Extracts

(Excerpt from the The Age of Self Primary)

The day every person on earth lost his and her memory was not a day at all. It couldn’t be slotted in a schedule or added to a calendar. In people’s minds, there was no actual event—no earthquake, tsunami, or act of terror—and thus whatever had happened could be followed by no period of shock or mourning. There could be no catharsis. Everyone was simply reset to zero.

This moment of collective amnesia could not be understood within any context because it was the context itself that had been taken away. There was nothing anyone could do to repair themselves because they didn’t know what was broken. Before the resetting, they had created for themselves lives of routine and were motivated to participate in the world because they knew where they had come from. They knew what they were capable of doing and clung on to the mistakes they’d made like the maps of dangerous roads they knew not to take. They were driven by their aspirations as well as the fears they’d built up over the course of their lives like solitary fortresses on the peaks of mountains. But with no recollection of their aspirations, no remembrance of their fears, they were not propelled at all.

And so everything stopped. Industry. Commerce. Politics. Religion. Technology. They could no longer remember what their gods had needed of them. They no longer knew how to use the machines they’d once made, let alone how to improve upon them. Money was of no use because the values of various notes, coins and currencies could not be designated. So they became loiterers. Ghostly wanderers, doomed to haunt a world that no longer belonged to them.

When a few memories did begin to filter back to them, gradually and in no particular order, there was, at first, a mood of hope. Some families drifted back together. Homes and towns were faintly remembered. People hoped that over time enough memories would return to remind them of what their purpose had been before the resetting. Their memories would show them the significance of the lives they were supposed to now resume. But even as memory upon memory slunk back in their minds—a familiar face, a friend, a place from their childhood, a talent and a job they had once done—the purpose of their existence did not follow.

Instead, as they hunched down, picking up each new memory like the charred and scattered remains of a burned-down house, they were filled with a new sense of despair. The despair of realising the things in their world did not add up to any whole, and that there was no meaning in any of it. All the things they’d been desperate to recall were little more than the trivial knick-knacks of a species that had not lost—in that one global moment—any meaning, but that had never had any real meaning to begin with …