Random Access Memories

“You’re not using all of your brain. Or even most of it, really.”

“Wow. Thanks,” Laura said, trying not to roll her eyes.

She had come to the strip mall office for a quick paycheck and wasn’t too keen on ethics or technical details, but the tall, toothy manager was already moving past her and onto his next point.

“It’s not personal. Nobody does. Now, the thing about people only using ‘ten percent of their brain’ is made up,” he said, pushing an informational pamphlet titled, GreyMatter and You! into her hands, “Don’t think of it like percentages—it’s more like, certain discrete processes, you know? Ninety percent of the time when you’re actively using your brain, you’re only using maybe twenty percent of the processes available to you. Does that make sense?”

“I’d like to think I use my brain more than that,” she said. “I did go to a liberal arts school, after all.”

“Perhaps. But how many days do you spend doing the same things, thinking about the same stuff?”

He had a point, especially now that she was living alone, sleeping next to an ex’s imprint on a bed and catching whiffs of his six-month old leftovers each time she opened the fridge. She felt like she was just going through the motions.

In answer, Laura looked down at the sweatpants she had been wearing for the last week straight and picked at a stain.

The manager cleared his throat, breaking the silence.

“Again, it’s not just you,” he said. “It’s everyone. There are endless swaths of grey matter that never get used. That’s why we went into business.” He extended a second pamphlet, this one titled: The GreyMatter History. Laura took it and thumbed through without looking.

“Just because portions of your brain aren’t being used, doesn’t mean they’re useless,” he continued, his voice taking on a compassionate tone that felt genuine enough. “In fact, neural connections are so fast that they’re the perfect tool for distributed random access memory functions. With our patented GreyMatter neural implant device, we take the connections that your brain isn’t using, and we use them to host our data for the duration of the information lease. Here, I think I’ve got—”

“I’m good on pamphlets,” Laura said, gesturing to the two already in front of her. The manager smiled tersely and moved on.

“The best part is that once we’re done, those connections become available to you, too. We shine up those old, unused synapses and make them into something you can incorporate back into your life. You can uncover things you forgot you could do, or memories you forgot you had. Does that sound good to you?”

She didn’t like this over-eager, condescending man; she didn’t like his teeth, or his hair, or the way he kept insulting her and then saying he wasn’t. What she did like was the idea of uncovering the type of person she used to be. The person she had lost.

And most of all, she liked the idea of getting out of those sweatpants.

* * *

Laura ambled through the produce section of the local Shop-Rite, looking, for once, for something that wasn’t candy. The procedure had been surprisingly painless, but it left her with a vague metallic aftertaste that she needed to chase out of her mouth.

Now was time to make a change. Prove that obnoxious pamphlet peddler wrong about doing the same things every day. That meant getting a real watermelon, not watermelon candy.

It had been so long since she had purchased fruit that the selection overwhelmed her. Ideally, it was supposed to be instinctual—some primal hunter-gatherer knowledge of how to pick the plant that wouldn’t kill you. Instead, she stood there feeling abandoned by natural selection for what felt like an eternity.

She half-remembered her mother, something about watermelon, but only saw shrouded glimpses, like watching a body through thick fog.

Laura flexed her consciousness in an attempt to connect the dots, but in the place where the memory was supposed to be, she merely found a long string of meaningless text.

import pandas as pd

import numpy as np

import seaborn as sns

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from itertools

import chain

import nltk

nltk.download('punkt')

The vague shape of the memory was there, but whenever she was about to connect to it, she ran into that string of letters and numbers again; the host of sights and smells and sounds became hard digital angles, information jarringly devoid of content or context.

She tried a few more times, attempting to turn it off and on again, until she realized what was happening.

It was one of those ‘unused areas.’ She wasn’t remembering, but accessing some company’s information.

Like snatching her hand out of the fire too late, she pulled away from the text strand as hard as she could. Of course, one of her least-used synapses was the one she actually needed, and of course someone else was already using it.

* * *

You are in the old Farm Fresh on Purdue Avenue, and even with the air conditioner blasting, the inside of the store smells like hot summer, agriculture and sweat.

• Mom, even taller in memory, white dress and green clogs, holds your hand through the produce section, where the watermelons sit in a store display lined with hay, sun-bleached and still lightly dirty.

