“So, what have you got for me? “ I could smell something in the air, a vaguely burning stench. “Are you overloading one of these very expensive machines?” I asked with a grin.
“No, I punched the wrong time on the microwave and ended up burning the crap out of my frozen burrito,” he said.
“Figures,” I said. “So have you worked your magic for our opening sequence?”
“Your idea was terrific. It works great.”
The screen in front of us lit up, first with a close up shot of the water and then the prow of a boat shooting through it. Then the camera rose to the darkened horizon and you could see the oil rig seeming to grow out of the water. That still sent shivers down my spine.
“Welcome, friends, as we seek to find out what is hidden in the shadows, what we see just out of the corners of our eyes, and, most of all, what is right in front of us In The Dark Corners of reality.”
The camera panned across the other members of my team and then settled on me for just a few beats; seconds later our show logo came up and the opening credits rolled.
“Nice job, Carl,” I said.
“Thanks, boss. Your new team is pretty colorful, but I still miss Jake and Nadia,” he said.
“I do too, Carl.”
“By the way, I love that effect the new night vision goggles’ light does to your eyes,” he said, picking up a half eaten piece of pizza from next to his keyboard.
“My eyes?”
“Yea, it makes them look like they have gold spots in them,” he said.
“Never noticed that. We can call it my new look,” I said, looking at the tiny gold flecks in my eyes reflected in the monitor on the control panel.
Bradley H. Sinor has seen his work appear in numerous science fiction, fantasy and horror anthologies such as THE IMPROBABLE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN, THE GRANTVILLE GAZETTE AND RING OF FIRE 2 and 3. Three collections of his short fiction have been released by Yard Dog Press, DARK AND STORMY NIGHTS, IN THE SHADOWS, and PLAYING WITH SECRETS (along with stories by his wife Sue Sinor.) His newest collections are ECHOES FROM THE DARKNESS (Arctic Wolf Press) and WHERE THE SHADOWS BEGAN ( Merry Blacksmith Press).
Story illustration by Steve Santiago
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Missing Presumed Wiped
by Derek John
The presentation had already begun when I arrived at the public screening room of the Film Institute and so I slipped unobtrusively into the comfortable shadows of the back row. The ghostly black-and-white images flickered in and out of focus as the projectionist carefully adjusted his lenses and the accompanying soundtrack swelled in crescendo, filling the auditorium with the relentless two-tone electronic war-drums of the original theme from Dr Who.
The title of the serial: The Power of the Daleks swam into life out of the swirling static. This meant nothing to me, but the reaction in the room was terrific. Whoops of joy erupted all around like a crowd at a football match. People were jumping out of their seats and punching the air, and one weak-minded fellow sitting next to me even seemed to be crying. I turned and asked him if he was all right.
“Tears of joy mate! Tears of joy!” he said, slapping my shoulder, but with his eyes still firmly fixed on the images unfolding in front of him. “The Power of the Daleks—it’s the Holy Grail for us Whovians—the first appearance of Patrick Troughton as the Doctor from the fourth series in 1966. They said the BBC wiped the whole lot, but they were wrong. Oh my God I can’t believe they’ve finally found a copy!” He grabbed me and gesticulated wildly at the screen. “Look! He’s regenerating! Oh My God! Oh. My. God!”
He started sniffling again and I quickly made my excuses and left.
Science fiction was never my thing and alone amongst my peers at school I had watched little more than a handful of episodes from this popular television drama, preferring instead to spend my idle hours reading Tarkovsky and Bresson or projecting obscure subtitled films onto my bedroom wall.
The presentation was part of an annual series of screenings undertaken by the Institute entitled ‘Missing Presumed Wiped’: a showcase for our archivists where any recent discoveries of lost television programs or motion pictures were paraded for the general public. The ulterior motive of course, was to raise our profile amongst the powers-that-be in the Department of Culture who held the purse strings for our annual grants. I had little interest in television and was merely showing up to provide some moral support for my colleagues in the hope that they would reciprocate in turn at the world premiere of my restoration of the lost film of Hieronymous Bak’s Life of Count Potocki.
My expectations of a ready quid pro quo for the screening of this lost masterpiece of Polish cinema were sadly premature, for later that afternoon, dotted amongst the row upon row of empty seats in the stifling projection room, were the lonely figures of the Polish cultural attaché, a somnolent (and undoubtedly well-soused on the free lunchtime wine) film critic from The Times and a handful of gormless film students. The event was not quite the succès d’estime I had envisaged. Instead, the next day’s newspaper headlines all trumpeted in unison: ‘Lost Who episodes discovered’ and even though I searched the ‘culture’ supplements assiduously, I could not find the slightest mention of my work.
And so, once the last dawdling members of the general public had ransacked the gift-shop and left the building, we began the arduous task of returning the screening rooms back to their workday use. A group of my colleagues were still congratulating themselves with rounds of mutual backslapping in the main room where the Doctor Who episodes had been left running on a continuous loop. It was then that I alone, it seemed, amongst all the people milling about, noticed something odd. There was a slight convex curvature to the projected image. It was not a direct transfer of an original and had clearly been filmed off a television screen, perhaps by an individual with a Super 8 camera. But, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I could detect something moving in some of the darker scenes, something not on the programme itself, but rather a reflection off the screen as it was being filmed.
