Selected Short Stories Featuring Analog Memory

by Nicolas Wilson

accepting Jesus as a savior, well, I never met the guy, but plenty enough of his followers have been douchebags for me to question his perfection.

  The celestial and terrestrial kingdoms are very egalitarian- the glory granted to one is granted to everybody. The thing about the telestial kingdom is you’re only accorded glory based on your works- it’s the only Heaven where individuality’s still a factor. As I understand it, there will be a few scumbags who get in, too, but hey, only a few scumbags is still nicer than any neighborhood I’ve ever lived in.

  Still, there’s a catch; when isn’t there? The telestials don’t get in right away. You spend your first thousand years in purgatory- and I don’t mean the Utah correctional facility. As I understand it, purgatory’s all about torture, and I don’t mean of the vanilla Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo Bay variety, either.

  On balance, I think I’ve lived fairly well. And if the cost of being me is a thousand years of mutilation, humiliation and horror before I get to go back to being me- well, it’s better than having to be somebody else.

  Unlucky at Math

  I’m sorry. I was wrong. You’ll know, no doubt, how rarely I say that. I’m rarely wrong, and it’s even rarer I’ll acknowledge it.

  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking today. How we met in game theory, and you pretended to have trouble with it so I’d tutor you. And I remember our first fight, over a homework problem from our vector calculus class, that dissolved into several minutes of laughter when you discovered I was on the wrong page. And I was the one who found that error in your doctoral thesis on the orientability of Möbius strips. Just this morning you screamed (and I screamed) until I agreed to recheck my DARPA submission (all right, I agreed after you’d stormed out, and I was left in the quiet without you, and I realized how difficult that kind of silence would be if it lasted).

  But I don’t want you to think that ours is a pairing based solely on intellectual compatibility; and I’ve always rushed to dismiss those who state a preference for similar literature, composers or cuisine decides a match, but we share the same desires in life. We like the quiet solitude of our apartment in the evening, and the walk for a bagel and coffee in the morning.

  I don’t normally like dogs, but I like your dog. I like the way the bed smells when you get up to shower, and I know that you like that I drive us to work. I like how you wear my shirts after I’ve worn them, and pretend not to smell them when I catch you.

  Don’t let my foolish attempt at a graph theory explanation of the dynamics of networks (and my even more foolish defense of it) stand between us. Inexplicable (and mathematically unexplainable) as it may seem, the combination of us is greater than the sum of our parts- we know it even if we can’t construct a proof.

  Randomly Accessed Memory

  My doctor has no idea how I survived, frankly. He gave all manner of pronouncements, mostly having to do with a loss of this function or that, all pulled clearly more from his rectum than a medical text. He told me my memory was probably shot, and that I’d never stand (let alone walk). I informed him that I’d walked into his office. He told me that was probably temporary, to which I replied that he seemed to be temporarily a moron. Despite his accusation, he seemed to forget the insult before I did, and continued on to tell me that I’d be excreting into a bag, and I’d never get another erection. I suspect these last two were his idea of revenge, because, at least til this moment, neither’s been an issue.

  I’ll start at the beginning (or at least I think I’m at the start- I tend to get things out of order, anymore). I got hit in the head. Actually, that’s not quite descriptive enough- I got hit in the brain. You know those wobbly goddamned traffic lights that lean across four lanes of traffic, and on windy days look like there ought to be a man in flannel standing at the bottom holding an ax and yelling “timbeeeer” at the top of his bearded throat? Well, one of those fell on me. Broke open my skull like old eggshell, and gave me the equivalent of a Muhammad Ali uppercut in the grey matter. The only thing that saved my life was my car roof taking at least some of the heat off it before it landed.

