Memento Mori

by Gingell, W. R.

  “Wasn’t it?” Arabella smiled up at him. “Here we go, then, sir: slowly, but not too slowly.”

  Delivery Schedule #3

  Marx felt his insides liquefy. He put the capsule down very carefully and tried to convince himself to walk away from it. He had no quarrel with either the Holstrom Institute or the sender of the parcel. If he did anything about this particularly inconvenient parcel, he would almost certainly have a quarrel with the sender; someone who had no qualms about sending well-concealed bombs through unsuspecting (or perhaps not so unsuspecting) delivery services.

  He couldn’t do anything to help, after all. Not without dying. Even if he left now—even if he remembered the way back out perfectly, ran the whole way, and escaped without being troubled by security—he couldn’t get the bomb far enough out of the Institute and himself far enough away from the bomb in time to save both the Institute and himself. Half an hour. Just half an hour.

  Marx looked down at his delivery, hopelessly trying to decide which tubes might deactivate it if he removed them, while the green numbers counted down from thirty to twenty. This one—or maybe that one. He’d seen enough bombs on Fourth World to know that even the experts could get it horribly wrong.

  Fifteen, said the green numbers. He only needed fifteen minutes to get out and away. He could just leave it and walk away. Live to fight another day. He could leave now. Right now. He could go.

  But then the numbers said ten and he found that he still hadn’t gone.

  He could, thought Marx, prowling around the reinforced security room, do exactly what the designers of this room had planned for; shut himself in this safe, cylindrical space while the Institute blew up around it. Marx very carefully picked up the capsule bomb and brought it to the centre of the room. After all, he had seen this type of room before; it would remain whole, preserving its data, communications, and occupants, through most forms of warfare. He could sit in here safely and emerge sound and whole when the rubble cleared.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said to himself as he dragged one of the unconscious security guards through the door and into the hall outside. He went back for the second. “I should have run at the first sign of trouble. I should run now.”

  Run, or stay in the only safe space in the Institute. He could live if he stayed in the security room.

  Why, then, wondered Marx; why was he shutting the bomb in there instead? In the event of an explosion or natural disaster, this type of room was designed to sink through the floor in a controlled descent, creating a safe space below ground while the structure around it collapsed. There was absolutely no telling if the Institute would remain standing when the bomb blast set off that controlled descent. And yet, here he was, outside the room again. And he could see his own hands, work-hardened and slightly grease-stained, pressing his Multi Lock tool against the reinforced door.

  There was a very final sort of click, a small hiss, and then every light beside the door’s sensor went purple. Marx gave it a humourless grin and put the Multi Lock back in his pocket. Just as he’d thought, it had thrown the security protocols right past red and into purple. It would take more than security clearance to get it open again.

  “Right,” said Marx to his two unconscious companions. “We should probably run for it.”

  Patient #51: Codename, Trouble

  It didn’t take the boy very long to adjust his collar. He did it silently, as he did many things; and Kez, waiting for him, systematically broke off pieces of the grating without any particular reason in mind. The boy didn’t seem to notice the pieces of grating that fell on his head, so when he snicked the cover back onto the collar, Kez asked: “Can you catch?”

  Her question put the boy back into one of his silent fits, and she waited patiently for him to come out of it.

  At last, he said, “I don’t remember. Drop it and we’ll see. What is it?”

  “Got yer summink,” said Kez gruffly. She hadn’t meant to get it for him—she hadn’t got it for him—but now it was halfway through the hole she’d made in the grate, just as if she had meant to give it to him all along.

  The boy asked again, “What is it?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Kez gave the glass bauble one last poke and it tumbled away out of sight. She peered through the hole in the grating to observe the boy as he turned it over in one hand and held it curiously up to the light. She said, “Won’t do you much good to keep it if you stay in here, though; Marcus’ll find it. So you gotta get out.”

  The boy was silent for so long that Kez thought she might have offended him. She was about to say, more crossly than before, “Don’t matter none! I’ll just keep it!” when he asked, with an unexpected laugh in his voice, “Are you trying to train me?”

  Kez huffed. “Gonna talk all afternoon? Don’t you wanna get out?”

  “I want to get out,” the boy said, but he didn’t move. “What about you? If I can get out of this collar, I can get you out of the Institute, too.”

  “Yeah?” Kez blinked. “Orright. Let’s see you get out of it, then.”

  “I don’t know if I can get out of it, exactly.”

  “Thought you said—”

  “I mean, I don’t think I can take it off. I just took out the bit that regulates the proximity failsafe so it can’t activate when I get too close to the perimeter.”

  “’Urry up, then,” said Kez, who didn’t understand a good quarter of the words he had used. “Wouldn’t be surprised if Marcus was comin’ back for you. Oi. And make sure that screwdriver’s in yer pocket.”

  “I will,” the boy said, and she heard the smile in his voice. “I promised I’d give it back.”

  He seemed to fall into another of his silent fits after that, and Kez, who had uneasily begun to feel the passing of time, said, “Oi. Get a wriggle on.”

