And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,41
to cancel my plans for the voyage immediately.
You and I should be forever grateful for living after the invention of the REMaker.
For hours I lay awake, overwhelmed by this strange, unfamiliar feeling. Despair, Stash. If ever you’ve been trapped in despair, you never shared it with me.
And then it struck me...
The nightmare that I woke into was much worse than the spontaneous dream that I’d forced on myself.
For the rest of my life...
In the bubble of the net...
Always trapped.
A programmed dream.
I want to wake up...
There...
In No-Net-Land...
In the Bohu...
All I remember of that dream is splinters of a story. No clear sequence of events or circumstances.
Just a sensation...
Fists beating and a strange sound...
Laughter...
Me banging against a solid mass...
A wall...
Closing in...
I think I was dreaming in black-and-white... More black than white...
Suddenly I was completely awake. My body struck me in all its tangibility.
Liquids poured out of me...
Forgive me, Stash. I didn’t mean to upset you.
I’ll spare you the rest.
If the little girl had been living in our time, with our readily accessible technology for healing after horror, we would have taken her to one of the clinics for Memory Excision – a safe and simple operation – on an outpatient basis. Once it is over, the patient resumes normal life, and the memory gap – this black hole they used to refer to as trauma – is completely eradicated.
I pull you back to the first experimental uses of memory excision, performed on adults who had witnessed a murder. Even back then, the results were impressive. The patients lost all traces of the violent episode and regained a normal continual memory.
First, the surgeons would perform a memory bypass procedure, and then they would excise the irrelevant information. Once the traumatic experience had been severed from its carrier, it was deflected to a dedicated submemoryfolder which could only be accessed by special court order.
Surprisingly, the operation is never successful in the case of children, and the younger the person, the lower their chances of full recovery.
The little girl, whoever she may have been...
How did she survive?
If indeed she survived...
Death seems preferable to a life with such a memory.
That rat...
That little girl who once was...
The Stefan...
The dream is beginning to decompose. I must hurry. My time is near.
***
A creature leans over me, forming a sign on my forehead. His lips are moving, but he makes no sound. Who is he? Maybe the REMaker has malfunctioned, and it is converting only sights, not sounds.
As if the creature is telling us both something.
What will you do with my dream, Stash?
I’ve turned you into one of the Remembearers, one of those who have the traumatic event registered in their consciousness without actually having experienced it themselves: the second circle of witnesses to the violent experience. The commonest problem among patients being treated with memory excision is linked to the fact that the event itself can’t be excised from the memory of the other carriers.
I’m your Remembearer, Stash.
I’ll give off a stench.
That’s what
I can
Promise...
Only recently, the legal world was all worked up. Some victims had pressed charges, and were demanding full restoration of their missing memory link. The petitioners argued that the excision violated their right to determine their own fate, and that without the missing event, no matter how unsettling or horrible, they were not what they were supposed to be. The parties have reached a settlement though: the petitioners have withdrawn their claim, and a procedure has been launched for developing and testing a technology of controlled memory imprinting. It will allow memory stores to be mended without having to excise any “irrelevant information”.
Stash, have you heard about the guy who wanted to have a false experience imprinted in his brain? He said that he was under no obligation to actually experience it. When he entered an offer on the net to acquire traumatic experiences, his implachip was jammed with bids.
Look for him, Stash. He’s the ideal subject for your Anthropology of the Future project.
Why me?
Y-mee.
K-0005275-149.
I’m being retrieved 150 years back. The eastern side of Pan-Euro. A flashing Star of David...
Stash, we’re in a haze of thick info-clouds, enveloped by a dense and shapeless fog that the human mind cannot contain. Our only means of protecting ourselves from the torrents of information is to minimize it and package it so that it allows access on demand only. That’s what the separate, dedicated submemoryfolders are for. The research convention establishes that our individual implachips will be beamed exclusively to our own programmed submemoryfolders, to ensure that we derive