A short story by Joe Broadmeadow
What if you could erase your worst memory? What if a technology could remove the sadness or regret? What if someone could steal your memories? How much of our state of existence is based on our memories? Would we be different people if we could select the memories to keep and the ones to discard? What if there was a Memory Thief?
The woman on the table breathed in small, shallow sips, the way people breathe when they are afraid of what sleep might bring. Aldric Crane watched the rise and fall of her chest from the doorway of the converted lab, one hand resting on the cold steel frame, the other loosely holding the syringe that would end her dreaming for the night. Not her life. He was careful about that distinction. He was many things, but not what they would call a killer.
He crossed to her bedside and studied her face in the blue wash of the monitor light. Margaret Teller. Sixty-one years old. A retired schoolteacher from Gloucester who had, three weeks ago, witnessed a particular exchange on a particular harbor pier that she should not have witnessed. The men who employed Crane had been unambiguous: the memory had to go. Not the woman. Just the six minutes she carried inside her skull like a stone in a coat pocket.
He set the syringe down and reached for the electrode array—a crown of fine filament leads that, laid against the scalp, could map the electrochemical signature of a consolidated memory with a precision that had taken him eleven years to achieve. The research was real. The papers had been published, in truncated form, under a different name, in journals that no one read. The device was real. The ethics committee that had approved it did not exist.
Crane pressed the first lead to her temple, and she stirred, murmuring something in Portuguese—a language, he noted, she did not speak. The deep brain, he had learned, was a polyglot. It translated everything into its own grammar. He sometimes wondered what language his own memories would surface in if someone were ever to do to him what he did to others.
He had never wondered long.
* * *
The procedure took forty minutes. When it was finished, Margaret Teller’s breathing had deepened and steadied, and she would wake in the morning with a mild headache and the vague, untroubling sense that she had forgotten something the way one forgets a dream—not with grief, but with the passive acceptance of something that was never quite real to begin with. She would remember the harbor. She would remember the fog on the water, the cold, the bite of winter air off the Atlantic. She would not remember the men, or the transaction, or the briefcase, or the name she had heard one of them say.
What she had lost, Crane carried now on a palm-sized data card clipped to the inside of his jacket pocket. The memory had been extracted as a sequence of neural encodings—not images, exactly, not film footage of the past—but something richer and more intimate: the full sensory and emotional context of the moment. The smell of brine. The texture of fear. The particular quality of certainty that comes when a person understands, without wanting to, that they have seen something they were not meant to see. He could reconstruct all of it…if he chose.
He had, over the years, accumulated many such cards. He kept them in a fireproof lockbox at his apartment in Providence, each one labeled in his precise, unhurried handwriting. Not to protect his clients’ interests. To protect himself.
Insurance, he had come to think of it. The only currency that mattered in the work he did.
He stripped the electrode array, bagged the syringe, and let himself out into a November night that smelled of wood smoke and the coming cold. His car was parked two blocks away. He walked without hurrying, because men who hurry draw attention, and men who draw attention in this line of work eventually disappear in ways that have nothing to do with memory extraction.
* * *
He had not started this way.
He had started, as most catastrophes do, with a sincere and well-documented good intention. His original work at Brown—before the funding dried up and the oversight committees grew nervous, and the IRB redlined every page of his methodology—had been aimed at trauma survivors. Specifically at veterans and first responders for whom certain memories had become structural damage, load-bearing walls of suffering that conventional therapy could not reach. The technology had worked. In the early trials, three subjects had been lifted clear of recurring nightmares that had lasted decades. He had watched a sixty-three-year-old former Navy corpsman weep with uncomplicated relief in a conference room in Providence, and it had been, without qualification, the best moment of his professional life.
Then, the funding committee had asked about scalability. Then, a defense contractor had made inquiries. Then a man named Garrett—no first name ever offered, no card produced—had appeared in Crane’s office one afternoon and explained, with the measured calm of someone describing a weather forecast, what the technology could do in the hands of people who operated outside the IRB’s jurisdiction. Garrett had not threatened him. He had simply observed that the research was going to end, unless it didn’t. He had left a number.
Crane had waited four months before calling it. He had told himself it was the science. The work deserved to continue. The applications he would refuse—the coercive ones, the political ones—and take only the cases that were, in some arguable sense, humane. A frightened witness who could be made safe. A grieving spouse spared the forensic details of how their partner had died. A child too young to hold the weight of what they had seen.
