The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  The light inside was warm, the harsh world of concrete and fluorescence shut away as the door closed behind them. They were standing in someone’s cherrywood den, an expansive room of plank floors and leather couches. Hardback books lined deep shelves on every wall, old tomes, fragile and fragrant with glue. Someone, somewhere, was cooking bread.

  “Hello?” his father called.

  A head peeked around the corner of a doorway. A man’s head, fortyish, skin waxy and grayish, almost sickly, the way a vampire might look after decades of night. “Ah! What a pleasant surprise!” he said.

  The Maestro stepped into the den. He wore black pants and a gray sweater. A white apron hung around his waist. LICENSE TO GRILL, it said in black letters. The man’s body bent forward slightly, a hunchback’s bony knob pushing his sweater into a mound behind one shoulder.

  “And who is this?” asked the Maestro.

  “This is my son.”

  “Well, hello. Won’t you come into the kitchen for some cupcakes? We’ve just made some red velvet. You must try one. This way.” There was something simply magical about this man, like an old wizard. The boy was too thrilled to speak.

  They followed the Maestro into a kitchen bathed in pale blue-and-white light. A plate of cupcakes cooled on the island. The Maestro motioned for them to sit on wooden stools, then nodded to the treats. On top of each cupcake was a white marzipan aspen leaf. Cole ate greedily. They were wonderful, soft and moist.

  “And what is your name, young prince?”

  “Cole,” he said around bites.

  “Cole, you can call us the Maestro. It’s all right to say it in here. The Hounds can’t come in. Not without proper cause.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Our pleasure. We haven’t seen a child in fifty years.” They turned their attention to his father then. “A break in protocol. What if the Hounds found out?”

  “I’m beyond that now,” his father said.

  “Do tell.”

  “All the time I’ve known you, you’ve never much liked what you do. You hate the Hounds…”

  “Animals. Don’t get us started.”

  “So why are you helping them?”

  “We maintain the algorithm. It’s what we were made for.”

  “But the founders wouldn’t have supported these new forgottings. Right? We should stop it. All of it. People need to remember.”

  The Maestro smiled. “Consider what would happen if the signal from HAARP suddenly cut off and six billion people woke up to the real world. If they weren’t ready for such a thing, it would drive them mad. They might become more afraid than they already are. Then they would truly be dangerous.”

  “So then what do we do?”

  “They have to want to remember.”

  “What does that mean?” his father asked.

  “It means we can’t simply turn the machine off. The people have to want us to. But … perhaps we can nudge them in the right direction. Allow them the choice of remembering.”

  “How?”

  “Give them reason to question this version of the world. Show them part of the machine. Hint at the truth. That way, they come to it gradually.”

  “Show them part of the machine?”

  “Expose a relay,” the Maestro said.

  “How?”

  “Blow off its shell.”

  His father rubbed his chin, considering what the Maestro was suggesting. Cole could tell it was a weighted decision, the kind of decision you can’t back down from. Then he patted Cole on the back. “Come on,” he said. “Time to go.”

  The Maestro walked them to the door.

  “You’ve come a long way, Stephen,” the Maestro said. He looked down at Cole. “Whatever happens today, you’ve already inspired others to remember. And that’s a real start.”

  Back in the corridor, Cole’s father zigged right, down a narrow hall where another blast door was located. A sign above this one read BATTERY. He spun the wheel and it clicked open on a room filled with rows of metal lockers. The place reeked of oil and grease and the sweat of large beasts. His father went to a locker and pulled it open. Inside were guns placed in gray foam. He took one, considered a moment, and then removed another, which he handed to Cole. It looked like a toy ray gun and felt as light as a television remote.

  “Here’s the safety. Here’s the trigger,” his father said. “Keep the safety on unless you mean to use it. Hold it steady when you fire. It won’t kick, so don’t flinch. Keep your eyes open when you shoot, okay?”

  Cole felt his heart beating in his neck.

