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‘That’s the definition of the future!’ Thomas’s voice betrayed frustration. ‘The past has happened. It is recorded. We all remember what happened yesterday. The future has not happened. It is not recorded anywhere and we cannot know it.’
‘Isn’t that tautology? Remembering is the recollection of the past. The past is that which can be recollected. Well let me tell you that I am unusual among people in being able to remember what has not happened yet. And the distinction between past and future seems less important than you might imagine.’
Thomas stared at her. He assumed madness.
‘For you, the present is easy to discern because it is simply where memory stops. Memories hurtle out of the past and come to a halt in the now. The present is the rockface at the end of the tunnel where you gouge away at the future.’
There was still no one else in the library. They talked naturally, loudly.
‘I, on the other hand, was born with all my memories, rather as a woman is born with all her eggs. I often forget where the present is because it is not, as it is for you, the gateway to the future. My future is already here.’
‘So tell me, if I am to believe you, what I am going to do tonight, when I leave this library.’
‘You make a common mistake. I didn’t say that I know everything that will ever happen. I said only that I already possess all my memories. (And they run out in so short a time! I have lived through nearly all of them, and now there remain just a few crumbs in the bottom of the bag.) Still, I do have more memories of you.
You will spend your life in the realm of the past You will fail entirely to keep up with the times But your wealth will make your father seem poor A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines.’
Thomas thought over the words.
‘What does all that mean? Can you explain?’
The old woman gave a flabby chuckle.
‘Surely you can’t expect me to tell you more than that? Isn’t it already encouraging enough?’
She put the lid on her lunch box.
‘Anyway. It is time for me to take my leave.’ Her possessions found their way back into her bag and she stood up, slowly and uncertainly. ‘But I have just remembered what will happen to you tonight. My mind is more blurred than it once was. You are going to have an encounter with Death. Don’t worry–you will survive.’ She smiled at him–almost affectionately–and departed.
Thomas could not return to his books. He sat for a long time reciting the woman’s words to himself and wondering about his future. He left the library in a daydream and wandered home. Full of his thoughts he rang at the wrong bell. A hooded figure answered the door, black robes billowing around its knees and only shadows where its face should have been. The figure carried a scythe. Made of plastic. Thomas remembered it was Halloween.
Not long afterwards, Thomas’s father received a big promotion. He worked for a small but thriving investment firm in the City that had made a name for itself in private financial services. He had joined the firm twelve years ago from Goldman Sachs and had from the outset consistently delivered better returns to his clients than any of his peers. Tall and attractive, with an entirely unselfconscious sense of humour, he also had a talent for entertaining the high net-worth individuals that were the firm’s clients. Now the board had asked him to take the place of the retiring managing director. He had agreed unhesitatingly.
In celebration of this advancement, Thomas’s father took the entire family to the Oxo Tower for dinner. They drove down from Islington in the car, crossing over Blackfriars Bridge from where the floodlights on St Paul’s Cathedral made it look like a magnificent dead effigy of itself. The restaurant was a floating cocoon of leather and stainless steel with lighting like caresses, and their table looked down over the row of corporate palaces that lined the other side of the Thames. Thomas thought his father looked somehow more imposing even than before. His mother had put on a new sequined dress and talked about the differences in the dream lives of modern and ancient Man as described in the book she was reading about Australian Aborigines. Champagne was poured. They all clinked glasses.
‘So here’s to the new boss,’ proclaimed Thomas’s father.
‘I’m so proud of you, darling,’ said his wife, kissing him on the cheek.
‘I can tell you boys: investing is a great business. A great discipline. It forces you to become exceptional. Most people are just interested with what’s going on now. Getting a little more, perhaps. But basically turning the wheels. When you’re in investment you have to be completely sceptical about the present, aware that there is nothing that cannot change, no future scenario that can be discounted. You exist on a different plane, predicting the future, making your living by working out how other people will be making their living tomorrow. And not only that, but making that future materialize by investing in it. There’s no sphere of knowledge that’s not relevant to this job. It might be water, it might be toys; it could be guns or new kinds of gene. The whole universe is there.’
His wife looked lovingly at him through mascara-thick lashes. Sculpted starters were brought that sat in the middle of expansive plates and seemed inadequate to the three brothers.
‘So tell me, boys–you’re all becoming men now–what is it you’d like to do with your lives? What is your ambition?’
The eldest spoke first.
