"This object is like a sign post," he began. "It points you in a direction that might help you find your way, though the answers you're seeking won't ever come to you easily."
A signpost? He was correct, though. I was absolutely, undeniably lost.
"You're looking for solutions to problems you'll never understand; you'll find answers to questions you'll never even think to ask. The important thing for you to remember is that you must find your own way. The individuals who have provided this object to you insist that our assistance to you remains limited to this final meeting, along with the information that you've previously been provided," He paused, reaching for his cigarette, which had burned halfway down to the filter in the time that he had been opening the package.
I didn't speak.
"You asked what's going on," he resumed. "You're searching for your missing girlfriend, a woman named Corentine. I can confirm that Synchro Systems does have a hand in her disappearance," he stopped again, looking out of the window, watching the rain run down the glass. "They also have a hand in her appearance."
"Her appearance?" I interrupted. My stomach turned over.
"When she arrived without explanation in your apartment's bathtub. Where do you think that she came from? How do you think that she got there? She doesn't remember, that's true. Why haven't you ever considered that you can't recall the evening before, either?"
I thought about it for a moment. It was a day like any other, except that it was the day before things began to change in my life. Something like the last day of a prison term. What about the night before? What did I do on the night before she arrived?
"I… I… can't remember the night before. I can't remember the week, or even the month before, either, really, but what does that even mean? Life's a blur sometimes. Life's boring and cyclic, and before I met her, life wasn't even worth living. There wasn't a single unique thing about my life worth talking about. So what? People forget their days all the time."
He smiled.
"I suppose that you now believe you've found a reason to live," he said, lighting another cigarette. He exhaled slowly, savoring it, appearing to enjoy each second of it.
"I have a reason for being here, but I'm not sure how this is helping."
Cor's entire past seemed like it was blank. We knew that it existed, that it had to exist, that the memories were locked in her head somewhere, buried down deep in the dark of her brain, and that they'd come up from time to time for air, taking a breath of life, and she'd speak them out loud or write them down, holding them close to her like prizes won by children. And they were her own victories, for how hard she fought to regain each and every one of them. A daily struggle.
I realized that my own lapse of memory was something totally different, though. I compared it to her amnesia as a point of reference only – because her amnesia was something that I had come to understand in a way. In her case, everything was lost, therefore only gain was possible. In mine, I didn't even know what I'd forgotten. I assumed that it was nothing important. Or better yet, things that I wanted to forget, things from the past I'd been trying to walk away from.
"We've asked you to meet us in different places, always at the last minute, as you know, and that reason should be obvious to you. I will not waste time explaining that. The questions that I've asked you and that you've asked yourself – those are the most important pieces of information that I can give to you, though you may never understand or appreciate them. In addition, I can give you this," He reached over and handed the object to me, closing my fist around it, but kept his hand on mine. His hand was cold to the touch. I wanted to pull away, to inspect the smooth round object in my clenched fist, but I kept my hand in place and didn't break eye contact with him.
"A second meeting with Partain. He still has connections within the company that may be useful to you. He can also explain the object that you hold in your fist."
He relaxed his grip and I pulled my hand away. Instead of looking at the object, though, I pushed it into my jacket pocket.
"Are you going to look at it?" he asked me, sounding somewhat surprised.
"Eventually," I answered, reaching for the door latch.
"Goodbye, then. You will not hear from us again."
"I'm not really sure that I believe that, yet," I said. "But like everything else, I'll have to take your word for it."
I opened the door and exited the car, stepping out onto the sidewalk, followed by a cloud of smoke that had been filling the car. He started the car and almost immediately began to pull out into the street. I watched him go, reaching into my pocket and withdrawing the round device, skeptical.
"I think that most of the major events that occur in life work on a level that is beyond one person's ability to change them. It's like the tides."
"So what's the point of anything if you can't make a difference in the end? If it's all going to happen in a set order, because if you're from a point forward from where we exist, from all of this," I made a sweeping motion with my hand, gesturing towards the darkness outside of the car, "then all of this is just a history lesson."
"All of this," she said, mimicking my gesture, "is exactly what the point of everything is!"
"The here and the now, you mean."
"Wherever that might be."
"It sounds like a cop out to me. It seems like we should be able to change things, that there isn't just one way that things can go. Time shouldn't be one string of events leading to another, unchangeable, while we just ride along with it."
"Don't forget that you're applying your own personal, human conceptualizations to a universal set of events. Just because something seems like it should be one way or another according to our human perspective of things doesn't mean that the universe operates that way."
"It's true. We tend to do that, don't we? One of these days we're going to wipe ourselves out because we think the entire universe revolves around ourselves," I said.
"Well, it hasn't happened yet, and until it does, you're all that matters," she replied, rolling her window down as she did. The warm, fresh air mixed with the recycled air-conditioned air inside of the car, and I imagined a miniature thunderstorm brewing inside the car with us.
She held her arm out of the window and made a kind of music with the wind as it blew across her hand.
