The Forgetting Machine

by Pete Hautman

“Try this.” Billy rattled off a list of numbers. I punched them into the keypad. A green light came on. I tried the door again. This time it opened.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “It’s his birthday. Amazing how often that works. And that people put their birthdays on Facebook.”

  I stepped inside the building. The lights flickered on automatically.

  “Hello,” said a voice.

  My heart stopped. I looked around to see who had spoken, but there was no one there.

  “Hello?” I squeaked. One wall of the room was lined with cages. A long workbench covered with cables, printed-circuit boards, tools, and various unidentifiable devices ran along the opposite wall. There were two computer displays and a complicated-looking chair. Mounted above the chair’s back was a thing that looked like a bicycle helmet with a bunch of wires coming out of it. Equally scary were the heavy Velcro straps attached to the arms. It looked like an electric chair, or some sort of torture device.

  I heard the voice again.

  “Give me food.” It was coming from one of the cages. I could see now that four of the cages had occupants: a cat, a cocker spaniel, a Yorkshire terrier, and in the large cage at the end, a goat.

  “I like cookies,” said the goat.

  The goat was wearing a collar.

  I had seen collars like that before.

  24

  Client Key

  A couple of months ago, Billy, Gilly, Myke Duchakis, and I had successfully shut down Area 51, the ACPOD animal-cybernetics program. Area 51 had been created without Gilly’s knowledge, and it was horrible. The scientists behind it were performing surgeries on animals and implanting sensors in their brains. They had built a device that translated animal thoughts into human speech. It had seemed like a cool idea at first, but dozens of dogs, cats, and monkeys had been killed in the course of their research, and the animals that didn’t die were miserable prisoners with wires sticking out of their heads and strange voices coming from collars around their necks.

  Mostly what the animals said was “I like you,” “I hate you,” and “Feed me.”

  Like most cruel and unusual scientific experiments, the original intent of the Area 51 program was noble. The researchers were hoping that eventually they would be able to use the technology to help people who had lost the power of speech—people who had suffered strokes, or who were in a coma. Ultimately, they hoped, the tech could be reverse engineered to allow humans to communicate directly with machines, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the animals suffered, and when Gilly found out about it, he shut the program down, freed the research animals from the various machines, and turned Area 51 into Clawz-n-Pawz, the animal adoption agency where Myke Duchakis works.I

  Ernest Rausch had worked in Area 51, and it seemed that not all the lab animals had been freed.

  “Hello, Mr. Goat,” I said.

  “I like you,” said the goat through the speaker on his collar. “I would like a cookie.”

  “Sorry, I have no cookies.”

  “I hate you,” said the goat.

  “Let me go,” said the cat. “Let me go. Let me go.”

  “Fine, I’ll let you all out, but let me do a little snooping first.” I looked in on each of the animals. Only the goat and the cat were wearing collars; the dogs appeared to be unmodified.

  “Let me go,” said the cat.

  The Yorkie started barking; the spaniel whined. I didn’t need a translator to know that they were echoing the cat’s request.

  “Quiet!” I said sternly.

  The dogs fell silent, but the cat continued its refrain: “Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.” The goat was muttering its own mantra: “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”

  “Okay, whatever. Just wait a few minutes.” I turned my attention to the computers. The first one demanded a password when I woke it up. I typed in Rausch’s birthday.

  PASSWORD INCORRECT

  I tried a few other common passwords, including 123456, QWERTY, and PASSWORD. After five tries the screen displayed the message LOCKED OUT: TRY AGAIN IN AN HOUR. I woke the second computer and was greeted with the word “REMEMBER” emblazoned across the screen in Comic Sans. Once again, I was asked for a password.

  “Let me go,” said the cat.

  I typed in LETMEGO. No luck.

  “I hate you,” said the goat.

  I typed in IHATEYOU.

  Ka-ching! A list of files appeared on the screen. I scrolled through. Most of the file names were nonsensical, like d9389(Y88v3) or OXOGLETE. But a few looked promising:

  Client Key

  REMEMBER log

  To Do List

  I clicked on the “Client Key” file. A spreadsheet filled the screen.

  10-1 G.B.

  Partial restore

  Canis lupus familiaris 02

  9-30 W.B.

  History, American

  Canis lupus familiaris 02

  9-29 G.B.

  Code, AG-3601

  Capra aegagrus hircus 01

  9-27 R.C.

  Evangeline

  Felis catus 01

  9-20 H.M.

  Code, DB-1923

  Felis catus 02

  9-19 W.O.

  Mathematical functions

  Felis catus 02

  9-16 G.B.

  Code, AG-3601

  Canis lupus familiaris 01

  9-14 D.T.

  King James

  Felis catus 01

  9-22 X.Z.

  CRC Handbook

  Canis lupus familiaris 01

  7-19 M.T.

  King James

  Bos taurus 01

  7-12 V.T.

  King James

  Bos taurus 01

  It looked like a jumble of nonsense at first, but after a few seconds something jumped out at me.