‘Father, I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I think after I’ve finished at the LSE I’d like to get a couple of years’ experience in one of the big management consulting firms. I think that would give me a broad exposure to a lot of different industries. Then I can do an MBA–maybe in the US. At that point I’d be in a really good position to know what direction to move in. But what I’d really like to do–I say this now without much experience–is to run my own business.’
‘Sounds good, son. Make sure you don’t get too programmatic about things. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come at really inconvenient times. If you’ve planned your life out for the next twenty years you may not be able to make yourself available for them. Next!’
The second son spoke.
‘Father, I want to work for one of the big banks. The money industry is never going to be out of fashion. I can’t see the point of working in some shoe-string business for just enough to live on. The only respectable option to me seems to be to work damn hard and earn serious money–and retire when you’re forty.’
‘Well I’m forty-nine and I haven’t retired yet! Remember that it’s not enough simply to desire money very much. You have to be good at earning it. But I’m sure you will be. So finally to young Tom. What about you?’
Thomas looked around at his whole family, his eyes glinting with champagne.
‘I will surpass you all,’ he said. ‘I will make you all look like paupers.’
The paterfamilias smile vanished.
‘Oh really, Thomas. And how are you going to do that?’
‘You will see. One day you will see my mountain of jewels.’
His father’s voice became unpleasant.
‘Thomas, I’m just about sick of your stupid talk and your irresponsible, lazy behaviour. How dare you talk to me like that when you haven’t got the first idea of the world–especially on a night like this!’
His mother continued.
‘Your father and I never stop condoning what you do, tolerating your insolence and absent-mindedness. But sometimes I think we go too far. Do you realize who your father is? He is not just some average man who can be talked to like that. I don’t know how a member of your father’s and my family came to act like you. Think like you.’
Thomas’s brothers looked under the table. Waiters glided around in practised obliviousness. ‘Sometimes the future is not just an extension of the past according to rules we all know,’ said Thomas. ‘Look at revolutions, the collapse of empires. I think that something will happen to all of you that you have not even thought about. And you will not have devoted one minute of your lives to preparing yourselves for it. I don’t even know what it will be. But I know it will happen.’
The silence that followed was the silence of Thomas’s father’s rage. When he spoke it was with a self-restraint that burned white.
‘Thomas, when we go back home tonight I want you to pack your things and get out of our house. I will not have some mutant element in our home. Our family will not be abused by someone who is ungrateful, someone who likes thinking about the destruction of his brothers and parents. You will get out. Do you understand?’
Thomas nodded slowly, amazed and aghast that things had gone this far.
His father left the table and did not come back for half an hour. No one spoke as they drove home.
The family went to bed with raw feelings and empty stomachs. Thomas’s mother whispered to him that they would discuss all this in the morning. But Thomas could not bear the idea of waiting for such a discussion. He lay still until he could hear no movement and then silently got up, packed some clothes by torchlight into a school sports bag, and crept downstairs. He took two antique silver picture frames he had once helped his father choose for his mother’s birthday in a gallery on Ladbroke Grove, a gold pocket watch that was on display in the drawing room, and his father’s state-of-the-art SLR camera that had lain untouched in its wrappings for the last year. He disabled the burglar alarm, undid the locks on the heavy oak front door, eased it open, and stepped out.
The moon was so bright that the streets seemed to be bathed in an eerie kind of underexposed daylight that was even more pellucid for the absolute quiet. Insomniac houses and Range Rovers blinked at each other with red security eyes. Thomas wandered aimlessly, up to the point where gentility broke and the streets opened up around King’s Cross station. He bought a bag of greasy chips in an all-night kebab shop and sat in his coat on a bar stool at a narrow strip of tabletop looking out through his own reflection at the sparse traffic of taxis and night shelter regulars. He studied a much-faded poster of Istanbul hanging on the wall next to him, the skies above the Hagia Sofia unnaturally turquoise and the cars on the streets forty years old.
He left and wandered aimlessly around the station. It was late November, and morning came before the sun. Timetables took hold again as commuters arrived in waves and departed in buses and taxis. Eventually it grew light, and the shops opened.
Thomas went to a pawn shop. He removed the photographs from the frames and placed his items on the counter. The shop owner offered him £2,000. At the last minute he decided to keep the camera, and took £1,750.
