alley that swung at ninety degrees behind bins of garbage, toward Broadway. He chanced another look. There were two now, bounding down the alley, gaining. As he watched, one of the sharp-dressed Hounds leaped onto a brick wall and used it as leverage to launch himself forward. The little display of parkour closed some of the distance between them.

  “Don’t look back,” said Jack, quickening the pace.

  But of course Cole did. “Holy fuck!”

  They shot onto Broadway. To their immediate right a cab had pulled over to let out a pair of women. A man in a tweed jacket, the kind with cosmetic patches on the sleeves, waited to get in. As they approached, the man positioned himself to block them. The Captain barked at him like a Doberman. The man in the tweed jacket jumped back three feet, holding his hands in front of his face. “He’s ill,” said Jack. In a moment, they were inside.

  “GO!” shouted Cole.

  “Where, brotha?” said the cabbie, a young bearded man with a Quincy accent.

  “Just fucking go!”

  “Roger dodger.” The driver accelerated into traffic. Jack spun in his seat to look out the window. Two Hounds watched from the shadows of the alley. One was on a cell phone. They didn’t even look winded and their hats remained snug on their simian heads.

  As the cab darted through narrow gaps in traffic Jack noticed the driver staring at them in the mirror. What he didn’t need right now was someone recognizing them from the news. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “You guys media?” the cabbie asked.

  “What?”

  “CNN? The Times?”

  “No. Why?”

  “The attack. Just, everyone’s going crazy. I’ve been jetting reporters around town the last hour.”

  “Attack?” the Captain said, leaning forward.

/>   “Man, where you guys been? Check the monitor.”

  They looked at the small screen stuck into the back of the cab’s partition. It showed a live news feed: a fire on the ocean, flames erupting from a jumble of twisted metal without shape. An urgent scrawl ran underneath, portending major shit. A red bug on the top right corner blinked: Breaking News. Cole fumbled with a knob, cranking the volume.

  “… according to unconfirmed reports. President Obama was alerted an hour ago, in Florida, where he was addressing a group of elementary students. He was moved by Secret Service to a secure bunker at an unknown location.”

  The summary came from the scrawl: Terrorist attack! Cruise ship taken by hijackers, crashes into oil rig in Gulf of Mexico. 3,000 feared dead. Oil plume seen miles from explosion …

  “Who did it?” the Captain asked.

  “They’re saying al-Qaeda.”

  “What’s al-Qaeda?”

  “Some Islamic cult.”

  “They’ll find a way to use this,” said Cole, looking out the window as they headed south.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jack.

  “Whoever is running things. Whoever is causing these new little forgettings. They’ll rewrite everyone’s memories of this attack to fit in with their agenda. Don’t you get it, yet? Whatever history is the last one written is the one that becomes true. The history we know right now may not be the one that ultimately survives.”

  The Captain looked out the window, at the skyscraper where the kid’s father had once worked. Cole’s father had worked in the north one.

  “We used to joke about those buildings,” the Captain said. “When we were flying into JFK.”

  Cole looked over at him. “The Twin Towers?”

  The Captain nodded. “We used to joke about flying into them. Sick joke, really. They’re just so goddamn big. Every pilot knows that, eventually, somebody’s going to accidentally fly right into one. Some little Cessna, maybe, flying blind at night.”

  As the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center passed behind them, Jack gave the driver directions to the garage where they’d left the truck. In another hour, they were out of the city.