  I walked home. I figured it would be best to get my car some other time (whenever I was able to remember where I’d put it). When I got home, Jennifer was asleep on the couch, with reruns of F-Troop playing without the sound, wearing one of my dress shirts and nothing else. I was about to kiss her awake when a moist man in a towel emerged from the bathroom, and made a noise not unlike a dog barking. Jennifer leapt to her feet. She said I didn’t live there anymore, that I hadn’t for a long time, and I realized she might have been telling the truth. She told me she was wearing my shirt, but that it didn’t mean what was underneath it belonged to me, anymore. I left quietly after that, and stood on her porch after she turned out the light. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

  Jenny and my problems didn’t start when I spent a good six months with my brain looking out at the world through a plastic window- because we’d been having problems since we moved in together. If anything, she tried to be kind to me, to at least be gentle, if she couldn’t ever manage understanding. I never had the best memory in the world even before my accident, which had always been a contentious issue, but now I was completely unreliable. I’d pay the month’s rent three weeks in a row, then forget it for four months. Once she asked me to look after her rabbit, and when she got back he looked like those starving Africans in the infomercials (though for some reason I’d been diligently cleaning his cage every 12 hours). But I took some comfort knowing that we cared for each other, even if it would probably never to work out.

  Things only seemed to be getting worse, so I went to the doctor. He asked pertinent questions, and quickly deduced that my mind’s filing system had gone off the tracks. It was dysmemoriae, he called it, although he may have been making the word up- my brain wasn’t organizing memories according to a timeline, anymore, just shoving events in whatever order it could. I could tell he was eager about his theory, because he started talking to me excitedly about my hard drive being fragmented, and how I’d need therapy to defragment it- and I stopped him, because he was beginning to hurt my head. He told me to turn around, since I still had the plastic bubble on it, and he’d see if he could see anything wrong. I didn’t smile, although it was probably kind of funny.

  Analog Memory

  I used to be a very bad person. I worked for the CIA, and that’s all I recall anymore. I did terrible things. I was good at doing terrible things. I don’t remember if I was injured, or if I finally did something so terrible I had to be punished, but the memory centers of my brain were removed, and replaced with tape drives the techs called streamers.

  I had difficulty with the tape drives because I was often recording data at a lower speed than the drive’s minimum threshold, so the tape would have to stop, rewind, and restart quickly- the techs called it shoe-shining- it created a lot of potholes in my mind’s road. But the bigger issue with the tapes is they don’t allow random access to memory. If you want to remember your sister’s name, you can’t just skip to the part where that information’s stored, you have to watch through the tape of last Christmas until you get to the part where her husband said it aloud- it’s called sequential access. It’s made my life a comic book I flip through, desperately trying to figure out who I am. The pieces I put together, mostly from records and not from the shattered remnants of my brain, tell me that might be a mercy.

  Over the years, styles and capacity changed, and usually the upgrades meant better storage, higher resolutions, quieter operations. I went through several tape drives before the Deputy CI sat me down. His face was grim, and his office was dark, but even in the silence I knew there were a pair of agents behind him. He told me maintenance on the tape drives was getting prohibitively expensive, that components and tapes were becoming a real fiscal issue.

  I asked if we could transition to a different storage media. Floppies (5 1/4 or 3.5) would never store enough data; I’d be popping disks in and out all day long without time betwe
en even to take a leak. A DVD burner would have been ideal, only the heat of the laser would apparently have cooked the rest of my brain… so I’d remember everything, but be a vegetable. I asked if we could use a hard disk drive, and he sighed. As the techs had explained it to him, a hard disk would be a fine idea, only they die periodically. Every five years I’d lose everything, and go back to being a simpleton and needing retraining to do even the most mundane of tasks. If I was in the field when it happened, I’d be dead. And without a hard back-up medium, crucial mission data could be lost- and that’s just not something they could risk.

  Because of its ubiquity, and, I later discovered, its relatively low cost, they installed a VHS recorder in my forehead. Because of the larger cassettes, we tried recycling the tapes annually, but after five years, I started slurring my words. A pair of archivists from the Library of Congress assisted in cleaning up the cassettes, but explained that with any future rerecording, we would continue to experience a loss of data. So we stopped reusing tapes. The budget only covered replacements every two years; I made up the rest out of pocket. I figured