Memory Maintenance

I cannot believe I am using my lunch break to write. All I do is write.

People with more money do not come here. They do not need to use these second-rate Memo Booths, taking home their recordings to squirrel away in some drawer, to pick over when they feel lost. I imagine them curling up to their own stories at night. I wonder if they are shocked by themselves. I wonder if they are bored.

My services are for the desperate.

I took this job to be Extended. Some jobs are like that. You can’t really be expected to hold down a job like this without a memory extension. Extended jobs are coveted and there so many bright young candidates competing for the antidote. I took what I could get.

I smell chicken cooking from the cart down the alley. I can envision the chunks of meat on sticks, cheap like this place, easy and sickening. How many Short Terms have bought and rebought that meat, clutching their bellies at night as it explodes out of them. It’s almost funny but I won’t let it be funny. Empathy is important. It keeps you from being a monster.

I imagine my clients’ memories as volumes in a massive vault. Rows upon rows, leather-bound, aging, shelved by people like me, evaluated by people who control me. I am too much of a thinker for this job. There is no place for philosophy here. I am not paid to perceive. I am paid to record.

My first client this morning was an old lady with a tightly clutched bag. She remembers before Memory Maintenance. She told me it’s like everyone has Alzheimer’s now. Her smile was bitter when she said it. It’s on my list of things to look up later.

My notebook is illegal. As an Extended, my short term is intact; there should be no reason for me to jot down a thing. This is my research book; I fill it with bits of antiquity. Alzheimer’s... I made her spell it twice.

She has a new great grandchild. She wants to remember that she looks just like her dead sister, that she likes applesauce. When we are done, she cradles the sheets of paper like they are the girl herself. I suppose so. The little things keep us alive.

I’ve met one Director; my hiring manger. I passed enough tests and smiled through enough screenings to get the interview. The tests were easy. My typing was perfected during my years at The Voc. The personality tests were almost fun. They think they are clever, trapping you into contradiction while they weed out the potential troublemakers. I think I am too smart for them. It will kill me someday.

The Director pointed to a seat across her glass desk. If it was shoved just right the desk could bisect a person. I wondered if that was a feature. The Director was thin, white, and carnivorous looking. Her questions were sometimes direct, other times leading. My answers were met with long pauses, giving me the opportunity for blundering confessions. She made the appropriate gestures, sighed with understanding when it was called for, nodded, grinned. Behind her glasses, her eyes were racing, crawling over my face, dissecting me, trying to detect cracks and fissures. She missed them all.

Hackers are the elite of The Program, the wheel on which Memory Maintenance spins. When Dealers are found, the Hackers process the memories of the Dealer and their clients. The Dealers are shot on live TV and they say clients are lobotomized. That could just be propaganda, meant to scare off potential clients. Since it would be cheaper to kill them, killing them is probably what they do.

All Memo Booths are assigned at least one Hacker. Arrogant, hair overdone, ours swaggers when he walks. To him, I am dirt. A low-level Text Recorder, dealing with paper and Short Terms, uploading unimportant memories from unimportant people, germy by association. I want to ask him what that says about him, this low-rent assignment. I want to bite his face.

The Hacker came in because of a Breaker. Breakers are enemies of The Program. Sometimes they are ex-Hackers, ex-Directors, runners from The Program. Somehow, they have escaped and find a shop like mine, looking for a way back in or a final way out. The Program hunts them with vengeance. Breakers have few places to hide. They live the lives of scrambling mice.

The rarest type of Breaker is an Immune. To many, an Immune is a myth. Newborn babies are tested and Immunes are weeded out. Immunes are put in special schools, trained to be Hackers or Directors, brainwashed and merciless. If they fail to impress or if they rebel they are killed.

Very rarely, an Immune sneaks past the doctors. If they are born to good law-abiding stooges of The Program, they are turned in, rejected by their parents. Most misses are turned in to The Program. Other parents try to raise the child themselves, teaching them at a young age how to feign confusion, to not tell stories. This is a dangerous life, often a short life. The Program excels at rooting out its enemies.

When the red-dress lady first came in, I didn’t think anything of her. Young, pretty, and married, her shirt was neat, and her shoes were clean. She was there to record for her son. She started with small memories from the day, little things like most recordings. As she continued, she got comfortable, and she dropped her filter. Just once. It was enough.

“This morning he asked me how can pigs even build houses”. I tried not to react when I heard it. He asked a question, which is bad enough, but it was related to a story she told him the week before, which was worse. Some memories do stay; people would not be able to function otherwise. But such a small memory retained for over a week? Never. She had to be Flagged.

