Will You Want to Remember Me? - Apricity Magazine

Will You Want to Remember Me?

“Will you want to remember me?”

The voice is feminine, prying. The words are strung together quickly, like the question had been lingering in her too long. I like to imagine a woman with a round face, cradled in delicate hands. The fingers are long, narrow. The question comes from lips, artificially red. The eyes are deep, framed by thick lashes, pale blue and textured like a stormy sea. I like to think that, when she asked the question, I couldn’t look away.

I like to think that I promised her I would always choose to remember.

That question, so pointed. Maybe it’s the reason I don’t scrub it, no matter how many memories crowd my mind. If only I’d kept her face. She could’ve been young, old. We could have been lovers, friends, family.

But we were close, I’m certain.

Starting telomere therapy was an easy decision. Almost everyone signed up. I don’t remember much from the start, but I’ve always chosen to keep the moment where I signed the contract. So long as I could afford the injections, my body would cease to age.

If only we could conquer memory as easily as we conquered death. Our brains weren’t built to live so long. Turns out, it takes about two hundred years of life for information to become jumbled, lost, overlapped, contorted and twisted so reality feels dreamlike, so that the past becomes a constant series of associative hallucinations that bleed into the present. The warning was clear: you can’t keep everything.

So we don’t, not any more.

I play with the memory center’s pen. LOTUS MEMORY SOLUTIONS: YOU CAN FORGET MOST THINGS, BUT DON’T FORGET US, it declares on the side. The reception room is in an old Earth style, the walls wood paneled and the seats leather. The organics are probably lab grown, but the aesthetic’s nice. The overhead lights cast the room in a warm, orangey glow. Music, a close approximation of old Earth jazz, plays from a hidden speaker.

It would be perfect if it weren’t for the smell: burning memories, seeping beneath the doors of the amnesiologist’s office. The cinnamon candles flickering in the lobby cannot conceal that acidic scent, scalding a little with every breath.

A muffled screaming starts from beyond the door. The secretary adjusts something,

making the almost-jazz grow louder. The screams still cut through the blare of saxophones,

almost melding with the brass.

At least those memories are gone almost as soon as they’re made. You’re supposed to

retain the most recent memory center visit, so you can have the peace of mind that comes with

knowing you’re safe for another year, as well as memory of when the next visit is, but everyone

cuts out the actual scrub.

The screaming slowly abates. The door opens. A man totters out, eyes wide and watery,

blood dribbling from a nostril. The first days after a scrubbing are always the roughest, but he’ll

be back to his normal self soon enough. The pain leaves fast; the emptiness lingers, but even

that’s supposed to fade eventually.

The amnesiologist follows after him, a professional smile on her face. She’s the same one

I had last time—Dr. Vander-something? She’s short, but the black pumps and long tweed slacks

hide it. She’s changed her hair, from teal to pitch black, from shoulder length to almost buzzed.

She maintains the plastic smile as she fixes her eyes on me.

“Pomnenka?” she asks.

I nod, standing.

“Perfect. I’m Dr. Vanderlethe. Follow me, please.”

The hallways beyond the door are wood paneled as well. The smell of ozone is worse

here. It’s a safe procedure, one I’ve done hundreds of times, but somehow that knowledge

doesn’t make the sweat disappear from my palms.

She opens a steel door to a small room, and the facade of coziness is broken. It’s a sterile

white cube, lit by its dimly glowing walls. In the center of the room sits the forgetting machine, a

metal chair with straps to keep the ankles, wrists, and neck pressed flush against the cold steel.

Suspended from the ceiling by a mass of tangled of cords and wires is the device itself, a chrome semi-dome ready to descend upon whoever sits in the chair.

Ready to descend upon me.

“Take a seat, please,” she says, her stride not breaking as she walks to a wall and taps a

few spots on it. The whole thing comes to life, displaying scrolling information in minute text. She tilts her head to the side. “Seven hundred? I never would have guessed. You’ll have to tell

me where you get your skin maintenance done.”

