Possible new novel idea.

This is a short story or novel idea rough draft.  I'm not sure what it will become but I'm pretty proud of this opening.  Again, rough draft so it has a lot of unnecesary words in it and some trimming that could be done.   So I'm aware of that, but I do like the ideas  in it:

THE

TECHNICIAN

I hate the way the image freezes on the picture of a fading child.   That sad picture of rolling waves that ebb and flow and attack the shoreline only to miss the child completely.  It’s a fabrication, something someone altered to make nice what was once bitter and cruel.    What they don’t see is the child going forward in life and her eyes watching in disdain as her own life passes her by, for those three or four years.   She’s filled with resentment, but she’s tried to forget it.   Her mind has deteriorated and all she sees now is her child.  Fading away as a specter.   She doesn’t recall the moments when she started to fully hate him, and his stupid big eyed stare.   That genuine pathetic curiosity of the world.   She ignores it, but if I plugged my own mind in and thought hard I guarantee I’d see her looking back at me from the kitchen table.  Cross legged and dragging on a cigarette and emitting the smoke into rings that I was mesmerized with.   I could recall though that although she could do magic her eyes were devilish.   Smoke rings were the only thing that ever made my mother ethereal.   The last time, out of the very few times she ever touched me was when she squeezed my shoulder and leaned in to my ear, and said, “Do good.”  A slight pinch of her claws, and then a clack of a step, a heel – she loved to wear them – and a slamming door.    It was cold in that room, in that facility.    I was a puppy dropped on the doorstep of a farmhouse, never checking to see if a fire burned for the chimney or if water ran through the pipes.  Left where it appeared to resemble a house, a yard.  My mother.

I scroll the ball mouse and click to drag her imagery into the save file, uploading them into the tank.   Next to me her chamber moves a slight hiccup.   She’s convulsed in a minor way as they all do.  Minute and quick as if a probe in their heads wasn’t etching a copy to pass through the channels into the bank system.   If I wanted to I could scroll the mouse a little more, click on my grabber tool and skim around the recesses of her repression, comb away until some sort of sorrow emitted itself.   Instead, I click the power down icon, and the chamber squeezes out the cooling mist of oxygen reserves and the dome cover opens.   I hit the page button for geriatric services.   The business of memory storage had struck a chord the last twelve years as dementia and Alzheimer’s had increased exponentially.   People had begun to live their lives through screens and social media.   Their minds were prone to weakening more than they had ever been.   Soon, they couldn’t form memories properly, couldn’t contract the diseases of never forgetting, or else contracted the real diseases of forgetting everything.   My mother fell into that category.  As she began to stir she routinely turned her face toward me, as it lay there upon that silken pillow, and asked the question, “Did you find him?”

“’fraid not ma’am.”  I lied.   After all I was right there inches away from giving her that reunion she thought she so desperately wanted, but if that were the case why would she have someone fiddle around and make nice that which she wanted to know.  Of course, the altercation wasn’t recent, it was some long off thing she had done shortly after giving me to the foster system in order to diminish her guilt.   The boy in the image wasn’t even me.   I was a dark skinned Hispanic boy, a tuft of thick hair atop my head, and with tattered clothes.   Her new son was a shiny Caucasian with perpetual smile, his hair cut short and neat.   His clothes pristine and new.

Her name was Martha Reems, serial code: 2-2-56.  A Second generation client of a Cerebrum Depository.   It being one of the original buildings of the system.  A milestone in mind management.   Not just a storage facility – that was just the civilian application – but a research compound.  That was downstairs, and above my clearance grade.   It was nothing terribly sinister depending on what aisle the protesters landed on.   They saw memory storage a slight against natural degradation, and the will of their god.   Others saw it a perversion of nature, which was just another way of saying what the first people said.   Most batted for the same teams, but I had been down in the compounds when I was originally hired in.  A guided tour passed ceiled doors in glistening white hallways.   No one was screaming, no cadavers piled in cold storage.    Rows of computers, volunteers, and non-disclosure agreements.   It was perhaps twisted, but not vile.   Her name was Martha Reems, second generation donator.   She got to revisit the memories she wanted to see, and the depository got to map her synapses.   In exchange for her to see her own lies of the past and look at her glittered mistakes they got to take a pretty picture.  