Later that evening, when I had the editing suite to myself, I uploaded a copy of the film. Using some digital editing software I isolated the reflection and enhanced the contrast. Gradually the obscure figure resolved itself into a small child’s face gazing impassively at the events unfolding on the screen in front of him. I checked for the expected Super 8 camera which by rights he should have been holding—but nothing else was visible. This was odd, very odd. Exactly where the camera should have been was simply the reflection of the child’s inscrutable face cupped in his hands. Being an obsessive type (as most archivists are) I resolved to investigate this mystery further and tracked down my colleague who had unearthed the serial.
“Where do you find these old TV episodes?” I asked him, feigning a vague interest.
“Usually, by old-fashioned detective work,” he replied, “plus a good smattering of serendipity. Believe it or not, a lot of classic stuff was wiped back then simply to reuse the tapes. TV was regarded as an ephemeral medium like magazines or newspapers; it never occurred to anyone that these programmes might have some cultural value. Occasionally we find things in the State Television archives of former Commonwealth countries, mouldering remnants of unrecorded foreign sales, sometimes it’s illegal copies made by cameramen and directors, and sometimes the damn things just turn up unannounced on car boot sale tables from God-knows-where.”
“And your latest Dr Who?”
“A most unlikely source. Real cloak and dagger stuff: a muffled phone call suggesting a meeting in a deserted car-park, a surreptitious handing-over of a DVD copy in a plain brown paper package with the promise of more to come. Didn’t ask for any money though, he told me that he was simply giving people back their childhood memories and that was reward enough.”
“So you have no idea who it was?”
“Not quite. I’m not in the business of stalking our donors, but in this case
the handover was in a supermarket car park so of course there was only one exit. I simply loitered by some landscaping until I caught sight of him driving away. Posh executive car, a Lexus I think, and he had a parking permit for a hospital stuck to the windscreen–Addenbrookes in Cambridge. I reckon he’s a surgeon or consultant of some sort, he had that air of arrogance about him and an over-firm handshake, but where he could be getting old BBC tapes from is a mystery.“
“We need to track him down and get to the bottom of it all,” I said disingenuously, “there could be boxes of these lost tapes slowly decomposing in an attic somewhere, and we need to get them into a controlled environment and conserved as soon as possible.”
“I couldn’t agree more!” he grinned, “but I’m surprised at your sudden descent from your cinematic ivory tower to slum it with us television types!”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I countered, “You won’t be finding me enthusing about lost episodes of Dad’s Army just yet. There is an ulterior motive. According to the BBC records they screened a short film of Bak’s: an adaptation of Grabinski’s Nuptial Flames in 1966, the same year as your serial. The film has been lost from the archives in Poland and if there is even the slightest possibility it survives I must pursue it to the bitter end.”
It was a simple matter to call up the hospital website and we scrolled through countless mugshots of academics and surgeons until my colleague jumped up and pointed at the image of a greying, bespectacled academic on the screen.
“There! That’s our man!”
“Mr Crawford Scarsdale,” I read aloud, “consultant neurosurgeon and member of the Cognition and Brain Research Unit. Speciality: the neurophysiology of memory.”
I remained silent about my discovery in the screening room. Could that be Scarsdale in the reflection? No, it was impossible. According to the short biography he must be at least in his early seventies, which would have made him a young med student back in 1966 and several years older than the child in the image.
Impulsively, and without informing my colleague, I telephoned Scarsdale’s secretary at his office and arranged a meeting for the following morning. Addenbrookes hospital was a swift ten-minute taxi ride from Cambridge station and I waited anxiously in his waiting rooms with a pitiful assortment of semi-paralytics and other randomly gesticulating sufferers of advanced neurological trauma. Once the final consultation had completed I was summoned by his secretary into a small, stuffy office, piled to the ceiling with papers and discarded scrips and centred on a large grey metal desk from behind which Scarsdale rose to greet me.
“Welcome, Mr... ?”
I gave him my card and he reciprocated with a distressingly firm alpha-male handshake. He was in his seventies but had the vigour and sharpness of a man thirty years younger.
“I’m from the Film Institute,” I stammered, “and we were very grateful for your donation. Perhaps you and your source may have something less err... populist. As for myself, I am particularly interested in Polish cinema. You have heard of course of the great director Hieronymous Bak?”
I proceeded to launch into my standard (and no doubt unendurably tedious to the uninitiated) eulogy on his works.
Scarsdale interrupted me mid-flow with a dismissive flourish.
“Sir, I must admit my ignorance on Mr Bak’s oeuvre. However, let me be frank with you. I am not interested in unearthing old movies. I applaud your amateur detection skills, but the Doctor Who episode was a mere jeu d’esprit of mine: a by-product of my experiments, an amusing test case, something to prepare the public for the full revelation of the fruits of my research which will come in due course.”
“And your research involves what exactly?”
“Induced hyperthymesia, or in layman’s terms: forensic recollection, the medical reconstruction of lost memories. Come, let me show you to the laboratory.”
