Below the introduction to a new Novella - out on Kindle this Autumn
‘Hello Garden’
The cover of the
small book is blank bar the title; my name. It is embossed in old fashioned
type, the letters dig into the creamy cartridge paper. Like the front page of a
movie script trying too hard. A smudge of lipstick smeared across the front like
a butcher’s thumbprint. The red makes me feel uneasy. An omen in a real library
or a deliberate message here in the depths of the new unreal.
Then I open it
to the greeting. There on the first page the words whisper to me.
‘Hello Garden.’ Two
words are there, printed stark against the white page that doesn’t exist in the
library that cannot be.
I can hear a voice
say my name. I can hear her voice.
She knows I am
here. The web vibrates and draws her in.
‘Hello Garden.’ The voice like dates and
caramel.
I turn the page
and memories I have forgotten rise like floodwater. I am condemned.
It had all
started this morning so simply, so peacefully.
Forgive me, but
I want you to understand before I go on, even in this prehistoric medium. Words
on a page, typed with my own fingers: mechanical, abrupt. I will write it as it
happened. I cannot think in any other way. So ‘I am’, not ‘I was’. That’s the
hope for now.
In my present world
to experience in the past is to be unconnected. Everything I feel, everything I
experience I do in real time. If I engage it is immediate, if I learn it is as
if I was there unless I am searching some long lamented archive with my
fingertips.
My mind has been
altered so my memories are experiences I access as readily as a file on a
computer to be played again and again. Like a teenager’s favourite, tortured
track repeatedly pounding from behind a bedroom door.
In the twenty
third century the world is here and now and at once. The past, present and
maybe future are concepts that are slowly dissolving from language and from
understanding as brains connect to the ever growing homogeneity of humanity.
This is my
lesson. This is my punishment. I have been left my memories to access as I
please, but their recollection must be transcribed, hammered out as interpretation
rather than real; my fingers bruising themselves against a typewriter in my personal
prison.
I have been
reduced, my thought process redacted.
You could not
comprehend it, not until you have experienced it.
To have the
world in your mind and to then be separated; it is a death and I am in my own private
hell.
All I have is my
memory and I will give it to you again, until she is happy, until she sees fit
to release me to the universe once more.
I begin again
and hope.
I wake in the
usual way. My internal clock rouses me from REM sleep at the optimum point.
Eyes open, moist, alert: I see my ceiling: corniced in a Victorian style, but
stark white. The newsfeed scrolls across the bottom of my vision in pale blue
and the messages wait in the top right. The information sits deep in my
periphery, floating icons an arm’s length away, unless I consciously retrieve
them to my foreground with a flick of my eyes or hand.
The pale green
bulb telling me I have messages flashes the figure three and I lie back on my
Japanese style bed, using my fingers to scroll through them like a cat batting
at imaginary yarn. Two from my finance manager who wants me to invest in books.
I chuckle
without sound. As no such thing as a book has been printed in fifty years the
first edition market has erupted and there’s a twentieth century First edition
Rowling he thinks we can get a share in. Putting my resources in printed paper
is as crazy as putting them in paper money. I watch the first video message. His
face appears as if he were before me, floating in a hazy facsimile of a chaotic
office. I marvel that in an age of complete disclosure he still sends video
messages from a rundown apartment amidst piles of papers. He is good, but he’s
not image conscious. I delete both and add a note to my calendar to call him next
week before storing the memory of the call.
The last message
has no return address, no content other than a time. I don’t need to look at a
clock. An internal chronometer tells me all I need.
I have twenty
minutes before potential new employers make contact.
More than enough
time for coffee.
I stand, stretch
and walk to the kitchen counter to go through the physical routine of preparing
an espresso. My apartment is vast and without walls: white minimalist furniture
and cupboard spaces seamlessly hidden. My kitchen is shiny white enamel with
only the barest obsidian touches. The counter sits flush against the wall and a
single stool grows organically from the floor before a small island that leaves
me leaning on a view out across the New York skyline through floor to ceiling
windows.
The espresso
machine is new, I could operate it with a single command, but I remember the
old way. I remember the steaming two tone machines and coffee houses with
cranking baristas working magic as they produced delicate cups of foaming oily
blackness: crema with the aroma of history and travel. It makes me think of a
moment I can’t remember.
I sit down and
stare at the jagged skyline raising the white cup and dark sticky wake-up to my
mouth, breathing in the memory. This happens to me more often than not.
Our brains are
connections. Synapses from recognising the smell run a signal all the way to a
memory that has an association. For me sometimes the memory is just not there;
saved instead in a data file, safe from outside eyes, freeing my mind for other
things. Every time I smell coffee it hits one of those dead ends and instead my
memory ends in a small warning message, a red dot appearing in my periphery.
The person, the event that it wants to run to is set in a series of ones and
zeros locked safe in a separate drive. For most memories it is just in the hard
storage surgically implanted into my brain, but for some memories the external
drives need to be used. Locked safe away from me, they are the things that even
I don’t want to know.
It takes a while to get used to. But the
universe is just too big now. For any sane person to live and work and interact
in the modern world you have to file away what you don’t need.
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