by Geoff Nelder
“It is weird, isn’t it? Every morning I wake up thinking it’s a year ago but also not remembering if I passed my degree exams or who I had sex with over the last year—or yesterday. Look, I have a wedding ring.” She showed him a plain gold band on her left ring finger.
Manuel took her hand. His mouth opened at the shock of how bony and white her fingers were. Bruises, scuffed knuckles, and dirty, broken fingernails all testified to her tough survival. He thought maybe it was as well she had amnesia. A paradox that ARIA allowed evil to be created and yet forgotten. He concentrated on the ring. “It’s old and you have no engagement ring. I’d say it belongs to your mother or grandmother and it doesn’t necessarily mean you are married.”
“I’ve thought that, but I don’t know, do I?”
“I don’t suppose you know if you’re er—”
“Pregnant? I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like it, and for all I know I’ve been peeing on test kits every other day for months.”
“Drugs?”
“Oh, sure.” Jat pulled up her sleeves, revealing needle marks, some recent.
“Well, I got some of those too,” Manuel said. “Recreational. I guess some of yours are from your diabetes jabs when you run out of patches or need a quick fix. AIDS? Don’t tell me. Neither of us knows much, do we?”
“You know a hell of a lot more than I do, Manuel. You and your NoteCom.”
“At what point will the NoteCom not be helpful, Jat?”
“Apart from the obvious, like when you lose it so one morning you have no knowledge of it, there would come a time when you wouldn’t recognise it for what it is.”
“You mean I won’t know how to switch it on? No problem, I’ll write a few instructions now to leave with it each night.”
“I meant if you forget the concept of gadgets as information providers.”
“No, Jat, you’d have to go way, way back. I had hand-held Personal Information Management systems back in the twentieth century. With the rate of forgetfulness, it would take—oh my God—just four months.”
“Four months from catching it, which was a month ago?” she said, getting up to make more coffee.
“Jat, let us suppose we survive for a year. My memories would relate to the life I had fifty-two years ago. I am fifty-four. By next April, I will have the knowledge and language of a two-year-old.”
“Lucky you. I’ll have the memory of a newborn in only twenty weeks. Five months, Manuel. I won’t know how to speak, clean, or feed myself. In fourteen weeks I won’t be able to write or read the notes I should be leaving to give me basic information. I’ll be completely dependent on you if we are still together. I’ll have the body with all the hormones and urges of a healthy woman but with the mind of a baby.” She shuddered at the prognosis.
“I don’t know, Jat. Just because your memory disappears, your body has had two decades of actions embedded in your muscles and nervous systems. I wonder how much of the memory loss is more related to events as opposed to learned or adaptive behaviour. Newborn babies have an instinct to grasp and suckle.”
“We won’t know for another five months unless we go out and find a child.”
“All the more reason to be vigilant about keeping notes to keep relearning what we know,” Manuel said.
“Yes, but not so much that five hours of each day has to be spent learning how to survive, who we are, where things are blah, blah.”
“Agreed, Jat, we need to know what is important.” He grabbed a piece of paper as well as opening a new page on his NoteCom. “We’ll always know our own names.”
“But not each others’; write them down. What do we say about who we are? You know, with respect to our relationship.”
“Umm, you mean when we wake up in the morning, you might think you married me in a fit of desperation?”
“Get lost, Daddy. Are you that desperate? All right, don’t answer. Leaving sex out of it, maybe it might be clever to pretend we’re married.”
Manuel laughed. “How does that work? I thought you’d prefer us to be father and daughter.”
“I’m a realist, Manuel. We’ll know for months that we are not pop and daughter, but we might believe we got married recently. I must have been smashed out of my mind, but there you go.”
“Thanks, Jat.”
“My pleasure. Hey, you never know, we might even enjoy fooling around. But, before you get excited, you know what this means to our list?”
He pulled a long face. “Yeah, we start it with a lie. That’s awful.”