I smile feebly. There aren’t a lot of us left, the first generation of people to become immortal. Avoiding old age is one thing, but there are so many other ways for a person to die. It

makes things easier for me, in a morbid sort of way. A friend passes, I’ll mourn them for a few

years, and then I’ll get the memories scrubbed and suddenly have so much more space. I’d want them to do the same, were the positions reversed. What’s the point of immortality if you only live in the past?

Will you want to remember me?

I wonder if she’s dead, if I expunged all but that one line because everything else she left

behind was too painful?

“What can I say? I’ve just played it safe,” I say, squirming in the fruitless attempt to

make myself comfortable on the metal chair. “There’s not a whole lot that can kill you when

you’re an oxygen farmer on a moonless planet.”

It’s just me on my boat, cutting through the otherwise motionless body of water, green

with algae.

“Does it get lonely?”

“Not if I don’t let it.”

“And good for preserving memory space, too.” Her eyes still flick about the wall, taking

in the endless stream of information. “Not a lot to keep track of with work like that.”

“I suppose not.” It’s true, most days are the same. Take measurements, compare them

against the ideal, make a few adjustments to the water composition as needed, stay on the

lookout for intrusive weeds. “One day’s as good as any other.”

She taps another point on the wall.

From above, I hear the groan of winches moving into action, can practically feel the

electric field descending upon me. She clicks over, begins fixing the restraints.

“So what memories are you looking to get rid of today?”

Every time I swallow, I feel the neck strap dig into my throat. “The usual. All the things that don’t matter.” The semi-dome descends into my field of vision until all I see is darkness.The machine isn’t scrubbing yet, but even in scanning mode I can hear a low buzz. More than hear it, I can feel it, pulsing in my head, thrumming in my ears, through my teeth, behind my eyes.

“Alright. I’ll go through your memories, note down anything that doesn’t have any prominent markers, no intense concentration or heightened emotional state, and then we can

work through what’s left to see what you’re willing to part with. Anything from before your last

appointment that you want to get rid of?”

“I broke up with a girl. We were dating since… July of the year before last. All those can go.”

“Easy, I’ll run through the memories made with increased dopamine and oxytocin.”

We go back and forth for a while. It’s the same as always, or at least as last time, with a long list of specific questions. They record the sessions, in the event you want to go back and

remember what you’ve forgotten. Most people don’t, though. We forget for a reason.

Finally, the conversation draws to a close. It’s time to make room for new memories.

“Wait—” I say, trying to lift a hand. The restraints stop me, biting into my wrist.

“Mm?”

“How far back do you keep records?”

“How far back are you trying to go?”

Will you want to remember me?

I think she was smiling when she said it. It’s there, in the voice.

“I have a memory, an old one, but it’s a fragment, and… it’s been bothering me lately.”

Dr. Vanderlethe clicks her tongue. “I don’t know why any amnesiologist bothers leaving partial memories. They just make people confused. When was it made?”

“A long time ago.”

A moment of silence. I can do nothing but sit in the dome’s darkness. Finally, she says,

“There’s something small, auditory, about five hundred years ago. Spiked oxytocin, some cortisol. Looks like you were consuming natural caffeine at the time. That far back, it could be a cafe.”

I can hear the distant murmur of background conversation. I can hear the clink of china. Maybe it was a cafe. Maybe the sunlight streamed onto her face as she watched for my answer.

“Do you think I removed the context recently? Recently enough that you—”

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s been poking around there in the last few centuries. No one

keeps records that long.”

My stomach twists. I’d hoped finding her would be easy. I don’t even know what I intend

to do once she’s there. Maybe just say, “Yes. For hundreds of years, I have chosen to remember

you.”

Would that even be honest?

Dr. Venderlethe’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “We should probably just scrub it,

obviously she’s—”

“No. Thank you, but… I’ll hold onto this one.”

“Okay.” The inflection in her voice makes it clear she doesn’t approve, but it’s not her

memory. “I’ve got all the information to start, if you don’t have any more questions.”

I don’t. The machine crackles to a new level of activity. She must see my knuckles grow

white as the thrumming slowly turns to fire inside my skull. “It’s alright,” she says from somewhere far away, her voice almost drowned by the screaming that surely isn’t mine.

