She doesn’t know what time it is, because the flat’s in complete darkness. Outside, on the walkway, she knows, a light comes on at ten and goes off at four. She looks around to see what room she’s in, but it takes her some time to adjust to the light. Total darkness, utterly pitch black. That’s enough: she fumbles for the spare-bedroom door, opening it and letting light in, the faded orange-grey light from the living-room window. She moves again and feels a sudden tug on her head: and on it, the Crown. She puts her hands up and feels the pads, each on a pressure point. Two on her temples. One on the top of her head, the lid. Two smaller pads at the back, towards the neck, hidden away.
No, she says. Her own voice sounds strange to her: distant and vague. She suddenly becomes aware of the hum, sly and driven, in the back of the room. She can’t take the Crown off because she might have pressed something. It could be just the screen that’s asleep, because the Machine – it’s the only part of the room that the light doesn’t catch – is definitely plugged in. She wonders how she’s done this all in her sleep. What’s making her do it. She knows that she won’t have dreamt of anything else: the Machine is all that she’s dreamed of for months now, in one way or another.
She edges towards it. They said, If you take the Crown off and interrupt a procedure, you can cause irreparable damage. (She wonders if that damage is worse than the damage that Vic has already suffered; if they’re related, these two kinds of damage, or somehow the same thing.)
She presses the screen and it flicks on, onto the home page again. COMMIT. PURGE. REPLENISH. She looks at the options, almost invitations. No recordings have been made: she hasn’t used the Machine yet. COMMIT. PURGE. REPLENISH. She wonders if this is it: this is what her mind has been setting herself up for. Telling her, somehow – and Vic’s situation has proven to her that the thing works in a way we can’t and will never understand – that she should press one of them.
Press COMMIT, and talk it through the plan. Press PURGE and remove that plan entirely, letting the Machine fill in the gaps for you. Like you never thought it in the first place.
Beth wonders if the plan – the whole thing, the Machine and Vic and the island and saving up and everything she’s dreamt up for after this stage – is something that she could get rid of in one go. Like pulling off a plaster, swift and sharp. It was always about the depth of the memory: how deep-set it was. With Vic, the hours and hours of interviews, before they even began taking memories from him, covered every aspect of his life. They took him back to his childhood, where he sat in the gardens of military-housing complexes, playing with his GI Joe, which he cast in scenarios with his friends: establishing zip lines with string, launch pads and aircraft carriers with cardboard boxes, theatres of conflict across perfectly mowed lawns. They asked him why he wanted to be a soldier and he said that he didn’t know. That it was just all he had ever wanted to be. So when they rooted for the memory, to pull every stem of it from Vic’s brain, that was where they had to go. Deep down, to childhood. Beth asked them what those earliest memories would be replaced with.
What does any childhood memory consist of in the first place? the doctor said. It’s all much of a muchness. Doesn’t impede his education or his learning. This is a different centre of the brain altogether.
So what does it get replaced with? Beth persisted.
Nothing, the doctor said. It’s one of the few times from a patient’s life that can be removed without replacement, because they remember so little of it anyway. She remembers worrying about that: that the Machine would be putting its own nothingness inside him. A computer-created void. Not just nothing, but like the screen, emulating black, to approximate a state of sleep. A created depiction of nothing. She tried to think about her own childhood: what she could call up was colours of things, and toys; an outfit, maybe, something that she wore regularly; a story told to her so many times about a trip to the zoo – about her father dropping her in a urinal, such a funny story, and she remembered it happening; but did she? Or did she actually only remember the story itself, recounted at opportune moments for embarrassment? And when she was older she remembered birthday parties and holidays and single events, but nothing that she could say was defining.
(That was a long-standing argument of the anti-Machine protestors: who were the creators of the Machine to dictate life and death? To dictate creation? When they protested with their placards, they decided to bring God into it, with the capital letter. They fought for the right to say that the creator defined the soul. That we were made in his image. This is the next stage, after clones and gene therapy: we are changing what that image is. Picking and choosing what we keep for ourselves. Only this time it’s not something physical, something transitory and visible. It’s something that defines who we are, as people. As children of God. They argued that the memory was tied to the soul. And if we could tamper with memory, how long before we could tamper with the soul?)
Beth looks at the buttons. Her finger raises, and hovers. If she could do it, what would she say? This stage, the recitation, always took it out of Vic, and he was so strong. She had to pick him up from the sessions. She had to cradle his body, helping him from the car to the living-room sofa after the worst of them. When they took the deepest parts.
She hears her bedroom alarm in the other room. She pulls her finger away from the screen.
I could do it, she tells the Machine. Like she’s warning it. Like, if she did, it would somehow cease to exist.