• She flips and turns the melons with one hand—graceful, practical strength, tapping for the hollow sound on the inside, until she finds the one she wants and smiles. It’s unassuming, a large, white, worn mark on the bottom, not one of the beauty queen melons with perfect green to it, and you look up quizzically.

• “The ugly ones taste the sweetest,” she says, and winks. “Trust me.”

• And you do trust her. Or you remember trusting her, at least.

* * *

The memory they uncovered was so clear that it felt like real life, only more.

Laura felt its soft boundaries over and over again, letting it replay in her mind. She tried to think beyond its edges, conjure up the ride home, or the prior trip to Walmart, or the taste of the watermelon, but the details of those memories still felt out of her reach, like they were yet to be uncovered.

Maybe with time and focus she could clear off the grime and get them working again, but for now, the grocery store memory was so vibrant that she chose to experience it on a loop instead. Grey Matter had given her a gift by uncovering the memory. It was thrilling being reintroduced to Laura.

She had a tendency to burn things out through repetition, though—movies, songs, relationships, even—and memories were no different. After a while, the memory became routine, as worn-through and familiar as her favorite sweatpants, and excess watermelon rotted in her fridge.

Laura took a trip to the strip mall and signed another lease for new numbers in her head so she could piece more of herself together.

* * *

You’re at the boardwalk and it smells like low tide. Mom takes you to look under the pylons at the crusts of green-grey barnacles, and then to the oozing, stinking sand, pockmarked and perpetually in motion with thousands of black crabs, all one writhing mass until you focus in on one, on just one or two, and suddenly the picture clicks into perfect vision.

• You are walking back from the beach barefoot, hot pavement scorching your heels, but Mom says its fine, that’s the way you get summer feet, so by the end of the summer you can walk on the hot sand and pavement and feel nothing, but now every step is as light as possible, as fast as it can be, the sensation burning but worth it, you’re sure.

• It’s late and she’s late from work and she’s late picking you up and it feels like you’re both on the verge of screaming because you don’t know what to eat, and the only thing you say is “ice cream for dinner” over and over again, and so she decides fuck it, its ice cream for dinner, and she takes out the big brick of Breyers vanilla, and because it needs to be healthy for it to count as dinner, you dump granola, nuts, dried fruit—and, of course, chocolate chips for flavor—straight into the block of ice cream and eat it on the floor together.

• You are home. It is OK to sleep. You are safe.

• Remember?

Laura let the memories play in her mind like a screensaver when there wasn’t anything in the present occupying her attention. Sometimes even when there was.

The more time she spent in her own uncovered past, the less time she participated in her own life, but that was part of the point, wasn’t it? She was fine with everything happening around her, like a boulder parting a stream.

Even while it was happening within her mind, she was primarily occupying a space that was unearthed and mined by others, operated without care for her own priorities.

Even as she signed more and more lease licenses, building greater and greater networks of connections, she still ran into the harsh borders and grey zones of data, the long, lone pylons of corporate spreadsheets.

It unnerved her to uncover reams of corporate data inside her own head, so, over time, she learned to intuit the potential borders. She figured out how to guess which neuron would be used next, which memory was greyed-out now only to come into exquisitely sharp focus when the term was up.

She learned which memories to avoid, made notes of which ones to try later, once the corporate barrier lifted and the memories returned to her, polished and shined back to life.

Sure, there were some inconveniences. There was a week where she couldn’t remember her aunt’s birthday because the memory was playing host to Taco Bell’s quarterly payroll. But those limitations were few and far between. Besides, what was the point of worrying too much about present problems when the past was becoming so much more vivid?

* * *

They had met before, somewhere.

It was her first night out in what seemed like forever—funerals didn’t count—and she was face to face with an impossibly perfect situation. He was perfect: big dark eyes with a crinkle around them, a loose curl to his hair and his lips, a big smile, easy to like, and they had even met before, somewhere. Or at least that’s what he was saying.

“You remember me, right?”

She concentrated, but no matter how hard she tried to wrap her hands around the solid core of that memory, she found only lines of text and numbers.

This can’t be happening.

His smile faltered.

She tried again—she knew she fucking had it!—but again, all that came back was flat data.

“Come on,” she said, and smacked the side of her head.

“You okay?” he said. “I was just playing around, I didn’t mean . . .”