Next to the pawn shop was an advertisement for a room for rent. Thomas called the number from a phone box; a woman came downstairs in her slippers and showed him up to a single room overlooking the station. He paid her £600 for the deposit and first month’s rent and closed the door behind her. He sat on the bed and looked at his photographs. One was of the wedding of his mother’s parents, both of whom had died before Thomas was born. The other was a studio portrait of the same couple with a baby–his mother–in a long white christening robe. Between the two photographs the man had developed a long scar on his right cheek that Thomas had never noticed when he had looked at them before.
For several days Thomas walked everywhere in the city taking photographs of his own. He went to the sparkling grove of banking towers that sat on the former dockyards among the eastern coils of the Thames and took pictures that were rather desolate. He took photographs of pre-Christmas sales in Covent Garden. He photographed Trafalgar Square at 4 a.m.
He called his mother to say ‘Hello’. She was frantic with fear and pleaded with him to come home. He said he would at some point.
One day he was sitting having lunch in a cheap sandwich shop in Hackney. A woman sitting at the table next to him asked, ‘Are you a photographer?’ He looked at her. She gestured towards the camera.
‘Not really. I take pictures for fun.’
‘What do you take pictures of?’
She wore lithe urban gear that looked as if it had been born in a wind tunnel.
‘I don’t really know.’ He had not talked to anyone for several days and felt awkward. He thought for a moment. ‘I am trying to live entirely in the realm of the past. Trying to take pictures of what there was before.’ He looked at her to see if she was listening. ‘But I don’t seem to be able to find it. Sometimes it’s not there anymore. And sometimes when it is there, I can’t see it.’
She looked at him inquisitively.
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Do you need a job?’
‘Actually I do. I have no money.’
‘Can you keep secrets?’
‘I don’t know anyone to tell secrets to.’
‘Come with me.’
She led him to an old, dilapidated brick building with a big front door of reinforced glass that buzzed open to her combination. They stepped into a tiny, filthy lift and she pressed ‘6’. They were standing very close to each other.
‘I’m Jo, by the way.’ She held out her hand. He shook it.
‘I’m Thomas. Pleased to meet you.’
The lift stopped inexplicably at the fourth floor. The doors opened to a bright display of Chinese dragons and calendars. Chinese men and women worked at sewing machines to the sound of zappy FM radio. The doors closed again.
On the sixth floor they stepped out into a vestibule with steel walls and a thick steel door. There were no signs to indicate what might lie inside.
‘Turn away please,’ said Jo.
He turned back to face the closing lift door as she entered another combination. He heard the sound of keys and a lock shifted weightily.
‘OK. Come on.’
He turned round and followed her inside. Computer lights blinked in the darkness for a moment; Jo pulled a big handle on the wall and, with a thud that echoed far away, rows of fluorescent lights flickered on irregularly down the length of a huge, empty expanse. The floor was concrete, speckled near the edges with recent whitewash whose smell still hung in the air. The large, uneven windows that lined one wall had recently been covered with thick steel grills. Near the door stood three desks with computers on them and a table with a printer and a coffee maker.
‘Have a seat, Thomas. Coffee?’
‘Yes please.’
She poured two mugs.
‘We are setting up probably the most extraordinary business you will ever encounter. I’d like your help and I think you’ll find it exciting. Your interests will qualify you very well for the task and I’ll pay you enough that you’ll be satisfied. I will need from you a great amount of effort and imagination–and, of course, your utter secrecy. OK?’
He nodded.
‘Right. About twelve years ago there was a round of secret meetings between the British and American intelligence agencies. They convened a panel of visionary military experts, sociologists, psychologists, and businesspeople to look at new roles that the agencies could play in the future–particularly commercial roles. It was felt that organizations like the CIA were spending vast amounts of money on technology and personnel and that it should be possible to make some return on that investment–in addition to their main security function.
‘The most radical idea to come out of this concerned the vast intelligence databases possessed by the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and a number of other police and military organizations and private companies. As you know, most of this information is collected so that security forces have some idea of who is doing what and antisocial or terrorist activities can be thwarted. One of the social psychologists suggested, however, that there might be a very different use for it. He pointed out that average memory horizons–that is, the amount of time that a person can clearly remember–had been shrinking for some time: people were forgetting the past more and more quickly. He predicted that memory horizons would shrink close to zero in about twelve years–i.e. now.
