In private correspondence, someone suggested: in a fascist society with mind-reading technology, rebels can selectively erase memories to evade detection; but struggle with reindoctrination and personal connection
You can tell things about a culture from its fetishes. What it fears, what it covets, what it forbids.
The shadow of the Huang-Bodrick tube lies heavy on the furtive pseudonymous message boards of the Nation’s internet. Almost all pop-cultural depictions of it are wrong, of course — for screenwriter convenience, or for delicate Made with the Assistance of the Interior Regulatory Department obscurity-through-official-consultation reasons. Actual production tubes are neither the size of a car, nor smaller than a pistol; they need more power to run than is possible for a standalone handheld device, but considerably less than a hijacked power station; they cannot be made to extract nor excise precise, isolated, single memories, nor induce a particular window of mass retrograde amnesia in an entire, otherwise unaffected, city block.
(A sufficiently large and high-powered tube certainly can do something to an entire city block. But you cannot openly say the words Jefferson Square within the plaintext enclosure of the Think-of-the-Children internet; and if you had anything lawful to say you wouldn’t be seeking encrypted means of saying it, citizen.)
In the midnight silence of her own home, with exterior doors locked and the bedroom door, for the knowingly-illusory sense of additional psychological safety it gives, Rowan types, from memory, the lengthy gibberish address of a website, suffers the garish cyber-neon glare and huge knife-edged quasipixels of 8-bit nostalgia is my graphic design passion, clicks down through navigation links as mystifyingly labelled as a theme restaurant being cute about gendered restrooms.
The discussion forum is low-traffic, and of a quality that veers wildly from borderline illiterate to obviously disordered word soup to prose of heartbreakingly cruel beauty. Conspiracist ramblings to defiantly sniggering grad student Any medical or engineering school student knows there’s no black art to psychoelectronics; you can build a H-B effector in your kitchen— to erotica.
(You can build a Huang-Bodrick tube in your kitchen. It helps enormously, of course, to be the rich child of rich parents, in a medical or engineering school, with access to the materials without being put on a watchlist. You cannot build the analysis backend in your kitchen to read from the effector; but you could certainly press the warmed beam-forming end of the tube against someone’s head, ask them to concentrate on a conceptual anchor, and spend a few minutes unweighting the memory associations tied to it.
(Anchor concepts, like the corner patterns in a QR code or radiotherapy alignment tattoos, are an affordance within the fuzzy soup of the analogue world to steer the intolerant precision of the machine. They teach them in school: reading, writing, ‘rithmatic, anchor visualisation, free association, guided association, standardised association. What do you also think of when you think of—? What do you anchor this concept to—? Each of the Nation’s youth has constructed inside them a memory palace, to a plan devised by the Nation’s architects. Human messiness trained into easy reach of the machine.)
Rowan skips a post retreading the urban legends of people who built a home H-B tube for kink and gave themselves pseudo-dementia. (Even if someone sincerely thinks they’re posting a true and useful safety warning, one has to assume that these boards are monitored, and some of the posters are probably plants, and that it’s not sensible to bring oneself attention by engaging with it.) She clicks open a newly posted work of fiction, palms damp already just from recognising the author’s username.
Rowan has been H-B profiled, of course, all through school to check her brain development and anchor calibration; during routine medical checkups — height, weight, H-B scan to check for degenerative neurological problems such as memory loss or terrorist sympathies — and for the usual random screenings, citizen number pulled randomly from the rolls and conveyed downhill through the Department for Social Restitution to her employer, taken aside to the manager’s office on arrival with the usual cluster of two or three random others, the Department man with his portable kit and clipboard and standardised questionnaire. Concentrate on your anchor concept for loyalty. Allow your mind to otherwise wander freely in a relaxed state. Mm. Mhm. And now your anchor concept for justice—
Reading this stuff feels — ugh. Frightening in simultaneously good and bad ways. A cotton-wool feeling in her brain, a pit in her stomach. Thinking about having your memories wiped is — it makes her nauseous.
She slides a hand down the front of her pajama pants. Cups herself. She hasn’t even read it yet, and—
It’s short and stark. First person. Someone secured — zip tied? — down, interrogated by a barely-described figure, unseen. Lies and omissions are impossible, with a Huang-Bodrick analysis directly pulling the truth from your brain, in parallel to whatever stumbles from your mouth. The character tries to lie anyway, tries to squirm around thinking about, properly answering, the question What do you know?