  “It’s just a precaution. You probably won’t need it.” His father went to another locker and removed five bricks wrapped in thin, powdery paper.

  “What’s that?” asked Cole.

  “Bombs,” his father said.

  * * *

  Just after noon his father pulled the strange jet car into the public parking decks below the North Tower of the World Trade Center. “It’s like this, sometimes,” his father explained. “Everyone wants to live in a time when all they have to do is live, to live their lives and not rock the boat. But sometimes … sometimes you realize you have a responsibility to change things for the better and not just for you but for everybody. And the only way to do that is to risk your own peace. It’s a choice like everything else. Do you understand?”

  Cole didn’t. But he nodded. If his father—and the man he called the Maestro—if they believed this was the right thing to do, then it must be. He’d never known his father to make an impulsive decision.

  The Twin Towers, his father explained, disguised relays that blanketed all of New York City with the forgetting broadcasts. If they could blow apart the shell of one of the towers, the relay would be revealed. In the face of such technology, the public would question its purpose and function. The signal itself might weaken all over New York, too. It was a start.

  The parking deck was claustrophobic and every sound they made bounced back to them from the walls in a way that made his fillings tingle. Cole felt the gun as a bit of pressure against his thigh. Could he actually point it at someone and squeeze the trigger if he had to? He didn’t think so.

  They began a circuit of the parking garage. His father paused at a key column of concrete and placed a brick of C-4 against it while Cole watched for cars. They continued around the lot and placed another. They had placed only two when a young man in a sharp suit came out of the elevators and spotted them: “Hallo there!”

  His father tucked the explosives into the bag and put an arm around Cole’s shoulders. “Greg!” he said.

  “Hey, man, where ya been? We missed you at the conference this morning.”

  “My son caught a cold,” he said. “I had to pick him up from school.”

  The agent looked to Cole. The boy blushed, beads of sweat gathered at his hairline.

  “Oh,” said Agent Greg Carr. “This your boy?”

  “My one and only.”

  Greg waved. “Hey, kiddo. Well. I’ll just, you know, head back up.”

  Suddenly one of those ray guns was in his father’s hand. It had appeared so quickly, Cole hadn’t even seen him reach for it. He pointed it at Greg. But Greg was already ducking behind a minivan. His father fired. A wave of energy shot from the barrel, rippling the air like the wake behind a boat, and then the minivan was a pile of blue ash. Greg crouched in the open space. He raised his hands. “Hey, man. Think about it. What are you doing?”

  “Get out of here, Greg,” he said.

  The agent ran for the street. As soon as he was out of range, they could hear him shouting into his walkie-talkie. “Breach! Parking lot! It’s a breach! Evac!”

  “Run!” his father screamed, shoving Cole toward a set of stairs. Thirty feet away, a Ford Taurus vaporized in front of them. Cole turned to see three Hounds jumping over a row of cars, launching off the metal roofs like acrobats. His father reached into the pocket of his suit and came out with a thin metal tube with a red button on top.
He pressed it, hard.

  Cole felt the blast before he heard it, a wall of hot air lifting him off his feet like a wave breaking against him. He was lost in it, unable to tell up from down, left from right. He collided with a red sedan, crumpling the back door. The world was filled with a cacophony of hurtful noise and shrieking metal. The sound registered as pain before it differentiated into separate tones to be heard. Then the heat: a numbing fire, as if he’d bent close to a grill. Cole tried to breathe but his lungs were empty, the fire had stolen his air. A rush of wind as the blaze consumed oxygen, became a living thing. The crash of girders against concrete, raucous music of architecture, a symphony of destruction.

  A Hound, its hair on fire, rolled on the ground six feet away. “Hoo, hoo, hoo,” it shouted. “Help! Ha-elp!”

  Cole watched it succumb to the fire, flames rippling around its humanoid lips as it inhaled its last breath. The Hound’s body curled against itself, a charred black mummy. Cole tried to stand but collapsed back to the ground. Great clouds of noxious smoke rolled like dirty cotton balls on the ceiling.

