a tribute to false memories

Did they ever consider this?

Sure, cyborgization was a good idea. It gave mobility and sight and hearing to people who would have previously been crippled by unnecessary disabilities. It made our soldiers safer. Some people thought it would make them immortal, but ghost deterioration soon showed them. Still, for people like me, I guess it sort of did. 70% of my body was destroyed in a train accident. But here I am, walking, talking, writing this.

So, yeah.

But I bet those bright lights who brought the notion of the cyborg out of science-fiction and into medical reality never thought it would have these kinds of repercussions.

Technically, they call it an artefact. I have an appointment tomorrow to get it removed. Get my e-brain calibrated so that it doesn’t bug me anymore.

Every minute, waking or sleeping, there in my left hand, a holographic picture of a young woman. I don’t know her. No idea. They say it’s just a misfiring loop of electrons, that it happens sometimes. People get a glitch in their senses. Me, it’s visual. Some other guy heard a car horn constantly for three weeks until they fixed him. They say that normally it’s caused when an abnormal electrical discharge occurs while perceiving something. They say I must have held this picture in my hand once, even briefly, and it became a permanent fixture of my visual memory buffer.

They say that, so I guess they must be right. They’re the scientists, after all.

I’d remember her though, right?
Remember her face?

***

I wish I knew her name. I wish someone else could see her too. She feels like a ghost; I wonder if she’s alive or dead. Whose daughter, whose girlfriend, who?

I’ve gotten used to it – it’s been almost two months. These artefacts are getting more common – the secretary at the clinic said that people used to be able to get appointments faster than I did. She said they’re even looking to hire another doctor.

I’ve gotten used to it, her face staring out at me while I shave, brush my teeth. Every glance at my left palm shows her to me. Even in the mirror, like she’s a part of my body. My sense of proprioception has integrated her into what it thinks is me.

Me. I guess it makes sense – my brain had to reinterpret everything, after the accident. Most of me isn’t me anymore. My face got reconstructed. My left arm, most of my spine, my hips and both my legs are artificial. But they did a great job – even though I shouldn’t feel like myself, I do. I’m 70% cyborg, and it’s as if I was a normal man.

Except for her, of course. My little parasitic photograph.

I look at her again.

What’s your name?

I almost feel like I’ll miss her once she’s gone.

***

She was on the bus.

Screw the appointment, I had to go after her! You’ll understand, right? Two months of looking at her face every day, I couldn’t mistake anyone else for her. It was her. I’m sure of it.

I only noticed as she was getting off. The doors closed behind her and rushing there and battering on them didn’t help. I got out at the next stop, impervious to the dirty looks of the other passengers.

Ran like a fool down the street, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Dammit! I thought of showing people my hand, saying, Did you see this woman, but that was useless, no one could see her but me.
No one could see her but me. Could her appearance on the bus have just been another glitch? Was I going to start seeing her everywhere, if left untreated? Was this how people went mad?

I ran down a damp alley after the echo of footsteps. Came to a dead end. Of course.

Shopkeepers and landladies all got asked the same question. Me, the crazy guy, looking at my empty hand from time to time as I give them the description of a girl. Them, shaking their heads, or shrugging.

I’m an idiot. Missed my appointment, of course.
I called the clinic and rescheduled. Luckily, there’s a cancellation a week from now. This will be over soon.

***

I still can’t believe I saw her.

I try to make sense of it. Why yesterday, of all days? Was it a sign, telling me to not let go of her picture?

Easy to be superstitious, in a world like this. Robotics and medical advances just made it worse. Everything’s up for grabs now. Easy to pass from ghosts to ghosts. It’s possible to have a shell without a ghost in it – androids are the best example – so it makes sense that you could have a ghost without a shell. A specter. A wraith.

I’m staring at my hand a lot today, at work. Scanning her face for new clues. Maybe I saw her on the bus before. Maybe that’s how this started. Maybe I never consciously noticed, but she’s always been there…

But then why would my memory be of a holograph in my hand?

***

More and more, I’m thinking back to the day of the accident. Eight months ago.
My memories are patchy. They’re not really mine, technically, they got saved and then transplanted into a fancy new e-brain. Not the same circuitry that stored them in the first place. Everything from before the accident is a xerox of what it used to be.

