The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora)

by Angie Smibert

  The universe muttered its somber agreement.

  I left Winter snoozing in the sun. Aunt Spring was in the kitchen chopping vegetables.

  “Poor dear. Everything seems to take a lot out of her these days.” She sounded like she was talking about her grandmother, not her fourteen-year-old daughter.

  “Is it the meds?”

  Aunt Spring chopped up a carrot before answering. “The delusions came back.” She opened another bag of carrots and started chopping again. “You’re welcome to stay for dinner,” she said, looking at a mound of orange cubes in front of her.

  “No, thanks, Aunt Spring. Dad expects me home.” I turned to go, but then had a thought. More of an ill-formed plan. “Mind if I use the facilities first?”

  “Of course not.” She motioned down the hall with her knife.

  I passed the guest bath and made for Winter’s. Inside I found a new prescription bottle. I scanned the label with my mobile and slipped one pill into my pocket. I’m not sure why, but one of those whispers from the universe told me to seize the opportunity now.

  Aunt Spring was still chopping carrots when I let myself out the front door.

  11:35 PM. SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY OF HAMILTON…

  Good evening, citizens. Today our fair city hosted a little get-together, a summit of Patriot Party leaders and hopefuls. You probably saw that on the news. Candidates big and small, all promising to make this country secure right after you vote them into office.

  What you didn’t see was a secret enclave of mayors from across the country meeting at TFC headquarters. My sources say they were strategizing—with TFC and Green Zone’s help—about how to implement Hamilton’s mandatory ID program in their own towns.

  Imagine that. Chips for everyone.

  This next song is “Something’s Happening Here” by the Fortunate Sons.

  25.0

  ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MEMORY (CHIP)

  WINTER

  I woke up as the sun was setting, the heat still heavy on my brain. I’d dreamed I’d been drowning and Aiden tried to reach me, but the water had wrapped me in its arms, pulling me down into blissful nothingness. There was something I’d wanted to tell him…

  Mom slid open the patio door. “Dinner, Winnie-chan.”

  I used to hate that name, but now I didn’t have the energy to protest. I could smell meat and vegetables—sukayaki, or at least Mom’s attempt at it, simmering on the stove.

  I tried to get up, but at first my feet wouldn’t listen. When I did get them in motion, the tremor came back in my hand.

  The tremor was like the flapping of tiny bird wings as they fought to free themselves from a cage.

  I didn’t care.

  26.0

  WAY TOO MANY VARIABLES

  AIDEN

  I was on information overload, and the universe was no freaking help.

  Dad didn’t make it home for dinner. Again. Cook offered to fix me whatever I wanted, but I ordered a pizza and holed up in my room. I had to start with Winter and this latest development. I checked out the doctor and the prescription info I’d scanned off Winter’s meds.

  The doctor—Dr. Hannah Ebbinghaus—was a company doctor. No big surprise. Nomura had a huge medical complex for its employees. It wasn’t free, of course, even though the company frowned upon you going elsewhere. But the center was supposed to be good.

  I did a little searching on her name. Her specialty was cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Was schizophrenia considered a cognitive disorder? I had no idea. Bio wasn’t my subject. (Those systems had way too many variables.)

  The good doctor’s work seemed legitimate. Filled with altruosity even. She’d developed a memory implant to help Alzheimer’s patients remember.

  The drug Dr. Ebbinghaus had prescribed for Winter was an antipsychotic typically given to schizophrenics. They had too much of a neurotransmitter called dopamine in their brains. The pills blocked dopamine reception. Blah, blah, blah. Possible side effects included drowsiness and tremors, but only if the dose was too high.

  It all sounded legit. The thought made me profoundly sad, though. Maybe this meant I’d never see my Winter again. Stepford Winter would replace her and live happily ever after.

  The universe muttered something in the back of my brain. Sometimes you don’t want to know for sure what the universe is trying to tell you.

  I ate my pizza. I showered. I watched Behind the Gates, of all things. I could kind of see why that congressman fell for its star, Mercedes Rios.

  Then the ’casts algorithm foisted this news segment on me about Nomura’s stock plummeting. TFC let it slip that it had been negotiating with a Nomura rival, Mikota, to build mobiles compatible with TFC’s application. Rumor has it, the business pundit commented, that Nomura may be unable to deliver on Chipster deployment here and abroad.

  No wonder Dad is stressed. Good-bye billions.

  I couldn’t help being a tiny bit happy about that.

  The mayor, standing in front of a TFC, then reiterated how important both Nomura and TFC were to the success of Hamilton’s ID program and that he was sure they’d work out everything in time. The glint in his eyes said or else.

  I turned down the volume, but left the commercial ’casts running, just in case the MemeCast broke in.

  It didn’t.

  27.0

  THE TWINKIE FACTORY

  VELVET

  The boys were skating at the old Twinkie factory on Salem Avenue. It was their go-to spot when they were bored. The place had been closed down for years, and no one had bought the joint for condos. The rumor was that the pipes were filled with Twinkie goo that had hardened—and were supporting the building structurally.

  I pulled up a dusty crate and parked my jeans-clad butt to “watch.” But, really, I was scribbling out some lyrics.