  His father appeared behind another car. His face was covered in soot and an open gash ran down the left side of his face. “Cole!” he shouted. He started to run for his son but then a hairy arm wrapped around his father’s neck.

  “You!” the Hound screamed. It shoved his father against the car and pointed a gun at him. This was no atomizer. It was a nine-millimeter. As Cole watched, the Hound fired two bullets into his father’s chest. His body slumped to the ground.

  The Hound turned his attention to Cole then. And for maybe the third time in his life, the boy prayed.

  If someone’s listening, he thought, please don’t let me die.

  He never heard the shot. There was a little pressure in his head, like he’d been hit with the worst migraine of his life, and then … nothing. The next thing he knew, he was coming out of sleep, bit by bit, becoming alive in fractured memories. He was in the hospital.

  He’d been in a coma for two weeks. By the time he woke, they’d already buried his father. His mother told him that they’d been in an accident on Church Street; a taxi had pushed their car into a Sephora. She showed Cole pictures of the accident, color photographs of what looked like his father’s car smashed into a display of expensive makeup.

  “What about the explosion at the World Trade Center?” he asked.

  “You mean the bombing in the parking garage? That happened in 1993, nineteen years ago,” she said.

  The Maestro had rewriten the algorithm. The altered code had gone out from HAARP to the relays, out to the minds of humanity, altering memories of the attack to fit a new truth. Instead of becoming the spark that illuminated the world, his father’s insurrection was rewritten to further darken history. Another terrorist attack. A story to make people more fearful. The day Cole came out of the coma, three men in Alabama lynched a Muslim girl walking to school in a burka.

  Cole felt sick. Too frustrated to cry. And who to blame?

  If the Maestro had simply shut off the signal, his father would still be alive. Instead of turning off the machine, the Maestro let his father try to do it the hard way. The Maestro had made him a target. It was cowardice. It was evil.

  At first Cole tried to convince his doctors what was really going on. Cole told them about the chemtrails and the fluoride and the TacMars and they locked him away in the psych ward for so long his mother was forced to consider long-term care. It didn’t matter. They could ship him off to Ohio. Eventually, Cole knew, he would convince someone that he was telling the truth. It was just a matter of finding the right words, the right story to tell. He thought back on his meeting with the Maestro. That idea about gradual change. Gradients. That was an idea he might use to his advantage.

  Eventually there came a day when a new doctor arrived, a tall doctor with shaggy brown hair and glasses, a skinny man with a nice smile but some kind of darkness behind his eyes. Cole thought he recognized something there.

  “Cole, I’m Dr. Sanders,” said the man in the white coat. “Tell me your story.”

  2 “You killed my father,” said Cole, stepping toward the Maestro, the gun leveled at the sickly man’s torso.

  “No, Cole, we tried to help him,” he said. “What happened after he left this room we could not have predicted. There were too many possible outcomes.”

  “Put the gun down, kid,” the Captain said softly. “You’re about to kill the only person with any answers.”

  Cole’s bottom lip trembled with warring emotions. He stepped forward. “Why didn’t you just turn off the signal?”

  “Freedom can’t be granted,” said the Maestro. “It must be won. It must be fought for. Tell him, Jack Felter. In the history of the world has there ever been a society that has won lasting freedom without rising up and taking that freedom from the hands of their oppressors?”

  Jack shook his head. “No.”

  “You’re not going to kill us,” the Maestro said. “You don’t have murder in your heart.”

  “My heart is broken!”

  “This is bigger than you,” said the Maestro, his eyes full of patience. “We’re getting to the end, we are. But you and your friends here—and us, even—we are only single characters in a much larger story. If you could only see…”

  Something large collided with the door to the Maestro’s lair. The barrier held, but the Maestro suddenly seemed distracted. Annoyed.

  “If you want the Hounds to leave, I should talk to them,” he said.

  Cole didn’t move. His mouth twisted in thought, his eyes barely holding back tears.