  “Yes,” said the boy, but he still didn’t move except to put the glass bauble in his other pocket. “But I think I hear footsteps. Do you think they’re for me?”

  “’Course they are. Better get back into the bed. Sound like a lot of people, or just one?”

  “Just one,” the boy said, pulling the covers up to his chin. Through the grate, Kez could see the blobby whiteness of his eyes in his blurred face, gazing up at her as if he could see her. “Just…slow. He’s not hurrying.”

  “Quick!” Kez said frantically. “Close your eyes! It’s Marcus! If he sees you looking up, he’ll know I’m ’ere!”

  To her relief, the twin white patches disappeared into the milk coffee oval that was the boy’s face. The door hissed open a moment later, and a very ordinary head of hair walked into the room.

  Kez knew Marcus as well by the top of his head as she did by his full face. Very, very quietly, she slid herself away from the grating, taking care not to make so much as a shadow across that grating. Then she retreated to a safe corner of the ceiling, leaving the boy to Marcus’ attention with the regretful sense that she wouldn’t see her screwdriver again.

  That was a pity. She had liked that screwdriver. Maybe—

  No. There were no maybes. Everything—the screwdriver, the room, the game, the boy without a name—everything belonged to Marcus now. It was safer, thought Kez, hunched in her corner of the ceiling, if she didn’t go near the boy again. It was safer if she stayed away from that room altogether. It was safer if she left the ceiling and went back to her own room. That was what she should do.

  Patient #76

  Someone sat down on the seat in the corner. The nameless boy heard the seat squeak and began to count again.

  When he had counted to one hundred, someone’s voice said: “I’m not so busy that I don’t have time to wait until you open your eyes. I should also mention that I’ve been monitoring you on and off since you woke earlier. You did quite well with the orderlies. I would have left you to your own devices but I’d really rather you didn’t escape.”

  The nameless boy sighed and opened his eyes.

  “Much better,” said the man who was s
itting in his chair. “Now we can speak comfortably. I was told you’d be intelligent, but I didn’t expect you to be quite so proactive.”

  The nameless boy looked at the man opposite him, and found that he couldn’t read the other’s face. It was a plump, inoffensive face with sharp, bright eyes and a nondescript head of brown hair. The rest of the man was as inoffensive and plump as his face, but there was something so particularly bland about it all that the nameless boy found himself wondering what was beneath the vanilla façade.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Marcus Solomon.”

  “What is this place, and why am I here?”

  “The more important question is, I think you’ll find, just who you are,” said Marcus Solomon pleasantly. “If you think about it, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  “Am I here because of who I am?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Then I would like answers to both of my questions.”

  “Don’t you want to know who you are?”

  “Yes,” said the nameless boy. “But I don’t know you. How do you know I can’t remember my name? Do you know who I am?”

  “I do. Your father is a very important man in the twelve worlds. Let’s forget your first name for now.”

  The nameless boy wondered if that was a joke. “All right,” he said.

  “The important thing is that you’re the only son of the Li family: the Li heir. We’ll call you Master Li for now. Anything else might muddy the waters, considering the situation.”

  “What situation?”

  “You’re a particularly clever young man,” said Marcus. “I’m not inclined to overpraise people, so when I say that I’d almost call you brilliant, I’m not patronising you.”

  The nameless boy, who was quite sure he would have been annoyed at being called a particularly clever young man by anyone else, nodded once. “I’m in here because I was too clever.”

  Marcus’ brows twitched up once, and the nameless boy was aware that he had startled the man. A moment later, the plump face returned to its easy affability.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Marcus said. “You’ve been working very hard on some concepts for your family. Over-working, lack of sleep, and too few meals led to a certain…unsteadiness.”

  The nameless boy silently considered that. He had already felt the weakness in his own mind; the threads that flew free at the edges of his thoughts when the world was moving too quickly, the scattering of reason when Kez’s voice disappeared, even the constant buzz of ideas and thoughts that danced briefly at the surface of his cloudy mind before sinking back beneath the fog.

  “What did I do?”

  “It’s not so much what you did; it’s what you thought.”

  “I can’t remember that, either. What did I think?”

  “You thought you were someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s not a wise direction to take,” Marcus said. “You’re still fragile and I’d rather not expose you to more confusion.”

  “What concepts was I working on?”

  “I’m really not sure.”

  “Was it biotech?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  The nameless boy tugged at a too-long piece of hair below his ear. “I can remember things about biotech. Quite a lot, I think. Why do I remember that when I don’t remember my name?”

  “That’s the crux of the issue,” Marcus said. “Your father has been worried that you’ve become too interested in one of his employees recently: an older man who lost his son a few weeks ago. When your father brought you here, you were convinced you were that man’s son.”

  Could he have worked hard enough to become confused about something like that? The nameless boy thought about it for a little longer, and it seemed to him that it was very possible he could have done so. Amongst the things he was learning about himself since he woke was the strange intensity of his concentration on one bright, brilliant thing while everything around it was muddy.