“You won’t remember a thing.”

And she was right. As the world comes back into focus, my heart is pounding. I am gasping for every burning breath. The air reeks of ozone. The helmet lifts from my head, and Dr.

Vanderlethe’s there, undoing the straps. As she attends to my wrists, she presses a tissue into my palm. “You’re bleeding from your eyes,” she says with that sterile smile.

My hands, clammy and shaking, raise the tissue to my face. It comes back bright red.

“So I am,” I say, my voice ragged.

She leads me out. I lean on the wall as I walk. The world keeps threatening to spin.

In the lobby, I schedule my next appointment, a year from today, and stumble outside.

Azorica’s formal name is Stracony-959 C, but no one calls it that. It’s always been Azorica, at least for as long as I can remember.

Most of my remaining memories were formed beneath its pale blue sky. The memory

center’s on concrete stilts that hold it above the shallow waters. Everything’s on concrete stilts,

slick and green with weeds. The water below reflects the sunlight back onto the buildings in shifting fragments. The town stretches on and on, a forest of rickety structures.

I almost remember forests. I keep an image from Earth. The tall, shifting trees are so

alone in my mind, they feel alien, but I have to cling to them. I’ve forgotten many things, but I

refuse to forget home, not entirely.

I step shakily onto the boardwalk, pop an oxygen tablet, enjoy the cool breeze for a

moment. Worse than the splitting headache is the feeling of holes in the mind. One thing triggers what once was a memory, but the sparks lead nowhere.

I hail a taxi. It comes skimming over the water, a practical little boat pieced together from scrap metal like so much on this backwater planet. The driver’s old. Naturally old. Short

telomeres, and they’re only getting shorter. I don’t say anything, but I don’t meet her eyes either,

sunk in wrinkled flesh, lines deepened by a lack of regular skin maintenance. Her brittle white

hair is pulled back in a braid, but the occasional whisps float in the air, decaying hair on a decaying body.

There’s nothing worse than growing old, I think as I wipe more blood from my eyes.

We skip through town, beneath the elevated walkways and elevated buildings. The sky’s clear for the first time in a long time, so I savor the light of Stracony-959 while I have the

chance.

I’m home before I know it, on the rickety boardwalks that are often in the shadow of the

rim, a rare piece of dry land. It sticks up from the water, a colossal ridge of red stone curved in a

semicircular shape. The protected space within is perfect for cultivating algae, and large enough

that I’ve split it up with Isa. We have homes on opposite tips of the rim. I can’t see his house

from mine, and we rarely ever visit each other. Neither of us have ever been wildly sociable, so it works out.

The driver sends me off with a warm smile. It only makes the wrinkles deepen. I smile

back and see myself out, onto the boardwalk. In my haste and post-scrub haze, I almost miss my step, almost fall into the water.

I take small, careful steps towards my home. It started off as a wooden shack, back when wood was more plentiful. One by one, the planks rotted, and one by one, I replaced them with synthetic wood. It looks exactly the same, you wouldn’t know it unless you had once lived in an authentic wood shack. Unless you chose to keep the memories of an authentic wood shack.

Behind it, I have a shed for my farming supplies, made of scrap metal from a few crashed ships. It’s dwarfed by the even larger shed higher up on the rim, one I keep expanding with any materials I can get my hands on: my memory shed. It has all the material evidence that I have lived seven hundred years, all the journals, the pictures, tickets from trains that no longer run, trinkets I received as gifts from people I no longer remember. It’s stuffed, horribly organized, and sometimes the storms seep in and turn paper to mold. Mice, stowaways from Earth, make their homes out of pages, sometimes tearing up the only testament I had to a distant friendship.

It’s for the best, I have to tell myself. Like scrubbing, but for physical space, and I don’t

even have the headache afterwards.

If anywhere will have traces of the girl I want to remember, it’ll be there.