“It shows we are thinking positively about survival. I’m Mrs Manuel? Is there another Mrs Manuel who’s going to come after me?”
“Mrs Gomez. I remember getting married in my twenties but it didn’t last long. Don’t worry, I’ll pass on the conjugal rights, for now.”
“Whatever. Write on your NoteCom details like birthday, qualifications, last known job...”
“Hang on. Is qualifications and job relevant once you forget all your occupational skills?”
“They are in that they show what our personality and intelligence enabled us to achieve.”
“True, but say I was a doctor just qualified, within six weeks, I wouldn’t know hyperthermia from a nosebleed. Let’s concentrate on real survival data. So date of birth is a must.”
“Last known address of parents—especially in my young circumstances.”
“Whereas not in mine,” Manuel said.
“Do we have a gun?”
“I haven’t found one. Frankly, I doubt it. This cabin would have been an empty tourist lodge before I arrived a month ago with provisions. I have no recollection of ever having a firearm, but we could search for one before turning in.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Going to bed I mean, and no, Manuel, not that either. Maybe tomorrow when I read this note and find we’re married. What I mean is: why will everything today be wiped out by dawn? Is the amnesia effect accelerated by sleep or is it merely because eight hours is a long time not to keep going over things and keeping our brains working?”
Manuel rubbed his hands as if he’d thought this through before. “If it’s true that we lose about fifty days’ memory per day, then that amounts to two days’ loss per hour. But that’s for retrograde amnesia: forgetting stuff in the past going backwards. Maybe things of today are, like you say, so frequently reinforced with stimulation from having all our senses working, especially with each other to talk to. But when our brains shut down for sleep, it’s as if today’s thoughts were in a temporary memory then deleted.”
“So if we didn’t go to sleep, we’d remember more tomorrow?” Jat said.
“Probably, at least of today’s events, but then what state would we be in by the end of tomorrow?”
“Yeah, and today’s memory isn’t that perfect, Manuel. What did you have for breakfast?”
He looked at Jat and then over to the kitchen area as if that would be an aide-mémoire. Standing up and then wandering over, he tried to recall whether he’d found cereals or did he have spread on crackers, dried toast? Then again, had he already tried this exercise today?
She shook her head. “I don’t remember either. Of course, that might be normal for a lot of people, so let’s have a more rigorous test.”
“Let’s not, Jat. We still have a lot to do before sleep overtakes us.”
“Fair enough. Look, Manuel, we didn’t get round to using the web today, so let’s make sure we leave a note. I’d really like to check e-mails, social sites while I remember how. In fact, I’m writing my webmail address and password and other details. I presume you have all that for you on your NoteCom?”
Manuel shuffled his feet in embarrassment, then sat next to Jat. “I’ve avoided using the web in fear of what I might find. But you’re right. Add ‘Ryder.’”
“Your son?”
“A close colleague from the UK. In fact, because of that, he might still be clear. I wonder if I’ve contacted him already? Nevertheless, put it down. Look. I�
��ve found his details on the NoteCom, so copy this bit. What else is crucial?”
They sat there with the list wondering how it was that the most vital information needed to survive occupied only half of a piece of paper.
“We’ve been through a lot today,” she said.
Manuel’s tiredness made him drop his cup of coffee on the table making them both jump to avoid the cascade. He said, “Let’s get to bed. How do you know to give yourself insulin?”
She showed him a blue pendant round her neck and a medic-bracelet.
“Let’s make sure with a note—paper and on the NoteCom.”
Both bedrooms had en suite facilities, and smiling at each other, they parted. Manuel hadn’t explored the other room but assumed, like his, it housed an assortment of mixed-gender clothes and necessities. But now, he had company. Someone with intellect to bounce ideas off, keep his brain working, and jog memories. But would he have a clue who she was or remember anything of today when he woke up?
Sunday 3 May 2015, 22:50:
In orbit onboard the International Space Station.