  He sighed, and tapped the collar around his neck. “This is biotech, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss that with you. We’re here to work on your memory loss.”

  The boy frowned. He would rather have talked about biotech; knowledge of it was floating, sharp-edged and interesting, behind all the fog that obscured his mind. With it were other sharp-edged thoughts that seemed equally important.

  “Yes, but I think it’s helping me to remember,” he said.

  “I’m quite sure it isn’t,” Marcus said. “It would be wise to bear in mind that it was too much concentration on your work that led to your collapse in the first place.”

  The nameless boy registered a small inconsistency and filed it away for consideration later. To Marcus, he said, “Are you a doctor?”

  “Amongst other things,” agreed Marcus. “Are you sparring for time, Master Li?”

  “A bit,” said the nameless boy. Kez was right; now that he knew who Marcus was, it was quite obvious. What interested him was the fact that there had been fear in Kez’s voice when she said Marcus’ name. While the nameless boy quite saw that Marcus was very intelligent, he didn’t think the man was dangerous. He was certain Marcus wasn’t telling him everything, but that was no reason to fear the man. Kez, the nameless boy considered thoughtfully, was the sort of person to make trouble; and Marcus was not the sort to put up with it. He wondered if the fear was mutual, but since getting that information from Marcus would have meant apprising Marcus of his acquaintance with Kez, the nameless boy left that question for later. It wasn’t fair to give away Kez when she had only tried to help him.

  “You’ve been helping me to remember?”

  “Yes,” said Marcus.

  “For several weeks?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Why don’t I remember you?”

  “That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for the past two weeks. We’ve reached some form of resolution every time we have a session, but after each session your delusion comes back as strongly as before. When it reaches its peak, you lose consciousness and wake without any memory again.”

  “My brain is trying to reboot itself,” said the nameless boy. That was nonsense, but it was something people often believed when he said it. They didn’t know any better. The nameless boy allowed himself a small moment of warmth when it occurred to him that he had remembered something he often said. He was right, then. Thinking about biotech was helping his memories. It must have been a big part of his life.

  “So we assumed,” said Marcus. He said something else, too, but the nameless boy was no longer listening.

  His brain rebooting itself may very well be nonsense, but it seemed likely that someone had been rebooting it for him. Why was that? The who was more obvious—this Li person, or Marcus Solomon—but why? The nameless boy nodded to himself. That was why his mind had remarked the inconsistency earlier; the small inconsistency of Marcus’ claim not to know what his research was, against his tacit admission of knowledge a few minutes later.

  “Ah,” said the nameless boy, looking up at Marcus with bright eyes. He had found a thought glittering through the fog, and he wasn’t the nameless boy any longer. “Oh, now I understand. This is all about the biotech, isn’t it?”

  Marcus sighed. “Oh, partly, I suppose.”

  The nameless boy looked at Marcus again, and like he had with the clever little glass bauble, found that he was looking at something entirely different from what he’d first thought. He said: “I have a name, and it’s not Master Li.”

  “It’s interesting,” Marcus said. It sounded like he said it at random, but the nameless boy, who knew it had a purpose, waited for him to go on. At length, Marcus added, “Getting rid of your memories leaves you with an open mind each time, but it’s always only a few days before you begin remembering again. Once we discovered that we even tried uploading the memories directly into your mind. It worked, but only for a few hours. You kno
w why, I imagine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good. I was hesitant to use your own research on you—you are rather valuable, after all—but I don’t mind taking a chance when I know the odds are skewed in my favour.”

  Coldness spread from the nameless boy’s hands until he felt chilled all over. “How long have I really been here?”

  “Roughly three months in and out. We sent you back twice, thinking you were ready to go, but your mind kept turning each time. You’ve given us quite a bit of trouble, Master Li.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “I think you’ll find it is. Perhaps not now, but in less than fifteen minutes, it will be. Your research is very thorough and your methods work very quickly. I have to say, it will be something of a relief to close this file: you’ve been an exhausting guest. You escaped three times before we could fit the collar, and after that you kept remembering too quickly to get the work done in one fell swoop.”

  “Why is it so important for me to be Master Li?”

  “A range of reasons, none of which are any of your business.”

  “What makes you think I won’t remember again next time?” asked the nameless boy, but he knew why. It was the same reason he was still the nameless boy, despite remembering that name.

  “Your research showed us where we’d been going wrong, but I was hoping to avoid such a…nuclear method. It’s a pity,” Marcus added. “I’ll have to reprogram you again, risk and all. I did hope I’d solved the problem by myself. Your father will have to wait another half hour for you, I think.”

  “He’s not my father,” said the nameless boy; and now he understood the fear in Kez’s voice. Marcus sounded mildly irritated, but that was the only sign of emotion he gave. To Marcus, the nameless boy was just a more sophisticated form of biotech: there to be tinkered with, adjusted, and perfected without being concerned about such things as humanity or souls.

  The nameless boy wasn’t sure when it had begun, but he was shivering. He felt the fizz of biotech connecting from the collar around his neck, and then there was only blankness.