I struggle with Flagging. Any time I hear something that indicates a break with The Program, a hint at the Underground or any form of rebellion, I am supposed to apply a flag. The file is immediately accessed by a Director, while I am typing it. When the client is done, instead of being escorted to the printer with their numbered ticket, they are brought to a holding room. They usually don’t know what’s coming.

If I fail to flag, I will be caught and fired. Memory Maintenance will dose me with something like what they give the dreaming fetuses. I will become one of them, a Short Term. Worse, I will have memory holes where my job was. I will forget my notebook. They will find it and they will find him, my Immune. Hopefully they will kill us quickly.

Once I type the flaggable phrase, I have no choice but to keep it. Even my backspaces are recorded. Transcripts of every keystroke are available for review. The Hackers’ programs sift through the transcripts, paying most attention to final copies, but also comparing drafts to finals. If a Recorder’s draft indicates a retracted flaggable phrase, the Recorder is questioned. Their answers better be good.

Unfortunately for the poor mother, my mind barely registered, “this morning he asked me how can pigs even build houses” as I was typing it. My training kicked in and I knew she was done. I flagged her. As I watched her enter the holding room, number in hand, I hoped that she was a good liar.

My Extended status allows me access to history and that has been my only solace until him. I realize now that I’ve been numb my whole life. I feel as if I will explode. He has opened my eyes. He said he can protect me but I know his help is finite. He has lit me on fire and I am playing with it.

The woman with the son was not a good liar. The whispers claim her son was an Immune and she was trying to protect him. Our Hacker specializes in Immune detection. He picked her brain before turning her family over to the Doctors. Hackers and Doctors don’t like exceptions and this woman birthed one. They were now the property of Memory Maintenance. I wished them short lives.

A successful flag is the reason they employ us at all. Humans still beat machines in the detection of tones and context. Recorders act as filters and we are eager to earn our Extended status. I got a commendation for my flagging. I flagged only .24 seconds after the phrase was typed. I earned a lunch coupon.

He came in 81 days ago and he has been here every Monday since. I could picture him just as easily chopping wood as adding foamed milk to my coffee. The client before him was a man who had been coming in steady for over a month. He was recording sweet daily scraps of memory for as a gift for his wife. In my loneliness, I was especially vulnerable to a handsome stranger.

The first transcript was benign, no flags. He was funny. His eyes twinkled. When he was done and I was printing his number, he leaned in and asked me if I liked my job. Friendships with clients are not permitted, we are trained to resist personal connections. We do not socialize with clients. Recorders and clients don’t mix.

He must have known. A small violation, but a violation, nonetheless. A tiny thing but a huge thing, like a puddle of water in the desert to the dying. I let the silence spin out until I handed him his numbered ticket and said, “Not usually.”

My adrenaline rose. What if he worked for The Program’s Quality Control Department? I had cat at home that would starve, a mother that barely made a living. I had compromised it all with two words. I spent the day on edge, watching other Recorders, waiting for the hammer to fall. It never did.

A week later he was back. He talked about a sister, stuttering over half memories. Nothing flaggable. He seemed sufficiently confused. But there was something about his stumbles that felt too convenient. I worried I was turning him into more than he was; a pitiful way to add excitement to my life, a gateway to Termination.

I did not flag him. We are trained to flag first, ask questions later. They track our accuracy, and a skittish Recorder is a useless Recorder. Dangerously, I was curious. He interested me.

This time, when I reached for his transcript number, he asked, “What is your name?” “Helena.”, I replied.

We were now bonded. I knew he wasn’t Quality Control. He knew I wasn’t a robot of The Program. At the end of his third visit, he simply said “The Cavern at 9”. Even here, in my secret notebook, I will say no more.

Extendeds are required to attend a yearly Cleanse. Accumulated memories are examined for contamination. Nothing is sacred. I’ve heard of Cleansers extracting memories and selling them on the black market, from sexual encounters to bouts of diarrhea. The black market also sells a pre-treatment. I clutch it in my hand now.

My Cleanse is on Monday. Tomorrow, I will extract him from my memory. It pains me but I must, for both of us. I will hide my notebook away like I did before the last cleanse, hopefully stumbling upon it without losing too much time. I have been doing this for a decade.

I have never had so much to wipe before and it is careful work. Will I turn myself in or throw myself off a building? Will The Underground rescue me and pull out my chips, leaving only scars?

Will he ever come back? Will I?