  “Hey, where have you been?” Spike kicked his board in my direction, then plopped down on it beside me.

  “Working. Stuff,” I said, not looking up at him. I wasn’t sure how to play this. Should I be honest? Should I just give it time? Aiden might disappear back to his preppy school this fall and I might never hear from him again. Was that fair to Spike? There were more important things going on.

  “You okay? You don’t seem your usual feisty self.” He brushed away a hair from my forehead. “Missing Winter and Micah?” he guessed. “Me, too.”

  I shrugged. “Can I show you something?” I handed him my notebook, face open to a new song, “Chip in my Head.” I thought it might be the best way to break it to them about the chip.

  He took it gingerly and started reading. He glanced back at me a few times while he read.

  “This is killer, Velvet,” he finally said, full of seriousness. Spike always took music (and art) seriously. “I had no idea.” He leafed through a few more pages of poems and songs—lyrics only. I don’t know how to read music. “Velvet Kowalcyk, you have unsuspected depths. Guys—”

  “Wait—” I tried to stop him but he had already skated halfway across the warehouse floor—with my lyric book in hand.

  Do not run. Book of Velvet.

  By the time I strolled over, they were already working out the melody to the first song—well, playing air guitar to the first few stanzas.

  “This stuff is Great, but we can’t play it on the Bar Mitzvah/Quinceañera circuit,” Richie said. “Too political. And dark.” He was the money guy of the group.

  “I want to play somewhere cool,” Spike said. “I want to play something that matters.”

  “I just wanna get laid,” Little Steven added, a bit forlornly.

  “That better not be happening at the Bar Mitzvahs,” Richie said.

  Even I laughed at that. God, they were dim, but they were funny.

  Spike looked at me. “What do you want, Velvet?”

  “I want to do something.” I pulled out Dune’s wand from my backpack. “Steven, I saw your brother the other day.”

  Little Steven stopped laughin
g. I ran the wand behind his left ear. Chime.

  Ditto with Spike and Richie.

  “What the hell, Velvet?” Spike demanded.

  So I told them. About the cop scanning me, about the ID chips implanted in our skulls, about the Mementos, about Winter and Micah, about Big Steven. About everything except for Aiden.

  The testosterone flowed, and there was a lot of cursing and throwing of crates and skateboards.

  When they’d calmed down, I said, “What if we played here in the factory? We could get the word out about what’s going on.” I tapped my head.

  “You’ve been listening to the MemeCast too much.” Richie groaned.

  “Nah, it’s perfect,” Spike said as he drank in the space. “It’ll be like our own underground rave.”

  I knew there was a reason I liked Spike.

  “We’d better get busy then,” I told him. It was only one week until D-day.

  28.0

  BETTER TO GIVE THAN TO DELETE

  AIDEN

  Another day, another zero dollars in cubicleland.

  I stared at the function protocols for the model coming out in the fall.

  No good.

  I couldn’t concentrate. The universe was muttering. I didn’t want to think about Stepford Winter. The thought of her never being the same made me feel very unglossy. She was the only person that really knew me.

  The terminal called my name. But where to start, I pondered as I held the testing headset in my hand.

  The chip. I’d start with that. All my favorite people (both of them) seemed to have one. (And it kept coming up in the MemeCasts.)

  I cracked my knuckles and applied my more-than-willing fingers to the keyboard. After poking around a little, I found a back door into the project files that Roger or one of the other programmers had left.

  Skid, huh?

  Code jockeys, especially those with egos, always leave themselves a simple way to get back into a program or files, one they think only they will ever find. You just have to look for hints and pull on every door until one opens.

  All the new mobiles—the Chipster, the Soma, etc.—were designed to work with this chip, the nGram, which could send and store data. The phone used frequencies—ones that decades ago were used for other purposes, like radio—to relay info to and from this chip. That’s why the mobiles could pick up the MemeCast. But what use did that have? Sure, you could listen to tunes without earbuds and cheat on exams, but somehow that didn’t seem like a wise investment of so much research and capital. If that was all the chip did.

  Of course, there was the TFC app. Forget your cares right from your home. Did the app erase memories? That would be huge—and Not A Good Thing. At a TFC, you had to take a little white pill to forget. Could the company have truly figured out how to erase memories without the pill?

  The universe started muttering again.

  I opened another door. And there it was. Or, I should say, there she was. Dr. Hannah Ebbinghaus. Winter’s doctor. While at the University of Hamilton, she developed the prototype of the nGram, which was originally designed to supply memories to Alzheimer’s patients. I pulled up her research again. I didn’t get the biology or the math, but the chip could be preprogrammed with information a senile patient might forget: his name, address, spouse, children, etc. The first version of the chip reinforced this information verbally over time. Patients retained more information than did the control group, who didn’t have the chip.

  It was the old Forgetting Curve thing; we’d learned about it in study skills class. (Bern Academy did not like you to flunk. Anything.) Memories fade over time—unless you periodically reinforce them. Translation: study every night. Right.

  Version 2.0 of the nGram was supposed to reinforce memories chemically, through neurotransmitters. Nothing about whether this version was ever produced. But that’s about the time Dr. Ebbinghaus joined Nomura.

