by Neil Clarke
“I’ve—ah—yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a problem.”
“Sit.”
Irving sat, cross-legged, three feet from the Omissioner.
“Tea?”
Irving shook his head.
The Omissioner waited, face inscrutable. It took Irving a long half-minute to realise the old man was waiting for him to speak. He cleared his throat, irritated by the incense. “It’s a—it’s about a memory I’ve sold to an extraction service.”
Still the old man waited.
Irving continued: “It—the memory—is coming back. And I . . . ” He paused. It felt like he was making confession. “I’m worried about others I’ve sold. I think things may have got a little out of control—I had this life with my wife. I mean lunch—lunch with my wife. She mentioned this—this incident in Luna Park, which I couldn’t remember at first, but which I’ve started to dream about.”
A hand appeared from within the Omissioner’s sleeve. “Your memory pin please, Mister Kupfermann.”
Irving’s mouth tightened.
The old man waited, gnarled hand extended.
Irving sighed. He put his finger to his cochlear implant and murmured the password. A quiet click sounded and the memory pin popped out of the steel. He plucked it between thumb and forefinger and handed it to the Omissioner.
Zau unclipped a dark green bracelet from his wrist and unfurled it, revealing a latest-model flexiscreen. One foot square, paper-thin, soft-glowing green. The Omissioner placed the memory pin on it and hid his hands back within his sleeves. The ancient lines of the old man’s face were lit up by reflected green as ideograms and graphs flowed across the screen.
After a minute of looking through the data, the man’s disposition changed completely. He took his hands from his sleeves, stopped squinting, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from a hidden pocket. “Dear oh dear. So you’re a Johnny,” he said, in a suddenly broad Australian accent. He lit his cigarette with a chrome lighter and snapped it shut, throwing it on the floor in front of him.
“A what?” asked Irving.
The Omissioner blew a cloud of smoke upwards. “You know—a memory hooker, an auto-amnesiac. Selling off those crystal-clear, seminal life moments to the ruling class—a Johnny.”
Irving paused, trying to get past the incongruity of the broad Australian accent coming out of the old Chinese guy’s mouth. “What? What is this— what game are you playing here?”
“Whatever do you mean?” the old man replied, with a half-smile that suggested he knew exactly what Irving meant.
Irving pointed an open hand at the room. “This game.”
“This,” said the Omissioner, letting his gaze roam around the gloom. “This is all part of the Mysteries of the East surcharge.” When he said Mysteries of the East his accent switched, for a moment, from Australian back to Chinese.
“Mysteries of the East?”
“Mysteries of the East, mate. Rich bastards don’t come here just for science; they want a mythic flourish from an ancient civilization. So I charge them extra for their ignorance, and give the same service they’d get from any other memory expert.”
“But—but everyone says the role of the Omissioner is an ancient Chinese tradition.”
“Oh yeah, sure mate. Thousands of years ago China had the Omissioners. Their sole responsibility was to remind the Emperor of important traditions or precedents.” Zau took a drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke upwards. “But many other cultures had something similar. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as Rawis were attached to poets as official memorizers. For centuries the Jews had the tannaim, who memorized oral law. All cultures, more or less, have had memory experts attached to the elite. The advent of the printing press, books, and libraries changed all that: they democratized exo-mem-ory for the masses. For a couple of centuries, anyway. Until the invention of the cochlear-glyph and the subsequent epidemic of memory decline that has made good recall the rarest of commodities. These days, the virtuosos of natural memory like me—” an ironic grin touched Zau’s lips “—Well mate, I’m the darling of the elite.”
Zau pointed at Irving with the end of his cigarette. “But you ain’t the elite. You ain’t a repeat customer. You’re a Johnny. Your wealth has come from selling off your personal history, right?”
“Well—”
“And you’re here to ask me to fix the dog’s breakfast you’ve made of the inside of your head, yes?”
“Well, yes, there’s this—”
“Then you’re here to ask me to fix the unfixable. I see people like you all the time. Bloody idiots, one and all. You got no other source of income, right?”
Irving started to deny it, out of instinct. But he relented and shook his head no.
“Then I can’t prescribe a way out of this for you. To fix the damage you’ve done, to reclaim some of the fragments of these lost memories, I’ll need time. Months. But even if you could afford me, the memories I’d reconstruct would mostly be copyrighted. So that’s no good.” He took another drag, glittering eyes fixed on Irving. “You could purchase the memories of others in order to improve your overall brain function, of course. But I’m not a butcher. I don’t trade in the prime cuts of the personal histories of the desperate.”
Irving decided to focus on the only part of the little speech that could help him. “How would other people’s memories help?”
“You don’t know?” asked the Omissioner, with a hint of surprise.
“It’s—” Irving rubbed at his eye, he knew this “—on the tip of my tongue.”
“You don’t remember. Of course you don’t. How could you, after all the things those bastards have done to you?” The Omissioner had let his anger show, for a moment, but he stubbed it out with his cigarette in the ashtray in front of him.