What the nay-sayers never cared to admit, or to acknowledge was that because of said pictures, scientists could confer with medical professionals, and shape cures.  Every day new cures were being implemented, new tests were being done, concoctions concocted.   Slowly the damage of deteriorated brain diseases was being undone, yet not at too far off stages like that of 2-2-56.   No, her mind was passed the point of repair, but if the depository had come so far in curing mental breakdown what would be their motivation in helping sick old ladies live their lies?   Marketing strategies.   People liked to revisit their memories of course, if something particularly magical happened: a child’s birth, the engagement party or quite the popular choice was first sexual encounters.   I’d rather watch a million child births.   The system was mostly automated; I was a glorified button pusher.   Dragging dated hardware around to point and click and drag to trash cans and folders while people slept semi-comatose in shiny glass balls.   Technicians were a necessity.  No matter how much automation was pushed for, because machines are and always will be prone to breaking.   A loosening bolt here, a malfunctioning door.    Often we were there to simply make sure the clients didn’t get their gowns caught in the doors.   Nearly unnecessary.  

Most importantly though technicians watched the code.   Which meant we watched the memories.  There were hiccups with the little bridging claws, like needle and thread.  Weaving in and out of sweet spots in the brain and playing connect-the-dots with various associated memories.   What might have lit up a recollection of a lover’s final quarrel might also invigorate the first sexual touch, and vice versa, like word association.   These jumps were not made easily in the code, the computer had trouble determining priority no matter what scripted events we implemented based on our clients wish for that day.   I had to take my clients trust and be their fingertips.    But with Martha, I gave her plenty of scars.   Highlighting a memory would reveal its emotional resonance on a color spectrum, joy, hate, fear, sadness.    I perceived that she would have liked to visit as much biting sadness as she could, the kind people gritted and pushed through as the tears streamed down their faces.   Of course, they too had some control and she always brought herself back to me, but not me on that beach.  The bitch, my mother.

Cures abound, a long list of ailing clientele set to fall off the mortal coil, all these issues plaguing the fears of the stockholders.   That was when dream storage was born.   The bread and butter of the business.

Martha, my birther, got up out of the machine.   Sitting on the edge her bare ankles dangling a couple inches from the floor.   She coughs a little and reaches for a glass of water we always have ready for them – it gets terribly dry inside the dome.  “I’m not so sure this is working, I’m not so sure what I’m even doing here.”   She said it, just like she always did.  She was quite present right afterwards, the electrical charges in her brain stimulating enough to give her a relapse into normalcy.

“You know they say the more you go the better the chance you’ll figure out just what is you are looking for.    What else do you have to lose Martha.   Ms. Reems I mean.   You’ll be back again next week and we can look in another nook, in another cranny.   It doesn’t hurt.”   I tell her knowing full well the drain it has on the mental mind, its tiring, exhausting having probes poking in dormant places.  It excites the mind but then the forced open flowers begin to dwindle, and fade away.    And her condition, beyond repair, always a whole island missing when she comes back and I hoping as I do that not all islands will be gone.   I know that I’m killing her though, or assisting in her death at least.   The more I meddle the quicker she’ll go.  Not if I was a good little technician and followed my script, their clients are fine and content not to see everything, but I need to find myself somewhere in her altered history.

The doors open and snaps shut, and the nurse greets Reems, and gives me a nod that I’m free to go to the lounge till my next client arrives.  It’s a new client, a dreamer, and I must have my entrance interview before I’m allowed to work on him.   I hate that part.  I grab my manila folder from my desk and lock out my control console.  I look back at Martha when I reach the door and the nurse is leading her to the dressing scrim, and I like how weak and frail she moves across the room.   It also worries me, she could go any day now, die without telling me in her pretty little pictures why she would abandon me like she did, and then replace my face with some blonde-haired brat.  “Have a nice evening Ms. Reems.”  I say it like I mean it in that customer service play voice and leave the room so I don’t have to listen to her half assed response.