  Why would the company want a chip that reinforced memories? Language instruction? Learn German instantly? Memorize Shakespeare overnight?

  Or could the TFC app add new memories as well as delete them? Maybe even things that never actually happened …? Shudder. That would be A Very Bad Thing.

  Someone coughed behind me. Roger.

  I made no attempt to cover up the screen. Act innocent. Act like you have every right to be doing whatever they caught you doing.

  Roger peered over my shoulder. “What the hell are you up to?”

  “Just researching the products.” When caught red-handed, tell the truth. Part of it at least. “It’s about time I took an interest in the company.”

  To say Roger looked suspicious would be an under-statement.

  I spun around slowly and looked him in the eye. “I will be running it someday.” It was dirty, and I hated doing it.

  “You’ve had everything handed to you.” He leaned in. “You’ve never had to hack, crack, or scam—let alone break a sweat—a single day of your privileged life to feed yourself or your family. You aren’t even a skid. You’re a suit-in-training.” He practically hissed the words.

  I knew I’d asked for it, but it felt like he’d sucker-punched me. I’d never been flamed to my face before.

  The universe wisely said nothing.

  29.0

  IT LIES

  VELVET

  I avoided the whole garage rehearsal scene as the boys worked out the music. I had some organizing to do.

  The guys and gals at the Rocket Garden agreed to print up some flyers on their homemade press—which Dune said came from Winter’s specs. I found out that his name is really An Dung Nyugen. I’d go by Dune, too.

  “My brother’s given name is even worse in English.” Dune laughed. “He changed it to an Anglo one as soon as he could.”

  I was busy writing out the flyer in marker. I collaged together some generic band photos from an old magazine. The headline said MemeFest, and underneath it I printed “Free country, free concert” and June 30. I hesitated to put more.

  It would be a bad idea to advertise the place and time of an after-curfew, Memento-inspired concert that was happening hours before it became a crime not to have an ID chip.

  But how would people know where it was? It was my first organizational snag.

  Dune was rambling on about his brother’s job and general geniusness. Their folks had run off to Saigon or Malaysia or someplace. I excused myself and went looking for Steven.

  I found him and the short-haired woman inside the dome packing up boxes of radios. This time the chick was wearing a tank top and jeans, and I could see her tiger tattoo. Of course. Rebecca Starr. She’d been the Channel 5 reporter who’d gotten fired for making shit up. Libel and incompetence. How did I know that? It was like someone had whispered it to me.

  “Don’t believe the chip,” Dune said from behind me. “It lies.”

  I spun around. “What?” I didn’t need his scrawny ass in my head, too.

  “That’s what my brother says.” Dune shrugged. “He used to help out here a lot.”

  Something wasn’t quite right in brotherland.

  “Roger is one of our graduates,” Steven explained. “He works at Nomura.” Steven tapped behind his ear.

  Nomura made the ID chip.

  “Do you mean—” I looked from Dune to Steven. Dune looked glum.

  “Dune’s worked out a security system for your concert,” Steven said, changing the subject.

  Dune brightened and launched into an explanation of his solar battery-charged lighting/alarm system.

  “Whoa.” I stopped him. “Too much information. You can run the system at the gig. And work the door.”

  “You bet,” he said, and ran off muttering about finishing it in time.

  Steven laughed. I could see he was trying to divert Dune’s attention away from whatever was wrong between him and his brother. It was almost like Steven was trying to be Dune’s big brother, or maybe trying to replace his own with Dune. Not cool.

  “Little Steven could use some
of that brothering,” I told him.

  Steven stiffened. “I know,” he said finally. “But it hasn’t been safe. Dad kicked me out when I went off-grid.”

  Damn. I was sorry I said it. It was a low blow, though I hadn’t intended it to be. Little Steven missed his brother, and the whole situation just sucked. The silence was painfully awkward.

  Rebecca helped us out. “You’re a friend of Winter’s, right? And the artist?” she asked. She lifted one of the sheets they’d been crumpling up as packing materials. It was a Memento.

  I nodded. Rebecca Starr, I now remembered, was also the reporter who’d been in the video Aiden showed me, the one where Nora James gets arrested. Duh. That’s why she got canned.

  “Well, you should be careful with that,” she said, indicating the flyer I still had in my hand. “Don’t put the location on it.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing. But then how do I get the word out?”

  “I can take care of that,” Rebecca said. “I’ll announce the time and place on the air.”

  Shit. She was the Meme Girl. She’d lost her job reporting on Memento, so she went off-grid to keep on reporting.

  That took balls.

  And a bakery truck. Becca—she said to call her Becca—asked Dune to take a look at something on her truck. I tagged along out of curiosity. The truck, which she’d parked as usual, outside the Rocket Garden gate, was a typical delivery van.

  Inside, she pulled out a rack of muffins, and Dune ducked in front of her. He tinkered with something for a minute and declared it fixed. Then he helped himself to a blueberry muffin. Becca handed me one, too.

  I wolfed it down and looked longingly at the rest. As usual, the cupboard was pretty bare at home. I wiped crumbs off my Rage Against the Machine T-shirt.