Seasons are slow here; we’re nearing the end of summer, but that still means I have until this time next Earth year (the intergalactic standard), so I spend my evenings after work sipping my vitamin supplements from a chilled glass as I work through all my old things. I find pictures of myself, grinning vacantly in various locations that I have no recollection of visiting, standing next to people I have no recollection of meeting, various names scrawled on the backs of them that do not even ring distant bells.

Hundreds of years to work through. I start sleeping in the memory shed, atop a mattress

of words I wrote when I was someone else. When storms pass over, I hear them beating a relentless staccato on the old metal roof, watching drips of water run down the ramshackle walls

of the interior.

I should do something about that. It’s an idle thought, one I’ve probably had a thousand

times before, one that probably gets scrubbed every year.

A month passes. I’m beginning to think any trace of her, whoever she was, was lost to the mice. Five hundred years is a long stretch. Empires have fallen in much less time.

But then, there it is, at the bottom of a box, wrapped in plastic. I must have loved it once.

It’s an envelope made of creamy paper, though perhaps that’s just the yellowing of age, postmarked to 2452 CE. I can hardly believe it.

There’s no return address, no attached name, but front and center in elegant handwriting

that swirls and spirals, it says:

203 Zion Street

New Orleans, LA 70065

Earth.

We knew each other when I lived on Earth.

And I have my old address, too, from so long ago.

Would she still be there?

Would there be evidence of her?

I put the envelope away, uncertain what to do with it. I tell myself I’ll sleep on the

information, but sleep doesn’t come easily that night.

Will you want to remember me?

Why wouldn’t I?

Her face is almost there, but it’s singed in all the important parts. There’s a liquid laugh

somewhere in the recesses of my mind; is it hers?

The next morning, I pay Isa a visit.

Neither of us are big on pleasantries.

“I need you to look after my algae for a bit.”

He hangs in the doorway of his house. I’m older than he is by about a century, but he

started telomere therapy later and doesn’t go in for regular skin maintenance. The beard doesn’t

help, thick and black and aging him a decade. A thin cigarette hangs from his lips as he studies

me, the smell of something synthetic wafting in the morning breeze coming off the lakes. “You

going somewhere?” he finally asks.

“I think so.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Earth.”

Isa snorts, laughs so hard the cigarette falls. “Dammit,” he says, bending to pick it up

from the metal porch. It immediately goes back in his mouth. “What’s left for anyone there?”

“Memories?”

“You keep memories from Earth?”

I feel heat in my cheeks. Most people don’t. Keep moving forward. An eternity isn’t

worth anything if you’re stuck in the past. “A few. Trees… A girl.”

“Mmm. She still alive?”

“I don’t know. But maybe I’ll find out.”

He looks skeptical. “You think she’s still there?”

“Like I said, I don’t know, but—but it’s the only lead I really have, so…”

His dark brows furrow as he stares past me at 959, slowly rising from the sea. “Yeah. I’ll

keep things from falling apart here.”

I turn to leave.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

It’s a fairly short hop to the Stracony-832 system, a local trading hub. The station there is

comparable to a small moon in gravitational pull. In population, however, it’s closer to a

full-sized planet. It’s chaotic, lit by harsh neons that buzz, scents from across the galaxy that

sting and overwhelm, people shouting. I keep my head down as I force my way through crowded corridors, towards the long-distance ships.

I board Theseus, a massive cruiser bound for Earth. It’s clearly spent too much time in

atmospheres, its blue-streaked chrome hull concerningly rusty. The whole structure groans as it

dislodges itself from the port, but the ship, shockingly, does not break. I’ve never been a fan of

travel; jumping past lightspeed makes me queasy. I keep my eyes pressed closed for the four

hours of the flight to Earth, playing the memory over and over in my mind until it starts to lose

meaning.

Will you want to remember me?

Most people don’t live on Earth, not any more. Some started trickling off-world in the lead-up to the Final War. And then there were threats of nukes, and anyone that had enough money and sense was gone as well. And then there were the nukes, and everyone left warmed their hands at the glow of radiation until they became something not quite human.

That was all a long time ago, though. The radiation’s gone down, and the Earthborn know

to scatter when tourists come to gawk at the ghost planet. There have been efforts to repopulate, but they always fail for one reason or another.