Nothing, the character tries to claim, but the interrogator is all-knowing, the H-B array omniscient. Punishes. Praises. Breaks them.
The Huang-Bodrick effector is bidirectional. It cannot write in the way it reads, despite decades of concentrated military research spending — despite the feverish imagining of the conspiracy theorists — despite equally fevered pornographic imaginations. Affordances for the machine can be trained into children to make memory examination a standardised affair, not requiring a bespoke interrogation and weeks of study; but the brain is too recalcitrantly individual, on a biological level, to simply fabricate new memories within it, conformant to the needs of the Nation, reflecting what is true and not merely what happened. No, but its bidirectionality can be used to erase. To weaken recollection. To de-link the web of associations that keep memories accessible within the brain. To fade and make elusive, to de-emphasise, to consign to personal irrelevance.
In the story, the recalcitrant character sobs within their restraints, under the skin-warming glow of the effector pressed to the back of their skull; and by the end, Nothing is the truthful answer, and the interrogator mercilessly rewards them, sick with already-fading yearning for the things they know they once knew, that were important enough to try to lie for.
Rowan comes, hissing through her teeth. Wipes sticky, shaky fingers on a tissue, cleans herself up. Lies in bed for a while, clutching a pillow to her chest.
Gets back up, in the reluctant knowledge she’s not going to sleep otherwise, and sends an email.
My favourite author’s back! Your new one is so good—
My favourite reader’s back! Glad you enjoyed it ;)
God, the thrill. Rowan’s fingers type out a reply almost before she can consciously catch up to what she’s doing; a day, a time, a trailing question mark. No place; implicit. Her head’s full of cotton wool.
She must have done her best to forget it, to forget her. This feels so dangerous. They met — once before? They — Rowan shivers, and memory is treacherous, free associated, out of control: hands gripping her hips, lips slick with each other—
She swallows and swallows and stares at what she’d done, what she already sent from whatever porn-addled, deliberately-interred reflex. Meet again? What was she thinking? She can’t — this feels illicit — she can’t have something that feels like she’s hiding it, needs to hide it; whatever would that look like next time she’s randomly pulled for a scan?
God, but an author of suspect erotica must have an even better grasp of the risks than Rowan; she needn’t embarrass herself worse by retracting the invitation, surely she’ll gracefully decline and Rowan can simply apologise and say she didn’t know what came over her—
There’s no reply to that, and Rowan doesn’t dare say more. Probably this is best; probably her slip is being gracefully passed over in a silence that makes it deniable, in hindsight, to both of them. Probably, probably —
—What if this is an implicit acceptance and she’s expected, how will she look, what kind of suspicious baiting manoeuvre will it resemble, if she doesn’t show? And how agonising, if she does and the other doesn’t?
Rowan owns a little apartment deep in the city, as well as her home on the far outskirts, left to her by an aunt. The Nation installed a plaque outside, commemorating so many decades in service of the Nation, the tireless, faceless, fungible heroism of emergency service workers, celebrated and unrewarded. It’s understood that this comes with responsibility, that one cannot simply sell a property so marked, that should it fall into unworthy hands, their possession of even such a humble monument to the spirit of the Nation would tarnish society; and so Rowan needlessly keeps it.
Her hands shake, unlocking the door. She stands in the tiny kitchen, clenching and unclenching her hands, feeling overdone in the nicest of her few dresses, preemptively humiliated. Her head is all cotton wool and déja vu.
The light knock on the door comes when she’s wound tight from anticipation and berating herself nonstop for thinking anything can or will or should happen, that the other will even arrive, that the other would want to. She opens the door, shaking.
“E-emily?” She stumbles rustily over the name, as if surprised to find she even knows it.
“Rowan,” the other — the author — Emily says. She’s smiling, eyes guarded.
“Sorry,” Rowan says, staring. “Sorry. I don’t — I don’t know what I was thinking. We did — we did this once before, and I — we must have decided it was too risky to do it again? I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” She swallows, gripping the edge of the door. “Your stories—” and she trails off, looking down.