"That's true, what you said, in a way," she said, pulling her arm back into the car a few moments later. "But you can't look at things from any other individual's standpoint, since you are who you are. You know what I'm trying to say?"
"Well, yeah, but I think you've missed the point that I was trying to make," I told her.
"You can only be you, you can only exist from all of the decisions that led up to where you're at today, because otherwise you'd be a different person, and then you'd not be able to have the same perspective on everything that you have today," she elaborated.
It made sense, but still didn't resolve the whole theoretical issue of a future time traveler changing events for someone else – or even more specifically, a future version of myself coming along and giving me advance warning of some situation in my life that was about to happen so that I could avoid it. It wouldn't change anything for the future version of me, but it would change the present version of me… altering my own destiny. Things could be changed, couldn't they? I could change myself, if I could travel in time, couldn't I?
When I asked her that, she shrugged her shoulders.
"Why not?" she asked. "There are a lot of mysteries out there, a lot of unknowns. From where the hypothetical time traveler from the future originated from, sure, this has all happened and is set in stone. However, from your vantage point or my vantage point it's all an open future; if you look at it THAT way, that's how it is. If you look at it THIS way, then that's how it is." She was done with the conversation, which had looped back over, folded over and again, like origami. It had become feedback.
Chapter 07
It was easy enough to convince
Partain to come along with me. He recognized me as soon as I cornered him inside of the convenience store.
"You again," he said, backing up a little. He ran out of space, bumping into the magazine racks behind him. He seemed a little drunk; he was somewhat disoriented.
"Again. We've got some important things to talk about, Partain," I began. "I can't have you leaving like you did the last time, either." I pulled my coat to the side, revealing the holstered pistol on my hip to him. He checked the handgun, and then looked back up into my eyes, his own eyes wide with disbelief. I glared at him.
"It's real," I warned.
"We can't exactly talk about things in here," he pointed out. "I'm not exactly in the right frame of mind for this."
"You're right," I agreed. "Good thing the bar's a short walk away. Let's go."
He hesitated a moment, possibly evaluating how serious I was about bringing him along with me. Before he could challenge me, I grabbed his arm.
"I don't have anything to lose," I said, gripping his arm as hard as I could, my intention not only to let him know exactly how serious I was, but also to leave a bruise.
He didn't answer, but started moving towards the door.
"I'm expecting you to make a break for it, or to yell for help," I told him as I removed the pistol from its holster. I pushed the barrel of the gun into his back with one hand and grabbed his shoulder with the other, leaning in close to his ear. I noted that gray hairs were taking over his head.
"Know that I'll kill you."
He stiffened in response to my threat, but kept moving. I holstered the weapon while we left the store, nodding to the clerk.
"You know where it is," I said, indicating the bar.
"Just beneath the surface," he cryptically replied, looking over his shoulder at me. "Just far enough that you can't quite reach it."
I shoved him once for good measure, but didn't dwell on his strange statement for very long. I wondered, briefly, how much he'd had to drink. I was also concerned that a passerby might figure out what was going on and call the police.
"You know that they made us go through with the treatment, too," he said. "They don't want us to tell anyone. They didn't want their secrets getting out into the wild."
"What I think is that you'll probably tell me anything that you think I want to hear just to get this gun off of your back, Partain. Keep moving."
We walked the rest of the way to the bar in silence.
Once we arrived, I didn't waste any time in getting to the point. I pulled the device that the man in the car had given to me out of my pocket and placed it onto the table in front of us.
Partain seemed surprised.
"I haven't seen one of those in a while," he said.
"What is it, exactly?" I questioned.
"It's a first stage prototype. One of the first series that functioned within the required parameters for further advancement. One of the first series of stable units," he paused. "I think. It's kind of hazy to me. As I said, they treated us, too. Said we signed up for it in our contracts, some clause buried beneath the paragraphs and pages that nobody ever really read," He drifted for a moment, lost in thought, then continued. "If I remember correctly, each of these units has a unique user assigned to it. There are records of the patient's treatments and procedures coded into the drive inside of this unit."
A waitress came by the table, and we ordered drinks, quietly.
"But we canceled that series," he added.
"Why? What happened?" I asked him.
"I forget. Something went wrong. People starting suffering from memory loss. Amnesia."
A chill went down my spine. Could this device be the key that I'd been seeking?
"What caused the memory loss, really, especially if the initial devices were stable? Did something set it off?" I asked.
"It's a side effect that occurred when a violent on unexpected shift would occur," he responded.
"An unexpected shift? What are you talking about?" I started to wonder more about Cor's mental stability than about how she'd entered the house, been taken from the house, or how we'd get her memories back, but only for a moment, because he interrupted my own wandering thoughts by continuing on.
"You're not going to like this," he said, chuckling to himself.
"I already don't like this, Partain." Where was he finding humor in this situation?