I donned a white coat and visitor’s badge and followed him deep into the bowels of the hospital building. After descending several staircases below ground level we emerged into a large high-ceilinged room. The hissing of cooling gasses—liquid nitrogen and helium—punctuated the sombre electrical drone emitted by large banks of machinery which fed their convoluted piping into a vast toroidal centrepiece.
Scarsdale gestured towards this technological behemoth.
“Magnetic resonance imaging! This, my dear friend, is the most advanced functional MRI scanner in the world. The peak field is twenty Teslas—that’s stronger than the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland! If we were to proceed beyond this yellow line we would have to remove all metal objects as a matter of urgency, otherwise your watch would literally be ripped from your arm by the magnetic flux, indeed probably taking your unfortunate arm with it—hence our location deep in the basement. Standing where we are now, we are nearly five floors below ground level!”
Scarsdale called-up several traces on a large computer console which seemed to be the hub from which the whole device was controlled. He motioned me to sit beside him as he selected a recent brain-scan and zoomed in repeatedly. With each click of the keyboard, he was probing deeper and deeper; neural networks of infinite complexity were traced in rainbow colours before me and the rippling concentric waves of each thought pattern tracked to their source like a valley stream from its watershed.
“Thanks to the acute sensitivity of this instrument—the accumulation of forty years of research—we can now measure cerebral activity down to the neuronal level. It is well known to informed laymen such as yourself that different areas of the brain correspond to different processes, speech, memory and so forth. Would you be surprised if I told you that we can reconstruct visual and aural impressions in real time purely by transcription of the MRI activity patterns in the cortex? “
“What! Seeing into people’s minds? Reading their thoughts?”
“Hah! You would not believe the shallowness and banality of people’s thoughts—a jabbering internal monologue of utter triviality! One lump or two? Hair up or down? Eastenders or Coronation Street? That I will leave to the academic bean-counters in my department. I am not interested in reading people’s thoughts, rather in decoding their memories.
“Thanks to my new imaging tools I have now proved beyond doubt that the minute particulars of every visual and aural impression are permanently recorded deep within the temporal cortex and can be replayed endlessly if elicited in the correct manner. I have proved that memory-traces may be treated as an impersonal archive; indeed, neurologically-speaking we are simply living breathing videotapes, for no part of our lives has ever been truly lost to conscious retrieval. One’s personality is there merely as a prism through which external reality is diffracted, an aberration easily corrected-for.
“I see by you expression that you still disbelieve me? The crude results of my competitors have been in the public domain for many years, but they are dilettantes, tinkerers. They are content with abstruse papers to Nature on irrelevant minutiae. I solved the calibration problem within weeks; it was merely a matter of accessing the vast computing power of the University mainframe. You see, each point of activity in the visual field has a correlate in the brain, and these patterns are remarkably consistent between most human brains; the activity can be isolated, defined to a colour palette and then the image is reconstructed by a simple algorithm, similarly with sound. When a memory is evoked, it is replayed, not like a dream, but as a real experience in the patient’s mind which can then be viewed in real time on the monitor here.
“I began by taking my cue from a famous example in literature: Proust and his madeleine. In this instance, a suitable emotional stimulus was used to evoke a profound series of recollections. And so for my first series of experiments I invited my eldest son, who is a stout forty-year-old with a pronounced sentimental streak. I reclined him in the MRI unit, and then, when all the calibrations were perfectly adjusted, I handed him a favourite toy from his childhood. Slowly and ambiguously there emerged on the monitors in front of me a mist-enshrouded, i
mpressionistic scene of our front garden circa 1978. But this memory was composite, fallible, I could see there were large areas of fantasy, displacement and compression; the memory was being warped by his unconscious neuroses. My greatest discovery was that this Freudian, as it were, tinkering with our processes of recollection, could be completely suppressed by placing the subject in a profound hypnotic trance and intravenously administering a powerful dopamine antagonist—in effect turning-off the unconscious censor.
“Once I had refined the technique I read about your institute’s appeals for lost footage and so to demonstrate the power and specificity of my technique one of my colleagues was regressed—with reference to an old copy of the Radio Times—back to a certain Saturday afternoon in 1966, where as a small child he was hopelessly addicted to a certain BBC science fiction series. “
“Of course! That’s why there was no camera in the image—he was the camera!”
“Precisely! Imagine the implications for policing: no more unreliable recollections, no more miscarriages of justice, or mistaken identities. The suspect’s own brain could be interrogated as an incontrovertible source of evidence. Just imagine, billions upon billions of living breathing CCTV cameras seeing all, recording all.”
Scarsdale beamed broadly and arrogantly at me.
His overweening smugness suddenly struck me as deeply supercilious and offensive, and a vile hatred welled-up within me like the overflow of some rancid sewer. His presence disgusted me; to kill such a pompous and obnoxious man would surely not be accounted as murder. My hands wrapped swiftly around his throat and began to squeeze.
“And relax!”
He tapped me once on the forehead and I crumpled to the floor, where, after lying prostrate for a few insensible moments I recollected myself and struggled to my feet, spluttering a profuse apology.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 37