The Library of Authorised Memorial Materials was a great machine. Jane enjoyed being one cog amongst many, working in the lab beneath the Library’s mile-wide floors, each a dense thicket of shelves that housed the millions of Memories in its collection.
Jane was one of the Library’s Conservationists, in charge of Downloading and Upkeeping the Memories. Memories were such fragile things. Jane’s Supervisors always likened them to statues, to monoliths in the landscape of the Institution, to sturdy planets spinning on their axes of civic duty. But Jane had come to imagine them as baby birds. She had never seen a bird, but she had learned about them from the oldest memories in the collection. The image of their delicate, bone-thin bodies mapped easily onto the Memories she worked with everyday.
Downloading the Memory was the first part of the process. A Patient would come to Jane, after their application had been extensively vetted by the Library’s curatorial team. She would take them into one of the peaceful Downloading Chambers and hook them up to the Memorial Vacuum, which took an imprint of all the neural pathways ever formed inside the Patient’s hippocampus. A polyvinyl chloride slate was carved with grooves that the Vacuum then filled with neural residue, the base material for the hippocampic imprint. Each slate’s grooves were intricately mapped by the Curators during the vetting process and formed a pattern that enabled the neurally dispersed life story of a specific Patient to take a neat and perfect form. The slates worked in a similar way to vinyl records, which Jane had also learned about from the collections; anybody could check out and listen to a particular Memory and, in doing so, learn the history, refined by the process, held within it.
Jane knew from speaking with the Patients during the Downloading sessions, who were all required to be of significant age or have a terminal illness, that their lives were not necessarily the orderly, linear bundles of narrative that the slates suggested. Her role during the Downloading was similar to that of a bedside nurse, and so Patients often opened up to her. Many were confused about the course of their lives, not at all sure how one thing had led to another, and often spoke of the past as if it were in the room with them. But to capture this meandering in a regulated pattern of grooves would have been impossible, let alone to catalogue, shelf and disseminate it. Jane understood that, for the Memories to serve as crucial learning material for the Coalition of Institutions and the people living within them, some edges had to be rounded along the way.
So, as neural residue poured into preordained groove through the Vacuum’s hypodermic nozzle, the Memory formed and then completed itself. Because neural residue was such a volatile substance, it required rigorous Upkeep. At the smallest exposure to light or dirt or handling, the residue inched fervently toward disintegration. It threatened constantly to weep over the sides of the slate, to evaporate and recondense, to broil up into a phlegmlike consistency and curdle across the grooves. The Library’s stringent conservation policies and sophisticated equipment, and the Conservationists’ expert execution, ensured the Memories were kept in line with the Institutional ethos of the Library – To Collect A World of Knowledge From All, For All – but that didn’t mean the Memories didn’t try their best, in the out-of-sight chambers of the lab, to
escape the Institution’s confines.
Jane’s favourite moments were when a Memory she remembered Downloading came back around for Upkeep. She could always remember the Patient from whose mind it had travelled, though she felt alone in this. No one at the Library but the Conservationists interacted with the Patients in-person, and whenever Jane asked another how working with Patients made them feel, they blinked back at her, eyes empty. So she had stopped asking.
And though Jane did enjoy the work, she often wondered what it was like outside the Library’s walls. She couldn’t properly remember the last time she’d left the Library. She could just faintly remember the view from a train window, on a long-ago trip, the city street visible way down below. Something about that view had stayed with her through the uncountable years. She distinctly remembered the dark fantasy of wandering, of getting lost amongst the ruins of a long gone urban history and staring straight up into the underbelly of the Institutions. The Coalition of Institutions and the singular bullet train that connected them had raised themselves up above the city on an intricately constructed network of iron platforms and pilings centuries ago. Life was a life on stilts now, freedom found in high flying, highly organised bureaucracy. But something about the mystery of the cement wasteland, like the meanderingness of her Patients, had unsettled her in a desperately intriguing way.
Jane could often shove this intrigue down, as the Library was her whole life – just the way it should be within the Coalition. She was grateful for her place inside the great machine and believed in its mission of collecting the world of knowledge. She cared for her Patients and their delicate residue, and thought the Library must care for them too, in committing their lives to the echelons of history. Until, one day, when she realised resolutely that it did not.
Jane had always been well versed on the policy of emotional pollution. Years of experience had shown the Library that the more emotionally polluted a memory, the more volatile the neural residue that held it. Because the material was already so difficult for Conservationists to work with, the Library held the policy that emotional pollutants were to be avoided entirely. This meant immediately rejecting any applications from Patients who had experienced extreme emotional turbulence in their lives. While the Coalition had mostly accomplished the eradication of such turbulence, unavoidable outliers persisted, as victims of the aberrant acts of individual violence, neglect and oversight.