  “Set the gun down. We’ll talk. Let’s talk.”

  Cole felt his vengeance breaking, his confidence dissolving. He knew he was failing his father, that somewhere his father looked on him with disappointment. The gun went limp in his hand and he passed it to the Captain before it could fall. Then he went to Jack and buried his face in his chest. Cole didn’t cry. He just sighed, a coldness draining from his pores. He closed his eyes and wished the world away. Jack held him tightly.

  The Maestro walked to an intercom and pressed a button. “Scopes? Is that you?”

  “Open up, Maestro,” came a shrill voice.

  “You know how this works,” the Maestro said. “These rooms are sovereign. It is a separation of powers spelled out clearly in the founders’ laws.”

  “Don’t quote canon to me,” said Scopes. “And don’t assume the law is guaranteed forever. The founders are long gone. Nobody remembers them.”

  “We remember,” the Maestro said.

  “We’ll wait,” came the reply.

  The Maestro turned back to them and smiled. “Well. Now that’s done, who wants pie?”

  3 “Get up!” the Hound shouted as Sam collapsed to the concrete floor of the debarkation room, another tidy space that resembled a suburban post office.

  Sam’s legs had fallen asleep inside the vacuum tube, and when she stood, it was like a thousand sewing needles jabbing into her muscles. She looked at the Hound before her. He wore a familiar uniform, that gray suit and Panama hat, a G-man on vacation. But this one was fatter. He didn’t seem to have a neck.

  “Step to the line,” he said, pointing to the floor.

  Thin trails in different colors were painted on the concrete. One blue. One green.

  “Green,” he said when she raised an eyebrow.

  She followed the green line through the door. Beyond was another branch of that familiar endless corridor. They walked for so long Sam lost track of time. Her mind wandered, remembering the day at the fair when Jack had looked at her as if she was worth something. Eventually they came to a steel door marked MOD-1, where a young man in a dark suit greeted them.

  “I’m Agent Snowden,” he said, shaking Sam’s hand as if he were an ob-gyn on a consult. “Come in, come in.”

  She stepped inside. The Hound closed the door and removed her cuffs.

  “Sit, please,” said Snowden, gesturing to a dentist
’s chair that waited in the middle of the concave room. Her heart shuddered at the sight of the tools waiting on the tray beside it. “Don’t worry. This isn’t torture, Samantha.”

  “What is it then?” she asked.

  “Just a filling,” he said. “Painless. In, out, you’re on your way.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Here,” said Snowden, his voice gentle, the good doctor easing the anxious child into the chair. He picked up a tiny square of electronics and held it in the palm of his hand for Sam to see. “That’s all.”

  “What is it?”

  “Tiny transmitter,” he said. “Your own little radio station. We write your new history here…” Snowden pointed to an antique green-screen Apple II personal computer sitting on a desk. “And it gets broadcast to your brain, from here…” He wiggled the relay in his hand. “Your own personal Forgetting. It’s a mod. A programming patch, like an update for Candy Crush.”

  Sam looked at the fat Hound. He glared back at her from under the brim of his stupid Panama hat. His hand rested on the butt of the nine-millimeter in his holster.

  “Painless,” Snowden said again.

  Resigned, she climbed into the chair and looked up to the drop ceiling, where Snowden had hung a poster of a kitten dangling from the branch of a tree. HANG IN THERE, it said.

  “Now,” said Snowden, sitting on a rolling stool and swinging around to face her. “What sort of person would you like to be, Samantha Brooks?”

  4 “So are you like a hunchback or something?” asked Nils between large spoonfuls of homemade cherry pie. They were in the kitchen, a wide expanse of robin’s-egg-blue backsplash and granite countertops, standing around an island made of wood. Everyone ate except Cole, who glowered silently and leaned against the stove.

  Jack felt guilty eating this pie, which was delectable, its crust made with some heavy lard, while Sam was imprisoned somewhere within this labyrinth of concrete. They were wasting time.