ALL ABDUL KHAN COULD HEAR WAS THE CRACKLING HISS OF THE RADIO. For all his communication skills, he could not raise Houston Mission Control. The core-design of the comms depended on permanent integration between the ISS and several grey boxes at Johnson in Houston. Failsafe circuits and switches kicked in when inevitable glitches occurred, but no one planned for a total blackout from the uplink.
Backup control centres existed. They didn’t get the fame or have the acres of goggle-eyed wonder-people being entertained at Houston. Abdul had flicked through their frequencies many times. The Challenger Center, Hawaii; Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; and Carnarvon, Australia. They ringed the planet. An altitude-zero orbit. In the main, their tasks involved radio relay, but they underwent control sessions so they knew what to do in emergencies.
Abdul considered a total communications blackout from Houston as an emergency. It had been a week since they received more than a garbled voice message, though they received data transfers until yesterday. Dan told him to switch to one of the other mission-control centres. Vandenberg might as well have been swallowed by the desert, though Hawaii sent message received and please hold returns. Abdul stopped getting excited by those auto-response messages from Hawaii and gave up expecting a real person to grab the mike at the other end. He had hopes for the more isolated Carnarvon space communications station. Based at the most western edge of Australia and surrounded on three sides by desert it had the best chance of housing healthy people manning the radio.
He set the switch for Carnarvon’s frequency and set the call on auto before sitting back with his hands cradling the back of his short black hair. The acknowledge-return call caught him off guard such that he would have fallen off the fixed swivel chair if it didn’t have arms.
Maybe their system auto-responded, but hey, there was a blond, blue-eyed young Australian woman, and she talked to him.
“That looks like Abdul. How’s it going up there?”
“Never mind us, how are you doing down in Carnarvon? Oh, sorry, can you give your name, call sign, and all that?”
“Ooh, listen to you, Abdul. Go on, guess my name—and it isn’t Sheila.”
Dan, as commander, came rushing to the console.
Abdul switched off the mike. “Commander, the lack of protocol points to big problems in Carnarvon too.”
Dan took over from Abdul, but instead of using his usual strict and aggressive approach, he smiled, “Hi, Australia. I’m Dan, who are you?”
“Dan, you are the famous commander. Wow.”
“No, it is me who should say wow. And you are—?”
“Charlotte.”
“Hi there, Charlotte, is your controller there at Carnarvon?”
“What’s that, Dan, aren’t I pretty enough for you? Just joking. Sorry, mate, this station is one of only a handful of buildings left standing in Carnarvon after a flash flood a couple of years back. When a new bar-manager arrived last week and had what we thought might be ARIA symptoms, everybody evacuated on the same plane she arrived on.”
Jena pulled a pained face at Abdul, but Charlotte pre-empted their response. “I guess that might have been a mistake, guys? I haven’t heard from them since.”
“You might be right, Charlotte. But how about you?”
“My parents are in Sydney and told me to stay out here until it all blows over. I volunteered to man the station. Did I do right, d’you reckon?”
“You’ve done right by us, Charlotte. Just a moment, our physician wants a word.”
“Hi, Antonio, is everybody fit and healthy up there?” she said, surprising the crew with her obvious knowledge of who they all were and their function.
“We’re doing fine, Charlotte. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“Shoot, Doc. But before you do, today is Monday May 4, 2015. Don’t forget I’m a little ahead of you in time. I had eggs for breakfast and cheese and crackers for last night’s supper. What d’you want to ask me?”
“Molto buon,” Antonio said. “You have no symptoms of memory loss, headaches, tinnitus, or anything else with your head?”
“Sure I do, Doc. I’ve always been scatty. I get headaches every time I drink red wine, and I’m always forgetting things on the shopping list I left at home.”
Dan interrupted Antonio’s interrogation. “Yeah, Charlotte, don’t we all, but you remember enough to pass your exams to be employed at Carnarvon. Yes?”
“I could tell you I slept with the prof, but kidding aside, I don’t have this ARIA thing yet. Any idea what the incubation time is?”