So it’s possible that I lost some resolution, right? That some information got lost in the transfer?
Maybe I knew her before. Maybe she was my girlfriend… Or a coworker, or a relative. But she’s not at work, and no one’s been talking about her. My family hasn’t mentioned someone missing.

Even though I saw her in person last week I keep thinking she’s dead. I got used to it, I guess… Thinking that she died with me on the train, that I was carrying her memory as a kind of testament to someone who once lived, someone otherwise unremembered. Someone to be avenged, maybe.

It’s easy to be superstitious.

***

So my appointment is tomorrow. Again. It’s making me psycho. I’ve decided to skip work. I can’t deal with it. I don’t want to lose her once and for all.

I tried drawing her, keeping a snapshot of her face to keep forever. Angry – she should mean nothing to me, a parasite, a glitch. Why do I even care? Why the hell do I even care?

She’s in the same city as me. I’ve taken that bus every day and never saw her again. Was that my one shot? Is she gone? What if she left? What if she got killed that afternoon? I watch the news every day but she’s never on it. I guess that’s a good thing. I guess.

I’m going to walk through the city today and look for her. I’ve been wondering what her name might be – Chloe, or Alice, or Rebecca. Meredith or Sally or Vera. Hair that might be blond or red, a narrow face, a pointed chin, a sweet and simple smile. If I can find her, I will.

I bring my sketch with me.

***

I guess I’ll never know who she is.

I’m upset – it’s such a weak ending to my day, my week. I really though I’d find her. I wandered through the city thinking at every corner that she’d be there. Took that bus. Showed people my drawing.

Nothing, of course.
I shouldn’t have expected anything different than this.

I’m not sure why I ended up at the train station again.
Eight months ago, I bought a ticket here. I was going to visit my sister who’d just had a baby. We got thirty miles out of the city and then collided with another train. It was the first time since the high-speed was installed in this district that a mistake like that happened. The fact that two trains were using the same line was blamed on a glitch in the tracking system. The fact that we impacted at full speed, 150 miles an hour, was blamed on an electrical failure of the braking mechanism on the train I was on. The first car was almost pulverized. The wreck was spectacular. Eighteen people died, and twelve more ended up patched up like me.

I can see the sunset through the glass ceiling. Another train whizzes away.

I fold her picture into my coat pocket. I throw out my full cup of coffee and head back home.
No answers here either.

***

It’s been a year since an accident nearly killed me.  Two high-speed trains collided, killing eighteen and injuring dozens more; several weeks of staggered operations and adaptations brought me back from the edge of disaster, now mostly cyborgized, but able to reintegrate my job. Live a kind-of normal life.

In this age of heightened interconnectivity, why is it that we’re all so isolated? I feel trapped inside my body, even as my ghost can soar further than ever before, can virtually link with others, can access all it wants with little or no effort. Since I’ve become a little bit more than just human, I’ve been so lonely.

No, not quite that long. I only really started noticing a few months ago. Looking at the guys at work, the people on the street, on the bus, looking at them and wondering if they’re all as alone as me. I’ve taken to eating out at restaurants, trying to get someone, anyone, to look me in the eyes.

They say that there’s such a thing as false memories. That because of some electrical misfiring in your brain, you remember things that didn’t happen.

I wonder if there’s such a thing as false forgetting?

I feel like I’ve forgotten something important, something that never was. I spend the hours after work wandering the city, looking for it in the faces of people I meet.
In this age of constant communication, I feel we’d all get to know each other better if we just shut up.

Is the thing I’ve forgotten life before e-brains?

What did people do before they could hook themselves up in a network?
Why does this feel like I can’t reach out and touch anyone?

There’s a clinic that specializes in recalibrating e-brain circuitry, fixing glitches and so on. They might be able to take care of this feeling – this irrational unease that’s been growing in me, that I’ve lost an important connection. This sense of loss.

Maybe I’ll call them tomorrow.

(Ghost in the Shell fanfiction, but without any of the usual characters or story. Feedback especially welcome for this one – I’m not sure I like how it ends. ?)