no_memory #27

no_memory

#27

by Stanley Lieber

But not for us. let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?

For Ralph, the experience had been far from routine. First, the client had sent him into the field without providing proper location data. He’d spent the entire first morning getting himself oriented—that is to say, getting himself pointed in the right direction relative to the silo, wherever that ended up being located. Then there had been the hike across the desert. His gear had gotten clogged with sand.

"Well, the eggheads swear that the sun isn’t burning coal," he heard Thomas insisting.

"Accurate," he heard Piotr reply.

These guys hadn’t changed.

But hey, wait a minute. What were they doing out here? This hadn’t been mentioned in the brief.

Ralph found himself unprepared. Gradually, the impromptu reunion of old schoolmates extended into weeks, and then months of intense questioning, deep below ground in the silo. Old hands at the question and answer game, they certainly had a lot to catch up on. But lately Ralph was starting to question the questioning itself. He’d met a new transfer named Jerrymander who was nervously filling his head with all sorts of confusing ideas. For one thing, why had a facility such as this been located on Mars, of all places? Jerrymander seemed to know a little bit about everything, which made him especially useful to a self-confessed idiot like Ralph. But somehow he’d still managed to find himself confined here, sharing a six-by-six cell with, well, a self-confessed idiot like Ralph. It was perplexing.

And there were additional questions. Why was everyone pretending that Super-Sonic was a medical doctor? Wasn’t that illegal? Ralph didn’t know for sure, but he suspected it might have something to do with tax shelters. Maybe the whole silo was a tax shelter, for that matter. Baffled, he bowed his head to pray.

There being no God, it was a toss-up as to whether or not there was any point to Ralph’s prayers. But things did start to get—slowly—better. Maybe he was developing a tolerance for pain, or maybe he was was just getting used to the routine. Whatever the cause for his relief, he was grateful. He crossed himself and dropped to the floor to commence his first set of reps.

Mornings were usually spent working on the fundamentals. Who was he, and how did he know for sure? How did he know that he knew? Was identity itself ultimately a source of friction harmful to social progress? This bit he usually sailed through with little difficulty. It was easy: he was Ralph.

But on and on the workout would grind, and the nagging voice in his head would continue to whisper: could that ever be enough?

Shut up, he would hiss between reps.

"Field trip around the sun," Piotr said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the triangular pink ship who was also his mother.

"Psst. He means that literally," Thomas said out of the side of his mouth.

Ralph got himself up.

Thomas placed a gloved hand on Ralph’s shoulder, pulled hard. Ralph collapsed involuntarily into the dust.

"Not so fast, dipshit. You’ll never leave this place alive."

And for all his training, Ralph never did.

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