"We were working on cognitive and memory theories, experimenting with technology that we didn't really understand. We wondered if memories are hardwired into the brain or if they are mere chemical arrangements, like beads on a string… ones that can be altered and rearranged as one might see fit, or deleted completely." Partain drifted off, thinking of something, or maybe he just didn't care anymore. Maybe there were too many chemicals saturating his system; his mind soaking in a Synchro Systems induced stupor from which he never wanted to return. I wondered when he'd been exposed to one of the banned treatments and how effective it would be. I wondered if it was more or less effective than the treatment he'd used on Coren.
Our drinks arrived, and I swirled the ice in my glass around in circles. Suddenly, Partain continued, as if he'd never paused at all.
"I remember things so clearly, sometimes. Other times I remember things that don't make any sense, faces, strange names, and buildings. It's all random, jumbled, and it's hard to predict when a new memory is going to surface and what it will mean. And how I'll understand it."
"So you're saying that the treatment's not permanent," I suggested. Maybe there was hope.
"Yes. No. I mean, I remember this: That we'd basically concluded that the final result of memory manipulations was only semi-permanent, and that the original memories were fixed, like a movie, and that you could move them around in the brain as much as you wanted but you couldn't change anything: the brain would recompile the information in its original order, with time – since everything that had happened previously, through all of that time, had brought you to your present point, and the brain has to make sense of that. There seems to be a system of elimination at work in the mind, where false memories are rejected and purged from memory as they are processed. The human mind is incredible and it never stops working, compiling information, and solving riddles. At least until you distract it. Or unplug it. So we agreed to the treatment ourselves under the illusion that we actually had a choice in the matter, in the event that further testimony would be required in the fallout after the company's further collapse this week. It's not supposed to be permanent, though it's starting to feel that way to me now. But hey, what can we really know for sure?" He had creases in the dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn't slept in days. He seemed to focus on something far away again, and I wondered where he was going when his eyes glazed over like that.
"What happens if the brain can't figure out which series of events is the correct one?" I asked.
"Like yours?" He asked, turning to face me, looking me in the eye again.
"Very funny, Partain. Except I've never been through one of your procedures," I retorted, thrown off. I set my glass down. I looked away.
"Are you sure?"
There was a long pause. He was trying to trick me. I didn't even know if he was telling the truth about his own experience or if it was just a ruse to throw me off the right track. He was still a company man, after all. Maybe I was getting too close.
"So what is this, really?" I asked, indicating the device. I rolled it around in my hand, looking at the winding hands and dials inside of it. It really resembled clockwork, except that it seemed too small to be functional and it was in the shape of a sphere, like a marble, instead of a disc, like a watch.
"I mean, what did Synchro really do to those people, and how is it that you even had subjects to experiment on at all, and how did you convince them to implant this inside of their bodies, and what else should I know that you're not telling me about?" I stopped for a breath. I figured it was a reasonable enough series of questions considering I was the part
y member with the gun. It would have been unfortunate for him if I actually had to use it.
"Think of the device as having a personality of its own. The AI programs inside of it develop and mature as they age and they exhibit inclinations and directions of modifications that best adapt to the user's individual memory experience. Remember, the device in your hand is only a first-stage unit, a prototype, and was rendered obsolete and unfit due to the transcription errors. The final procedure series, the one we treated ourselves with just this week, relied on almost undetectable nanite swarms composed of mostly organic bases. They were designed to be eliminated from the body, naturally, once the treatment had effectively taken place: usually within just a couple of hours." He pointed to the bathrooms. "We wanted a much less invasive approach, and of course, an approach which facilitated deniability. You piss them out once they've done their work, and since they're mostly organic, you can't stop them, even with an electromagnetic pulse, so they're much less vulnerable to destruction than anything we produced initially. We'd effectively militarized it."
He seemed excited about his research, and at the same time, a bit too knowledgeable, considering he'd supposedly had his mind blanked out of pertinent classified information.
"You have an awfully good memory for someone who underwent the treatment," I observed. "I'd really hate it if you were lying to me about any of this."
"What reason do I have to lie anymore? Anything useful, like how to engineer the nanites, is just a blank spot in my head," he retorted. "If you don't believe me, shoot me. Or order me another drink. Alcohol accelerates the process, and I'm ready to forget you, friend."
We were drinking in a corner booth of the Rat and Parrot pub, somewhere in the outlying suburbs of London, spending one of our last nights in the city without a real plan of action, going wherever the roads and evening would take us.
She sipped a pint of beer and I ran my hands over the marred wooden surface of the tabletop, names and locations etched into the grain of the wood over countless nights by both drunken travelers and bored locals.
Earlier that day, we'd taken a train to Dover, where we'd had out photo taken with the notorious white cliffs rising in the distance behind us. On the train, she slept, head in my lap, while I read a magazine. Every now and then, I'd look out of the window for more of the same fields and boroughs, at the time a little eager to return to London, but also a little content to sit still, idle, enjoying the moment for what it was.