“I remember your name,” she said, too loud. “I just—”

She tried flexing that memory one more time—nothing but reams of foreign data.

“Fuck!” she yelled. Now people were staring. Her ex’s friend, some beanie-wearing J-name, turned to the perfect guy.

“She’s been doing this thing, this data thing,” he said. “She’s—”

“I’m fine!” she said. A trickle of blood leaked from her nose. “It’s just a brain fart. You know? Natural. I swear I remember.”

She flailed out one last time, thinking as hard as she could past the data and into the thing it used to be.

At once, her whole vision filled with a red ERROR message and a claxon resounded in her head.

ACCESS DENIED. REMOTE ACCESS ONLY.

She tried to swipe it away, trying to push it out of her vision and move on to the memory.

ACCESS DENIED. SECURITY PROTOCOLS INITIATED.

She found her whole vision blocked by red. She tried to refresh her brain, turn it off and on again, blinking hard and shaking her head and flexing those muscles in her inner ear, but nothing worked. Short of knocking herself out, she didn’t have any idea what else to do.

Pushing through the crowd, the world seen through a red filter behind implanted error messages, she whipped out her phone but couldn’t see the numbers to dial.

“For fuck’s sake!” she yelled. “Hello? Anyone? Security? Is there anyone I can talk to?”

Suddenly, in the middle of the red, where—

ACCESS DENIED. SECURITY PROTOCOLS INITIATED

was emblazoned, came a new message:

SPEAK TO A REPRESENTATIVE?

“Yes,” she said, finally catching her breath. “Yeah, speak to a representative.”

CONFIRMED

A new message popped up and resounded in her head, a polite customer service voice:

NEXT REPRESENTATIVE AVAILABLE IN . . . 

FORTY-EIGHT MINUTES.

Then, curtly:

THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING GREYMATTER

“You’ve got to be fucking with me!” she yelled. “This is bullshit!” She pulled her hair violently, strands coming free between her fingers. “It’s my fucking head! You can’t lock me out of my own head! It’s mine! IT’S MINE!”

No matter what she tried to think, the message was stuck in her head:

THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING GREYMATTER.

Thank you for choosing. She slammed her head into the bar, shaking the red vision and making herself see stars.

A new message:

DESTRUCTION OF COMPANY PROPERTY WILL TERMINATE—

She didn’t give the message time to play out in her head, but simply flung herself, nose-first, directly into the wall, tasting sharp metal, then darkness.

* * *

You wake up in a hospital bed alone.

This is the first time you’ve been here without someone at your bedside, and, even if it’s disorienting, there’s something soothing about the beep of the monitors and the sound of a cough from the other side of the divider. You smell the canned air scent of a hospital, all dry breath and solvents.

“One of the more severe concussions I’ve seen,” says the doctor, a stern Scandinavian woman with a sharp blonde bob. “The cranial swelling was advanced—it must have been pretty inflamed already.”

Instinctively, your hand reaches to the side of your head and feels the spun thread of packed gauze.

“The implant was kaput, of course, whatever it was for. The facial swelling should go down in a few days. Nothing’s broken, thankfully, you’re just going to look like a boxer for a little while.”

A boxer. Of sorts. You certainly feel like you’ve been in a fight. Your vision is gauzy, and everything feels warm and dull like lamplight, sore but safe.

“We’ll be keeping you overnight to monitor your head injury, but unless anything worrying happens, you should be fine to leave in the morning,” the doctor says. “You were pretty lucky.”

You nod.

“Thank you.” Your voice is scraped raw.

“There’s water,” she says, and you gratefully take it, sensing it flow throughout your body as you swallow. “Do you have someone to pick you up?”

You look through your mind for someone, and you feel the familiar bumps and creases of memories, memories of other memories. You remember the feeling of encountering a version of the past so intimate and sharp that it brings everything into focus. You remember the safety then, the people then, and how it felt to have someone you knew you could call. But no matter how much you want those memories to be here, now, they’re not. Even inflated to artificial sharpness, they’re not the present, never were, never could be.

“No,” you say. “I don’t.” It occurs to you to be ashamed, and you look away. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Okay,” the doctor says.

But before she leaves, she walks close and squeezes your hand—right there, the touch of her skin becomes something you remember.