  Evangeline. My dad had told me that Ernest Rausch had helped him memorize that entire poem. And just to the left of that were my dad’s initials, R.C. And the number to the left of that looked like a date—September 27! That was the day my dad had memorized “Evangeline”!

  I looked at the other initials and dates. G.B. had to stand for Gilbert Bates, and “Partial restore” probably meant that Rausch had restored some of Gilly’s memories just this morning. His initials appeared in two other spots, followed by “Code, AG-3601.” Hadn’t Gilly said something about Rausch helping him remember code for his antigravity project?

  The initials W.B. would be William Bates, and yesterday Billy had had his head stuffed with American history. Reading down the list, I noticed the initials X.Z. There couldn’t be a lot of people with those initials, but I happened to know one: Xavier Zlotnick was the director of ACPOD’s nanotechnology program. I guessed that the other initials were also ACPOD employees.

  The Latin-looking words on the right looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  “Let me go,” said the cat.

  “I’ll let you out, but let me finish this, okay?”

  The spaniel growled. The Yorkie snarled.

  “I hate you,” said the goat.

  “I hate you,” said the cat.

  “What is wrong with you guys?” I glanced over my shoulder at the cages. But the animals hadn’t been talking to me. Their attention was on the door. I swiveled around in the chair to see what they were looking at and was hit with a clovey, nose-pinching wave of Bay Rum aftershave.

  “Ginger Crump,” said Mr. Rausch from the doorway. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  * * *

  I. The whole sordid tale can be found in—you guessed it—The Flinkwater Factor.

  25

  Projac

  The first time I met Ernest Rausch he hadn’t seemed scary, just weird. I had almost felt sorry for him, even though he had been rude and dismissive. I figured he was one of those guys who had never got a date in high school, so he avenged himself on the world by acting all snooty and superior. There are a lot of guys like that working at ACPOD.

&nbs
p; But here in his lab, caught red-handed snooping through his computer, I found his gangly, spiderlike body and his pointy goatee plenty scary.

  He closed the door and shot the dead bolt.

  “Oh!” I said.

  “Oh?” he replied.

  “I mean . . . ” I stood up. “I was just leaving.”

  He closed the door. “But you just got here!”

  “That’s okay. I have to go. Somebody’s waiting for me.” I took a tentative step toward the door. He did not step aside.

  “I see you’ve met my friends,” he said.

  “I hate you,” the cat said, then followed it up with a hiss.

  “Not very friendly friends,” I said.

  Rausch smiled. It was not a nice smile, more of a gotcha smirk.

  “Ms. Crump, I do not usually accept walk-in clients, but for you I will make an exception.”

  “Um . . . I don’t think I’m actually a client.” I did not want to be included in his Client Key file folder. What I wanted was to get OUT. Like, NOW! Where was Billy? Where was the AG-3601? Where was Gertrude?

  “Of course you are,” Rausch said. “Your father is a big fan of my REMEMBER system.”

  “I don’t know if ‘fan’ is the right word,” I said.

  “Everybody loves REMEMBER! Why, your friend Billy has the entire text of A Comprehensive History of the United States stored in his head. He can name every vice president, the names of their wives and children, and the names of their pets!” He spread his arms triumphantly. “How wonderful is that?”

  “I see what you mean,” I said, by which I meant, I see that you are completely insane.

  “What would you like to know, Ginger?”

  “Um . . . I would like to go now,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Think of this as an opportunity! Why, for you, I’m willing to waive my usual fee.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I came in here without permission. I won’t say anything to anybody.”

  “Say anything? To whom? About what? I have no secrets.”

  “What about them?” I pointed at the cages.

  “My pets? I am breaking no laws.”

  “I hate you,” said the cat.

  “You’re stealing people’s memories.”

  “Not true! I am bestowing the gift of memories. Useful memories. Why should you clutter your mind with what you had for breakfast this morning when you could be enjoying the knowledge of the ages?”

  “I’m leaving now,” I said.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” He set his bag on the floor and opened it to reveal a gray plastic cube about the size of a four-slice toaster. “Not until I demonstrate REMEMBER.”

  I made a dash for the door. Rausch shot out a long arm and snagged me as I tried to pass. I twisted out of his grasp and was fumbling with the dead bolt when he pulled a small object from his pocket and pointed it at me. I had about a tenth of a second to recognize the Projac before he pressed the trigger. The Projac made a ghaaak sound, and that’s the last thing I remembered.

  26

  REMEMBER

  I don’t know how long I was knocked out, but when I came to, I was strapped into the complicated-looking chair. Rausch was sitting in front of me stroking his bolo tie with one hand while holding the Projac in the other.

  “You’re not supposed to have that,” I said thickly. The pocket-model Projac he held could knock out an attacker from twenty feet away. A military-grade Projac could kill. Either way, the device was supposed to be top secret—nobody outside the ACPOD laboratory where it was being developed was supposed to know about it. I happened to know what it was because of the events last summer.I

  “You stole a Projac from ACPOD,” I mumbled. I was still pretty fuzzy after getting zapped.