Zau took a long breath, and then said: “When you sell a memory to the ruling class, you’re not simply selling one of your experiences. I mean, that’s part of it—having their subconscious integrate someone else’s experience as their own. The human brain is a wonderful thing isn’t it? Takes a distinct event from someone else’s life and—with a little nudging from technology and a good night’s sleep—absorbs it as one of its own.
“But what you’re really selling is the vitality and emotion of that experience. The power of these memories is such that when you experience them, they increase the strength and number of synaptic connections in your neural pathways. The rich need this, more than anyone, because nearly all of them are constantly editing their histories. For everything: relationships, jobs, family, making their lives seem superior to that of regular people. Bloody hell— some of them have a bad day they’ll erase it and replace it with a good one. In the end you get a kind of mass delusion among the one per cent—half their lives are based on vivid memories they’ve bought from Johnnies like you. So they become ever more dependent on top-of-the-line exo-memory to fabricate visual recordings and forge a consistent life narrative. In turn, they become less and less reliant on their own brains to encode new memories, and unused, those pathways atrophy.”
Zau took a long drag on his smoke and blew out a long slow cloud, watching as it curled its way to the ceiling. “So, there it is, mate. That’s why they pay so handsomely for your memories. Not just for the experience, but to repair brain damage.”
Irving felt the dread, sitting on his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. “How bad, Zau? How much have I lost?”
The Omissioner pointed at Irving’s memory pin, sitting on the flexiscreen. “I can’t tell you what memories you’ve lost. Not at a glance, anyway.”
“What can you tell me then?”
“How many memories you’ve sold.”
Irving’s breath came harder. “Well then, how many?”
“Two hundred and nineteen.”
It felt like a punch in the chest. “Fuck me.”
“Hmmm.”
“That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Mate. It’s as bad as it gets.”
&
nbsp; “Can . . . can I buy memories, like you said, help repair the damage?”
The Omissioner shook his head. “You’re remembering for them wholesale, but they’re selling it retail. If you’ve got no income other than selling memories, then you’re nothing more than a snake eating its own tail.”
“And you?”
“No. I’m not going re-craft your life into some sort of delusion—that’s what mercenaries like Thanks for the Memories do. That’s simply replacing one form of mental illness—dementia—for another—psychosis. My methods are more sophisticated than those butchers. They’re also much more expensive.”
“Can you do anything for me?” asked Irving, voice strained.
Omissioner Zau seemed oblivious. “Prescribe you Alzheimer’s medication. It’ll stabilize your condition, maybe even allow for a partial improvement. You’ll never be the way you were, but so long as you don’t sell anymore memories you should lead a relatively normal life.”
“Relatively?”
“Well—like I said—you have low-grade Alzheimer’s. You’re mildly intellectually impaired.”
“What the fuck?”
Zau paused for a moment. “Apologies. I tend to be less polite with people who won’t remember my rudeness.” The old man held out his cigarettes. “Fag?”
Irving shook his head.
“Drink?”
“Yeah,” Irving said, with a sigh. “Yeah, I could use one.”
The old man hopped up, far more sprightly than Irving would have guessed, and disappeared through a bead curtain in a dark corner of the room. As he did so, Irving saw that the Omissioner had no cochlear-glyph implant behind his ear. It had been a long time since he’d met someone unplugged.
Zau returned soon after with a bottle of amber liquid and two tumblers. The Omissioner settled down again across from Irving, poured them each three fingers. Irving downed his in a single hit. It burned his throat, but not too much, and relieved a little of the tension in his chest.
“I could go back to work,” said Irving. “Nano-tech pays well, if you stick with it. I could make enough to afford even you.” He smiled weakly.
Zau poured Irving another whisky. “No.”
“No?” What smile Irving had faded.
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
The Omissioner finished his whisky, eyes on Irving. “Imagination, that’s why. If you went back to work you’d be largely reliant on exo-memory, and exo-memory never made a new discovery or developed a new idea. It doesn’t have the rich associations of a natural memory, cannot accrete the layers of knowledge, interacting with each other, which give birth to an original idea. Memory is an act of creativity—the ability to form connections between disparate memories, build something new with them, and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a dance, or a nano-tech innovation.
“And you, Irving? You’ve pretty much lost your ability to create future memory. You used to be good at nano-tech? That’s gone now. You can’t get that back.”
Irving stared at the glass in his hand. He gave a sigh that included his shoulders, and said: “Well, I want to keep what I’ve got left, including the one I have of my daughter.” His throat closed a little when he said daughter.
“Sorry mate. But you won’t be able to do even that. You keep remembering copyrighted memories, you’ll get three years in jail and a fine so big you’ll be out on the street.” Zau waved his cigarette absently in the air. “You could leave the country, if you’re that desperate. A few countries left don’t have memory copyright. Belize has great beaches.”
Irving looked up at him. “Belize?”
“Belize.”
“Fuck Belize.”
Zau shrugged.
“Fuck Belize right in the arse.”
“That’s probably overdoing it.”
Irving picked his whisky up, and then put it down again, un-sipped. “What are my other options?”
“Options, chief?” Zau said, eyes narrowing. “You’re all out of options. You’re a fly, struggling in their web. Being aware of this fact is largely irrelevant. They’ll get what they want from you, one way or another. You resist, you’ll go to jail, and the judgment against you will include enforced reclamation of that stolen property—” Zau placed a finger on his own temple “—sitting there inside your head. And the government ain’t as careful extracting memories as the recall companies. It can get messy.”