He was not naive enough to believe this framing entirely. He was, however, skilled enough at the architecture of self-persuasion that he could inhabit it with something resembling conviction. That, too, was a kind of theft. He understood that. He had simply decided not to dwell on it.
* * *
The call came on a Thursday in January, eight months after the Teller job.
It was not Garrett. The voice was female, clipped, with an accent he placed somewhere between the Home Counties and nowhere in particular—the accent of someone who had worked to erase where they were from. She said her name was Voss. She said she had a client who required his services. When he asked the nature of the extraction, there was a pause of perhaps three seconds—not long, but in his experience, three-second pauses contained multitudes.
“The client is experiencing memories that are distressing to him,” Voss said. “He would like them removed.”
“That’s not how the procedure works,” Crane said. “Informed consent requires—”
“The client is fully informed. He is requesting this of his own volition. The distressing memories are of crimes he committed. He prefers not to carry them.”
Crane set down the glass he was holding. He took a slow breath. Through the window of his apartment, the Providence skyline lay flat and gray under a January sky that seemed to press down like a lid.
“You’re asking me to absolve someone,” he said. Not a question.
“I’m asking you to perform a technical procedure for which you will be compensated at triple your standard rate.”
He told her he would think about it. He spent two days doing so. On the third day, he called back and said no.
On the fourth day, someone broke into his apartment and took the lockbox.
* * *
The lockbox had contained forty-one data cards.
He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time after discovering it was gone, running through the mathematics of what that meant. Forty-one extracted memories. Forty-one people whose pasts were now in the hands of whoever Voss represented. Not as insurance—as leverage. As ammunition. Against the subjects themselves, against the people they had witnessed, against Crane if he resisted, against anyone whose past could be reconstructed and weaponized.
He had built his safety from the suffering of others and stored it in a metal box. It had not occurred to him, in the sustained fog of self-interested reasoning that had governed the past several years of his life, that someone could simply take it.
It occurred to him now with the force and clarity of a physical blow.
He called Garrett. The number rang once and was answered by a recording informing him that the number had been disconnected. He called it again and got silence, then a tone, then nothing. He sat for another hour. Then he went to his desk, opened his laptop, and began to compose a document that described, in precise and organized detail, everything he had done over the past six years: every subject, every client, every procedure, every payment. He wrote with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything, the clinical rigor of a man who had once been a scientist and had never entirely stopped believing in the virtue of getting things down accurately.
When he finished, it was past two in the morning. He read it through once, corrected two dates and a misspelling, and attached it to an email addressed to a federal investigator whose name he had memorized years ago against the possibility of a moment exactly like this one. He had been thorough about that, at least. He had always known this day existed somewhere ahead of him, a fixed point in the topography of the life he had chosen, even if he had spent years routing around it.
He hovered the cursor over the send button.
Then he thought about the forty-one cards. The six minutes of Margaret Teller’s life that no longer belonged to her. The Navy corpsman who had wept with relief in Providence. He thought about the first subject, a twenty-four-year-old Marine whose name he still knew, and what that young man had been returned to himself after the extraction, and whether any of it—the paper, the email, the federal investigator—changed what had been taken from any of them.
It did not. He understood that. The memories were gone. Whatever value they had possessed—as evidence, as experience, as the raw material of a person’s continuing self—had been extinguished by the procedure with the same neutral efficiency as a candle flame.
He sent the email.
* * *
In the morning, two agents appeared at his door. They were professional and polite, and they read him his rights with the bored precision of people who have done so many times. He did not resist. He did not perform remorse, either, because he had learned—from years of cataloging what other people felt and what it looked like on their faces—that performed remorse is always recognizable for what it is.
What he felt, standing in the gray winter light of his living room with his wrists being secured behind him, was something more precise and less comfortable than remorse. It was the recognition that the worst of what he had done was not the extractions themselves but the careful, layered reasoning by which he had made each one seem, in its moment, defensible. He had stolen memories. But before that, and more completely, he had stolen from himself the memory of knowing better—not all at once, but incrementally, one reasonable compromise at a time, until the original shape of the man he had been was no longer recoverable by any procedure he knew.
Unlike his subjects, he would have to carry that.
He thought, as they walked him out into the cold, that this too was a kind of justice—not the satisfying kind, the kind that restores and balances and rights the broken symmetry of things, but the other kind: the kind that simply refuses to let you forget.
—
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