  “I stole nothing. ACPOD stole from me. All my ideas, my brilliant innovations, my best ideas. The cybernetic interface that allows these animals to communicate with us was my idea. Gilbert Bates took my research and axed the project. But he won’t steal REMEMBER, because he won’t remember that REMEMBER exists. Is that not beautiful? I am using a machine that creates memories to eliminate all memories of the machine itself.” He gestured at the REMEMBER machine. Several cables led from the device to the headset above me.

  “Let me go,” I said.

  “Let me go,” said the cat.

  “I will let you go,” Rausch said. “But first . . . what would you like to remember?” He set the Projac on his workbench and woke up one of the computers. “I have quite a selection here. War and Peace? That might be useful if you go to college. Or maybe you’d prefer a textbook? Biology, perhaps. Or a history of Western Europe?”

  While he wasn’t looking at me, I tested the straps gripping my forearms. They were tight, but I could twist my arms a little. The left strap was looser. With enough time I might be able to pull my hand through it.

  “Why not just download the entire Library of Congress into my head while you’re at it?”

  “I cannot recommend that,” Rausch said. “You might forget your own name, and that would result in too many awkward questions. The more memories I load, the more you forget.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I figured the longer I could keep him talking, the better my chances of being rescued. Billy was out there someplace, and he must have seen Rausch arrive. Rausch hadn’t said anything about the drone, so Billy must have kept it out of sight. What would he do? Contact his dad? The police? That would be the smart thing to do, but knowing Billy, he probably would try to rescue me himself.

  “Why am I doing this?” Rausch chuckled in a not nice way. “Why does the sun rise? Because it must. And why should I not receive credit for my accomplishments?”

  “But what are you going to do? I mean, your machine isn’t much good if people have to forget as much stuff as they remember.”

  “That is where you are wrong! Forgetting is underrated. You must have seen things or done things that you would just as soon forget, yes?”

  I thought for a moment. There were a few things, like the time I threw up on Danton Wills in biology class, and the time I accidentally killed my goldfish by giving him too much fish food—or maybe it was the gummy worms. But I wasn’t going to admit that to Rausch.

  “I like all my memories,” I said.

  “In any case, you don’t get to choose. Your new memories will simply replace whatever you were thinking in the hours before downloading the new memories. The more complex and lengthy the introduced memories, the more you forget. If I were to give you, say, War and Peace, you would forget this conversation, and whatever you are thinking about right now, and probably everything you experienced or thought for the past twelve hours. But if I downloaded, as you suggested, the Library of Congress, you might forget how to breathe.”

  “That seems kind of random,” I said.

  “I’m still working on selective memory extraction. Such a technology would be tremendously useful. For example, if a man commits armed robbery, instead of sending him to prison, one could simply erase his memory of having committed the crime. There would then be no need to punish him. It would be as though he had never done it.”

  “The people who got robbed might disagree.”

  Rausch shrugged. “They remain robbed, but the person who did the robbing becomes innocent.”

  “That doesn’t seem exactly fair.”

  “I’m sure such minor details will iron themselves out. In the meantime, have you decided what you want to remember?”

  “I’m thinking about it.” I looked at the machine. “Obviously this is a brilliant, amazing, innovative, and incredibly valuable invention—”

  “Thank you.” He smiled a real smile. “I am, as you may have noticed, rather proud of it.”

  “I hadn’t noticed—you seem so modest.” Was I laying it on too thick?

  “I try not to be too boastful,” he said. Was he blushing?

  “How does your machine work?” I asked.

  “Ho-ho, wo
uldn’t you and everyone else like to know!”

  “I would like to know,” I said. “I mean, since you’re going to wipe my memory of today anyway, it won’t matter if you tell me, right?”

  “True,” he said, stroking his wispy, almost invisible goatee and looking lovingly at his REMEMBER machine. I looked past him out the window. A familiar dark shape rose into view, with my cell dangling from its underside by a scrap of tape.

  * * *

  I. You could read about it in . . . oh, never mind.

  27

  The Rauschinator

  “REMEMBER works by altering existing memory engrams,” Rausch said. “New information is implanted by flooding your brain with packets of trinary infocicles.”

  “Is ‘infocicle’ really a word?” I asked.

  “I made it up,” he said proudly. “REMEMBER is so revolutionary it demands a whole new language. For example, the altered engrams are known as rauschions, and the memory insertion process is called rauschination, and the headset above you is the Rauschinator.”

  “It looks like a bike helmet.”

  “It was once a bicycle helmet,” he said. “Now it is a Rauschinator.”

  “That’s brilliant,” I said. “Tell me more!” The drone was still hovering outside the window. I wondered how much Billy could see with that cell phone camera. Could he tell I was strapped to a chair?

  “Why not? You will forget your visit here, which will be very convenient for both of us. As I mentioned before, the system targets your most recently formed engrams.”

  “Then how come Billy forgot me?” I blurted. “You loaded him up with all the American history, and he forgot I even exist!”

  Rausch stroked his goatee. “That is interesting. Does he not remember you at all?”

  “No.”

  “In addition to recently formed engrams, REMEMBER targets extremely active engrams. He must have been thinking about you intently for those memories to have been overwritten.”