Irving was silent. He let the words sting him, let the sting linger.
“Unless . . . ” Zau trailed off. His eyes bored right into Irving, searching for something.
“Unless?”
The Omissioner took a long drag of his cigarette. “Unless you settle for the only thing you really can get now: revenge.”
“Revenge? Against who?”
“Mate. Against the mercenaries that built this edifice of mnemonic servitude to the rich. Against the recall companies.”
Irving stroked his long, curved nose. Revenge was such an exhausting pastime. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“What else have you got?” asked the Omissioner. “Your family and career are gone.”
Irving narrowed his eyes. “What was that about you being rude, again?” “I’m just being straight with you, mate.”
Irving was silent as he turned it all over in his mind. Ondine, looking at him, her face creased with contempt and Eulalie, water-blurred eyes, uncomprehending at the creeping neglect of his fatherhood.
Eulalie.
If he could have been a good father, all the other failures wouldn’t have mattered. Everything else was bullshit. If only.
And he thought about the recall companies. Yeah—them, most of all. With their spacious, marble receptions and employees with perfect white teeth and franchises popping up in every city, every suburb even. On the back of his dreams, his experiences, his essence, commodified as a plaything for the lucky rich. They were the ones who had done all this, brought him to this, reduced him to this. Tore his family apart, for profit.
Irving fixed his gaze on Zau. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe revenge is exactly what I want.”
The Omissioner leaned towards him. “Yes. Good. Now, if this works out, you won’t remember doing it.”
“Perfect.”
“From a certain perspective, yes. I’ll fix it so you won’t remember this conversation. You also won’t remember that Thanks for the Memories stole your life, or that you got revenge for all they’ve done. What point then, Irving? How does this act exist, if you cannot remember it?”
Irving downed the last of his whisky, cleared his throat. “Let’s not get metaphysical here, Omissioner. The tree still falls in the forest. The world still exists outside the boundaries of my skull. And if I make these motherfuckers pay, well they are going to pay.”
Zau nodded, eyes twinkling. “Good. You’re going to have to go to Thanks for the Memories, have the propriety product you are re-remembering wiped, and sell them one more legit memory.”
Irving shook his head immediately. “No. I’m done with it. They can take back Luna Park, but no more. I’ve lost too much of myself—you’ve just got through telling me I’m going to end up a retard.”
“Dementia.”
“Whatever. I’ve done enough damage. Time to draw a line under it.”
“Just one more, mate. It’s the only way to do it. This lunch you had recently, where your wife talked about Luna Park, it has to go.”
“Why?”
“Because it is part of a mnemonic loop that will keep sending you back in time to Luna Park, and forward in time to me, here. We need to snip it out, cover our tracks.”
Irving opened his mouth to say no, but the image came of Ondine, looking at him from across the table, her expression a mixture of sadness and pity. He rubbed at his eyes with his palms. “Yeah. Maybe that is one memory I could do without.”
“Good, mate, good,” said the Omissioner, eyes shining. “Now, they’ll be uploading more than a visual recor
ding from your pin and a memory print from your cerebral cortex. They’ll be uploading a project I’ve been working on for a long time. An offensively expensive virus I’ve commissioned, one that will bypass—”
Irving held up hand. “I don’t care what it is, Omissioner, just so long as it works.”
“Oh, it will work. When they take your memory, the virus will plug straight into the Kandel-Yu machine. It will ensure that every customer after you experiences an immediate decline in the release of certain proteins crucial to longterm memory formation. They will suffer anterograde amnesia—everything that happens after their trip to Thanks for the Memories will be lost.”
“They’ll still have memory pins.”
“Yes, yes, they’ll still have exo-memory. That’s why it’s such a cracker—it won’t become immediately apparent. Not before hundreds, even thousands have been exposed. Those infected will be increasingly reliant on a computer to tell them what day it is, where they work, whether or not they ate lunch, who their new friends are, the names of their children. They’ll keep going back to recall companies, buying more memories, infecting more Kandel-Yu machines. We do this right, the whole system of memories trickling up to the rich, of the desperate selling off chunks of their own soul, will be broken.”
Irving laughed without humour. “And here I was thinking I’d never achieve anything in this life.”
Zau watched Irving through the glass, doing a stunned kind of shuffle, following his vulture nose down the sidewalk.
“Your insider at the recall centre,” said Zau. “She chose well.”
“Yes,” replied Qiang from behind the reception desk. “She knows a hopeless case when she sees one.”
“He’s better than hopeless.” Zau continued to watch Irving walk down the street. “He’s the utterly irredeemable still yearning for redemption.”
Qiang waited until Irving had disappeared from sight. “Mister Kupfermann said you’d come to an agreement and that he wasn’t to be charged for the session.”
Zau looked over at him. “Charge him triple.”
“Triple?”
“Yeah. He won’t remember what it’s for, and I’ve told his exo-memory to hide it from him. Plus—” the old man smiled, his eyes sparkling “—it’s for a good cause.”