“My stories,” Emily says, and visibly relaxes. When Rowan risks a glance up, she looks less wary, and somehow sadder. “Are you going to let me in?”
Rowan flushes, swings the door wide, ushers Emily past her.
It’s awkward, standing in the entryway of Rowan’s aunt’s empty apartment looking at each other; and then Emily shrugs out of her coat and Rowan takes it automatically, without asking, as if taking womens’ coats is a smoothly routine gesture for her; puts it on the hook, and without knowing what she’s doing finds herself pressing a kiss to Emily’s cheek in passing, gasping as her perfume hits Rowan like a sea-wave tumbling a toddler off its feet.
“How did I ever make myself forget you,” she whispers involuntarily, and Emily jerks back from her with eyes like polished steel, grabs at Rowan with hard hands, pushes her face-first against the door with her arm twisted behind her, grip iron around her wrist.
“What do you remember?” Emily hisses, and Rowan shakes like a leaf.
“Nothing!” she chokes. “I don’t — we did this before. Once? And I must have, I must not have let myself really remember because, because we must have agreed that the things we — it’s suspect to eroticise the Huang-Bodrick, we must have—”
“How much do you know and how much are you guessing to fill the gaps in?”
Rowan slumps as though someone has cut the strings on a puppet, face against the door. Of course. Of course; suspect doesn’t begin to cover it. She must have presented as unusual at a medical exam, and been eligible for corrections; no wonder Emily’s angry, no wonder her head’s full of cotton wool, she must have put her in so much trouble already, and for her deviant desire to peek through even after the procedure — oh, how could she have put Emily in so much suspicion again?
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and then a blunt and solid muzzle of warm metal presses against the back of her head and she gasps and stiffens.
“What do you know?” Emily says, quiet and firm.
“Nothing!” Rowan breathes, terrified. “Nothing! I didn’t mean to — I asked you here without even meaning to, I didn’t mean — you should just have told me never to contact you again, I don’t want to force you under scrutiny, I don’t — I just remember that we were here before, and we—”
She doesnt have words for that.
“—Were intimate?” she hazards, wobbling over it, raw honesty that can be so easily crushed by answering scorn that it had not, in fact, been an intimacy; just projection. Naïve fantasy fulfilment.
“Don’t lie to me,” Emily says, close by her ear.
“I’m not,” Rowan protests, and begins to cry.
Emily releases her wrist. Rowan stays put against the door, tears running down her face, until Emily turns her, hands gentle now on her shoulders, shows her a pocket-warmed coin between her fingers, touches her wet cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” Emily says. “I had to. I had to make sure that — I had to do that.”
Rowan sobs and reaches for her.
Emily’s hands stitch together, fleetingly, fragments. Memory; and what Rowan had thought were half-retained dreams or daydreams, or merely fantasies.
They sleep, tangled up.
In the night, Rowan stumbles half-asleep to the kitchen, fills and drinks a glass of water, re-fills it to put on the bedside table. Hesitates. Quietly lifts the flap of Emily’s handbag.
It’s relatively easy to build an effector. A handheld example can be powered from a fistful of lithium-ion cells; low power and unrefined control systems can be compensated for with simple time, a weak and unfocused area of effect trained on the brain for long duration. Perhaps a gentle hour to unravel the knots of recollection while someone sleeps, in comparison to the quick minutes of the government scalpel. And who’s to say that the gentle cotton-edged fog left behind isn’t less likely to be stumbled over, worried at, than blatant discontinuities? People are very good at explaining themself to themselves.
Rowan lowers the flap of the bag and returns to bed. Emily is sleeping; Rowan thinks Emily is sleeping.
Rowan allows herself to remember Emily mouthing against her skin, words perhaps not really intended for Rowan, or intended at all. You don’t know. You don’t know.
It would be dangerous to hold any memory of wondering what Emily’s hands have done.
Rowan turns her back in a way that could be trusting, fits herself against Emily, drapes an encircling arm back over herself. Settles her breathing. Lies still, in a way that perhaps Emily will think is sleeping.
She will lie still, she thinks, and concentrate on the appropriate anchors; hold the correct parts of her brain up to the quiet erosion of the machine.