“Stand by to be amazed, Charlotte,” said the doctor giving a thumbs up to the others. “You should have been experiencing a dull headache and tinnitus accompanied by increasing loss of memory within twenty-four hours of breathing in the same place as your new bar-manager neighbour. So you know what that means?”
“Well, Doc, I was always a bugger for not getting everyone else’s colds and flu, so I guess I get away with it as usual. No big deal.”
“No big deal?” His excitement took his accent and language into overdrive. “Enorme, magnifico, molto importante. Mamma mia.”
Abdul took over. “Charlotte, our usually calm and collected doctor is trying to say that you are the first person we know of who might be immune to ARIA. Though it’s possible your newcomer didn’t have it.”
“Wow, guys. Hey...creepy...Does that mean sooner or later I’ll be the only one who knows anything?”
Antonio calmed down, but Abdul realized he was preparing to tell her that, barring enclaves of isolation, and if she met no one else, then with certainty she would be the only person on the planet in two years’ time who would be able to write, read, and speak.
Abdul switched off the mike. “I hope you are not going to give her a straight answer to that one, Antonio. It might freak her out. Let’s concentrate on positive aspects of her situation such as getting in touch with Ryder Nape’s group.” Everyone agreed, including Antonio.
“Charlotte, it is great you are free of ARIA. There are just a few others we know of who are similarly free. We would like to put you in touch with a British group. They have isolated themselves and have medical expertise.”
“Yeah, sure. It’s boring out here stuck between a desert and the ocean. Maybe I should go to Perth?”
“No, Charlotte,” burst in Dan. “Stay where you are. Much safer. Abdul will give you a web address for Ryder’s group. Log into it and use the e-mail link to introduce yourself. We’ll let him know too, so he’ll know you are not some freak who hit on his website randomly.”
“Okay, guys. It’s comforting to know I have friends on Earth as well as in space. I’ll chat to you again on your next orbit. Ciao.”
Monday 4 May 2015:
Moraine Lake, eighteen days since ARIA started. Most people have lost up to two years, four weeks of memory.
MANUEL STRUGGLED THROUGH
TO CONSCIOUSNESS. What must have been a new alarm clock hammered away, making him pull the pillow over his head. Throwing an unseeing arm at where his bedside cabinet should’ve been hadn’t silenced the percussion. One eye opened and found a varnished pinewood ceiling. He could smell coffee but the unfamiliar log cabin tugged at his worry bone. It looked like a vacation cabin in the forest but that didn’t figure. He remembered going to bed in his own room: pale-green walls, white ceiling, cobwebs.
Once he could stand it, he admired the brilliant dawn light hitting the carpet. Pine trees with a busy resident woodpecker met his eyes. The alarm clock had feathers.
He scratched an armpit. “So, I’m definitely not in Baltimore.”
After finding and using the bathroom, his nose detected toast along with the coffee. Fearing who he might find, he ventured into the kitchen.
“Oh, you’re up, are you, Manuel?” said a scowling young woman sitting at a rustic table.
Manuel stood searching his shot memory but failed to locate a white-faced girl with long jet-black hair among his acquaintances.
“Before you throw a wobbler, read that.” She pointed at a NoteCom placed at the opposite end of the table.
A milky coffee, just as he liked it, waited for him. He pointed at it, she pointed in return at the NoteCom. He looked up again. Yellow T-shirt and jeans; he looked at his own clothes—black trousers, white shirt, and a NASA tie. Good God, he’d dressed for work.
You are Manual Gomez, employed by NASA as their Education Officer for flight missions with responsibility to liaise with the media.
Except you are on leave along with most of the population because you have ARIA. An infectious amnesia throwing out your memories at the rate of 50 days’ worth each day. This probably started for you on 15th April 2015. It is now Monday 4th May 2015 so you have lost 950 days or two years, seven months, and two days of memory.
You have remarried to Jat Qappik, who also has ARIA and is probably sitting at the table with you. She is diabetic but cut down her Humilin dose (usually neo-Humulin patches)—see notes.