This fateful day found Jane sitting in a meeting that a Supervisor had called on a whim. Whimsical meetings were completely unroutine in the Library, and so everyone in the room waited nervously. The Supervisor looked visibly irritated, a slight sheen of sweat and a twisted grimace monopolising his normally vacant expression.
“There has been a major oversight in multiple departments,” he began immediately. “Never in the history of the Library have we had a case quite like this.” The room was silent as the Supervisor continued his anxious, exasperated speech.
“A Memory has been approved, downloaded, catalogued and loaned whilst being full of emotional pollution. We don’t understand how this could have possibly happened. But we received a very angry complaint from the citizen who loaned the Memory only to find it in a state of complete degradation. It is absolutely unacceptable that the Library should not hold itself to the highest standards of Memory conservation. So that you can all understand exactly what went wrong, what the listening experience was like for the affected citizen and why it is crucial that this never happen again, we’re going to have everyone listen to the Memory for themselves, right now.
Jane could see the slate that the Supervisor held in his hands. It was a mess, residue leaking down its sides and congealing along the curves of the grooves. She winced, imagining the audible fury that listening to it would bring. People queued up reluctantly, taking turns plugging into the Memory; Jane watched their faces contort at the unruly, unwelcomed sounds it emitted.
When she reached the front of the queue, the Supervisor placed the headphones over her head, and she closed her eyes, bracing herself as the Memory began to play. The sound was warbled and full of static and erratic changes of pitch. A man’s voice was just barely discernible, and it began to speak.
and collecting scraps of metal and hot soup on a makeshift fire and the Bank was colder than metal and the Support Home now is nicer than the Bank ever was where Supervisors hated me felt kicked down and mother kicked me in the head when I was little and mother used to drink somehow there was drink on the street but I didn’t touch it and they took me in a family I never had fighting rats fighting dogs lost to the streets growing slowly familiar like shadows like father who left before I could even sit up in my crib and down I climbed the long rusted ladder from train to street looking up behind me it’s a different world down here and back up to the Coalition eventually to the Support Home and down in the dirt roaming amongst the metal I was lost until I was found all of us shadows making shelter in the cracks and the grooves of the asphalt with the dogs rats stories on fires and we had nothing but it was home and
The Memory continued on. Jane was shocked by the well of feeling that rose within her as she listened. She had heard of communities that lived down in the streets, having run away from or been kicked out of their Institutions, but had never given much thought to these people’s lives. But as she listened, she felt closer to the Patient than any other Memory she had ever listened to. It felt like being in the Downloading room with him, talking to him, holding his hand. Through the alinear twists and turns of his story, where the past could bite the future’s tail and chase it in a circle, she could imagine his life, pulsing, vibrant, full of feeling. And though she had similarly never thought much about the implications of the emotional pollution policy, considering it a mere logical aspect of the difficult job of conservation, she suddenly felt flushed full of confusion and anger, that the Library might not care for its Patients at all. It cared for the collectible goo it could squeeze from their dying brains and mangle into a pantheon of displayable lives to prop up its own Institutional importance. But it couldn’t care for what it didn’t know. And what there was to know about the Patients, as Jane had experienced many times over and was experiencing now again in an entirely new and resounding way, was their raw, confused, rambling aliveness.
What was there to do? The Memory had stirred something in her that would not soon be stilled. She couldn’t go back to marching through her role when she had heard the sound of what might lie beyond it. She couldn’t imagine having ever been content to be a mere cog in the great machine. She continued to obsess over this newfound impasse, as she filed out of the room amongst the throng of employees chattering and gawking at the horridness of what they’d been made to listen to; as she went through the rest of the day’s motions of Upkeep; as she moved blindly through the Library’s canteen and recreation room that evening and saw nothing but the Patient walking through the city streets in her mind.
But of course, Jane thought to herself, lying awake in her Library-standard bed that night – the only thing to do is to start by getting on the train. She bolted upright when she realised the simplicity of it, staring out into the darkness in front of her. To learn from the grit and reality of moving through the city, instead of from the hollow, static objects that the Library presented her with. To press her eyeball to the window and let it scrape along the street below. Perhaps, even, to abandon the teetering, elevated Library all together, for the people living beneath it. Perhaps she would climb down to reality. There was only one way to find out; she would get on the train once again, and she would ride it into her future.
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