Stepping onto the gangway, I know I could never live here. Memories of trees are one thing. It’s another to see them, rustling in the distance, untamed and eternal. I forgot how out of

control life on this planet was, how many species of things fight for dominance here. It’s so

much simpler in Azorica, where it’s just humans, a handful of animal species we’ve carefully

introduced, and massive stretches of algae.

The ground here is dotted with color, the air carries so many smells that aren’t just water

and metal. The sky is impossibly blue, impossibly rich, and the sun—the sun burns in a way 959

would never.

I go to the visitor center. It’s on Earth, so it’s run down. There’s a sign telling you what to

do in case of an Earthborn encounter, souvenir marbles. I buy myself a ticket to New Orleans.

“I’m Earthborn, you know.”

The cashier eyes me, trying to gauge if I’m being serious. “You’re the most normal

looking one I’ve ever seen.”

“I mean I was born here, before the war.” I want him to know I’m not like them, the tourists, that I haven’t come to stare.

He seems unphased.

Through the power of vacuums and science that I do not understand, personalized terrestrial light speed travel is an almost foolproof way of travel. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. The claustrophobic pod I slip into reeks of vomit, and I only contribute to the stench on my way over.

Then it’s as simple as renting a boat.

I plug the address’s coordinates into the onboard navigation system. Most of the city’s

underwater. I could almost be in Azorica, I think as I skim over the water, the wind in my face,

moldering buildings passing me by. Almost. Trees and distant flying shapes break that illusion.

To think I lived here, once, on this alien world where life spreads and spreads and

consumes.

To think we all did.

The taller buildings begin thinning out, replaced by squat homes, collapsing from

centuries of neglect. Beyond them, water. It’s choppier here than it is back home. The moon’s

fault. It’s stupid, but there’s a childish part of me that hates looking at the sky, that’s disconcerted

by a large rocky body just hanging above me.

The navigation system beeps.

There it is.

I don’t know if it’s paint or mold or sun damage, but what remains of 203 Zion Street is

pale gray, a paleness made all the starker by the relentless sun.

I tether the boat to the only lamppost still standing in the neighborhood.

I want any of this to feel familiar. Maybe it’s the water? Or maybe it’s me.

I leap over the side, into cold waters that lap about my knees, and wade forward. Small

creatures, shaped like narrow ships, dart about my feet, casting their shadows on the cracked

concrete beneath the water. Fish? Are these fish?

The house doesn’t have a door, only a rectangular hole. The space beyond is lit by

sunlight that pours through the half-demolished roof. It smells like mold and rust in here, almost reminiscent of my memory shed back home.

It’s empty, almost unadorned, save for the pictures on the walls.

I pick one at random, scrub the dust and the grime away. It’s almost faded, but I can see the rough shapes of people through the warped glass. I slip the image from the frame, and there the faces are.

They’re strangers.

A woman with black waves that fall around her shoulders, with black eyes that stare

through time and into mine, in the arms of a tall redhead that stares down at her.

Could I have looked like this once? So much time is gone.

Could she have looked like this once?

I let that image drop, grab another. Unrecognizable. Another. The faces looking at me are meaningless. I keep going, desperate, certain something here will be familiar.

I hear a screech from overhead, jump, but it’s just a—an airborne thing with feathers,

a—a bird? It glares down at me with accusatory eyes, pure black beads set in white feathers.

I hate Earth.

Nothing watches me on Azorica.

I go through the house, looking for anything I might recognize, but time and entropy have taken this place as surely as they take everything else.

There’s only rot now.

Did I even live here?

Was it someone else’s mail I just happened to have?

Will you want to remember me?

Do you even want to be remembered? Because one of us has made it very hard for me to do so. If she hadn’t asked the question, would I have chosen to keep any memories of her? Why couldn’t that faceless woman have just kept her mouth shut about her place in my memories?

Why do I want to find her so badly?

I keep pushing through doors, sometimes having to ram through them shoulder-first.

Only decayed furniture, peeling wallpaper, fallen architecture and ceaseless light, endless water

through every window.