‘I won’t go over all the research and speculation about what kind of impact this mass amnesia would have on the individual, society, and the economy. But one thing became clear: the loss of personal memories would be experienced as a vague and debilitating anxiety that many people would spend money to alleviate. Our databases of conversations, events, photographs, letters, et cetera, could be repackaged and sold back to those individuals to replace their own memories. This would possibly be a huge market opportunity for us. It would also serve a valuable social and economic function in helping to reduce the impact of a problem that was likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in psychiatric treatment and several billions in lost labour.’
Jo took a sip of coffee. ‘Is this making sense?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘We started with a small group of people and started to record everything they did. We looked at what systems we had available and invented new ones. We put cameras absolutely everywhere. We developed technologies that recognized an individual’s voice, face, handwriting and everything so that the minimum human intervention was required to link one person’s memories to each other in a single narrative. Gradually these systems were expanded to cover more and more people. We finally reached 100 per cent coverage of the populations of the US and UK around nine years ago, and we have been working with partners in other countries to gather similar data there too. This is the largest collection of data ever to exist. We will be able to give our future customers CD-ROMs with photographs of them getting on a plane to go on holiday, recordings of phone conversations with their mother, videos of them playing with their son in a park or sitting at their desk at work…It will really be a phenomenal product.
‘Now we’re ready for all that work to pay off. We have the stuff to sell. We’re working with an advertising agency on a campaign to launch it in the next few months. We just need to work out a few final details. That’s where you come in.
‘You see there is one issue we didn’t think about very carefully when we started this project. Some memories, of course, are not pleasant. We are making all kinds of disclaimers about the memories we are selling, but we would still like to minimize the risk of severe psychological trauma caused by the rediscovery of painful memories that had been lost. There’s no point selling bad memories when we know what kind of an impact they will have on individuals’ ability to perform well in the home and the workplace. So we want to take them out.
‘This is going to be a massive job that calls for someone with your unusual empathy with the past. What we need you to do is to go through the memories manually and produce a large sample of the kind we’re talking about–the most traumatic memories. We will analyse that sample and find all the parameters that have a perfect correlation with memories of this sort. Then we can simply run a search on all our databases for memories matching those parameters and delete them. But we need to go through a lot of memories to get there. The statisticians tell us we need a sample of not less than twelve thousand traumatic memories in order for the system to be perfect.’
Jo stopped talking. Thomas said nothing. The idea was so far-reaching that he did not have an adequate response.
‘Do you have any questions?’
He searched within himself for the most urgent of his doubts.
‘Assuming that everything you’ve said is true–from the shrinking memory horizons to this massive database of memories–and it still seems rather incredible–I can see why people might want to come to you to retrieve some of the memories they have lost. That makes sense. But isn’t it only fair to them to give them everything? Who are you to edit their memories for them? They are a product of the bad as well as the good, after all.’
‘Thomas: we are not making any promises of completeness. We are providing a unique service and it’s totally up to us how we want to design it. It has been decided that we are not prepared to sell just any memory for fear of the risk to us or our customers. That’s that. Any other questions?’
He could find only platitudes.
‘What is the company called?’
‘Up to now we’ve been working with a codename for the project: Memory Mine. That name will no doubt fade out as the advertising agency comes up with a new identity for us.’
A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines went off in Thomas’s head. Was this what the old woman had been talking about? Was this where the prediction was supposed to take him?
‘So are you going to do it?’
‘I think so. At least–Yes.’
Thomas began work the next day. Each morning he would arrive at the office in Hackney and he and Jo would sit in silence at their computers at one end of this huge empty space. He would wear headphones to listen to recorded phone calls and video; the room was entirely still.
‘We have short-listed around a hundred thousand memories that you can work from. They’ve been selected on the basis of a number of parameters–facial grimacing, high decibel level, obscene language–that are likely to be correlated with traumatic memories. It’s a good place to start. Within these you are looking for the very worst: memories of extreme pain or shock, memories of unpleasant or criminal behaviour. Apply the logic of common sense: would someone want to remember this? Think of yourself like a film censor: if the family can’t sit together and watch it, it’s out.’
Some were obvious. A woman watches her husband being run down by a car that mounts the pavement at high speed and drives him through the door of a second-hand record store; two boys stick a machete into the mouth of an old man while they empty his pockets and take his watch–a sign in the video image says Portsmouth City Council; four men go to the house of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to collect a loan–when he can’t pay they shoot him in the knees; the police inform a mother by telephone that her daughter has been violently raped while taking a cigarette break from her job as a supermarket cashier and has almost died from loss of blood.