I might as well have stayed on Azorica.

One of the doors opens to descending stairs. I run back to the boat to grab the flairs,

finger an oxygen pill from my pocket. In the basement. That’s where I will find my answers. I plunge into the cold water. The sunlight’s blocked from reaching here. I’d worry about hypothermia, but I won’t be down long. I brandish a freshly lit flair ahead of me as I descend,

letting its crackling light break through the murky water.

At the bottom of the stairs, I see the distinct outline of a bulkhead.

A bunker entrance. The door hangs ajar. I kick through it, into the space beyond.

I’ve kicked up so much dirt that all I see are formless shapes. The world is muddy and

ill-defined, and trying to dig through it is useless, only turns up fistfuls of mud and—

I see a pale sliver of white in darkness. I plunge my hand into the grime, pull. I bring the

object close to my face. Through the almost opaque water, the top half of a human skull becomes clear. The hollows where eyes should be bore into me.

I don’t know how long I’m there, kneeled in the dirt, in the cold.

Long enough for the dust to settle. When I raise my eyes, the water’s clear.

The titanium walls are shredded, carved with words.

They’re not coming. Everyone’s dead. All I hear are screams above. Tallies, everywhere. Etched above, etched below. How long did they rot here?

How long did she rot here?

I turn. I have to go. I was stupid to come, to dig into a distant past. There is no point in

immortality if you only ever live in the— But even behind me—carved over the door:

THEY HAVE FORGOTTEN US.

Over and over again. It’s everywhere, the edges ragged, desperate, as if every mark was blindly slashed.

And they were right. Oh God, all I kept were trees and a voice, a single question, and—

And I have to go.

I don’t know why I came here.

I don’t know why I tried to find a distant voice.

There’s only death on earth. Only entropy. If she stayed, she died. If she left, she forgot.

And I should do the same.

Will you want to remember me?

Maybe I responded with my own question, the exact same question.

But I’ll never know.

Winter’s setting in. I’ve started bringing out the insulators to keep my algae lake liquid,

started layering clothing when I go to town. Autumn brings rolling thunderstorms. Light crashes

above me. I hunch my shoulders against the rain, producing a small envelope from my pocket. I

stare down at the elegant handwriting.

From my other pocket, I produce a lighter.

Sheltering the envelope from the wind and the rain, I let the fire take it, keep it in my hand until the flames lap at my fingers and I drop it involuntarily. Just like that, it’s nothing but ash that’s quickly washed away by the torrential rain.

I walk into the memory clinic.

The almost-jazz almost hides the screaming.

Dr. Vanderlethe leads a jarred woman from the room. Her hair’s crimson this time, falling in loose curls down her back.

“Pomnenka?”

“Yes?”

She leads me to the forgetting machine, goes over my information.

“Seven hundred? I never would have guessed. You’ll have to tell me where you get your skin maintenance done.”

“That old memory—I want it scrubbed. You were right.”

She stares at me blankly.

“What old memory?”

“From five hundred years ago. The auditory one.”

Vanderlethe purses her lips. She doesn’t remember me. Why would she? “Of course,” she says with a synthetic smile. “I don’t know why any amnesiologist bothers leaving partial memories. It just makes people confused.”

We go through the rigmarole, the sorting through what must be kept and what must be

disposed of. All of Earth, I want gone. The trees, too. Digging through my memory shed. And, of

course, the burning of the envelope.

What’s the point of immortality if you live in the past?

The scrubbing starts. The pain grows, blooms, takes up all the space in my head,

dislodging memories I’ve clung to for far too long. W ll y ou w t t remember e? It’s more than sound. W ou t remember ? It’s agony. remember ? It transcends sensation until the world is white-hot.

Everyone screams. There’s no shame in it.

“Don’t worry,” says Vanderlethe. “You won’t remember a thing.”

About the Author

Isabelle Nygren

Isabelle Nygren is a born and raised Alaskan, currently saving up money to get her masters degree in London. Though she doesn’t think of herself as a horror author, most everything she’s had published falls in that category. She’d like to write something with a happy ending, though, to make her mom happy.