Compliance Protocol

The bank of diagnostic equipment blinked and hummed in Harold’s garage-lab. He crouched at the center console in a wall of consoles. The screen cast an eerie green, a waveform which pulsed like something alive. Something hungry. And the signal was there—buried in the digital noise.

His cellphone buzzed. “Dad, stop being paranoid. Mom’s fine. Everyone’s fine. You’re the one acting strange.”

They think of me as a retired curmudgeon, he thought, at first for leaving his cell phone at home, refusing to watch TV, ignoring social media. But who says he should be a slave to devices? Life was short, and what he valued most was using his brain. He was an engineer by profession, and spent his days with hobbies: building solar power for his home, running electricity for his wife’s Tesla, and monitoring classes like Quantum Physics 501 at State. Professors welcomed him with sardonic smiles, impressed by the gawky gentleman who still wanted to learn. All before the signal analyzer, that was.

He texted back. “I’ve always been a little strange, honey. LOL.”

His phone buzzed again. “You’re scaring Mom.”

When he’d become focused on the signal analyzer, he’d questioned if he was losing it, thinking the cell phones and TV had a more nefarious intent than highly addictive tools. But he’d grown more uneasy observed his friends monitoring their phones, chatting endlessly about TV series, somehow “flat” in their conversations.

Then came the headaches. Everyone complained about them, but no one stopped watching. “It’s just screen fatigue,” they’d said. “It’ll pass.”

One night, his wife’s nose started bleeding as she watched her iPad. She didn’t notice, hadn’t even blinked. When Harold tried to take the device, she screamed—a sound he’d never heard her make in forty years of marriage.

Hearing the scream is when he vowed to do something.

He rubbed his tired eyes. “They’re being controlled,” he muttered, adjusting dials. The signal patterns were unlike anything he’d seen before—complex, seemingly organic in nature. After four decades as a chief engineer for Systotics, Inc., he knew artificial signals, but these were real. They had an organic quality, like breathing, but mathematical in their precision. The pattern was subtle, but he’d isolated it. This must be the government, or an oligarchy, not just broadcasting misinformation intended for political persuasions, not just to incite hate against a contrived common enemy, and not just using messages to influence the human subconscious to buy products, but much more. They were parasitically riding these devices to communicate with the actual neurons within human brains—they were rewriting thoughts and building memories as truth.

The radius was only fifty feet, but he could press ENTER and screen out the signals he was monitoring for both himself and his wife. Then he could work on expanding the range. Who knows? Maybe he could save the world.

“Harold?” Eleanor’s voice came from the doorway. She sounded tired. Worried. “There are some people here to see you.”

“People? Not now. Can’t you see what’s happening?” He gestured at his research, the news articles pinned to the walls, medical reports showing increased brain plasticity, the photos of suspected oligarch research centers. “They’re changing you. All of you. Your iPad, those shows you watch—they’re rewriting your memories.”

“Just stop, Harold. Stop.”

“Always something,” he muttered, then allowed his wife to lead him into the living room, where two couples, his friends, fidgeted uncomfortably. Thomas, next to his wife Patricia, nodded at him. “Sit down, buddy.” Bradley and Margaret, retired psychologists, avoided his eyes.

Harold turned to his wife. “What is this, Eleanor? A surprise party? It’s not my birthday.”

Eleanor took his arm and steered him to the couch. “It’s not a party, Harold. It’s an intervention. We’re all concerned about you. You’ve become obsessed with your… what do you call it?”

“Signal analyzer, but it’s—”

“Exactly. Your signal analyzer. But the all-nighters, dear. The conspiracy theories. And you’re not eating. This has to stop.”

Harold searched each face in the group. “You need to listen to me. I’ve found something. It’s organic. I’m not paranoid, but the signal is growing stronger.”

Thomas side-glanced his wife. Eleanor stared at the carpet.

“You must have noticed. It starts with a feeling in your gut, an anxiety, something we feel, but no one talks about.”

“Get him a glass of water,” Patricia said. “He’s going to pass out.”

Harold gulped from the glass, noticing their staring, the disbelief in their eyes. “All-right, how do you explain the anxiety, the headaches, your bleeding Eleanor? I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s there. When you look at your phone, your iPad, the TV, can’t you feel something behind the screen, something giving you a creepy feeling? But it’s more than that, isn’t it? There’s a… well, a presence gnawing the back of your brain. A tickle.”

“We all love you, Harold,” Eleanor brushed off his collar.

“Don’t patronize me!”

She flinched back from her husband, her eyes widening. “Harold?”

He jumped up. “I can prove it. We’re being reprogrammed.”

“Prove it? We know; your signals. From what, aliens?” Thomas shook his head, chuckled.

My signal analyzer. If you’ll just—”

Eleanor gently touched her husband’s cheek. “It’s ok, honey, we’re all getting older, forgetting things.”

“I left my passport on a train just a year ago, buddy. We’re all in this together.” Thomas stepped over and put his arm around him.

“It’s more than that!” Harold’s voice broke; he flailed his arms. “Can’t you see what’s happening?” He pointed to the TV. “Those shows you watch—they’re rewriting your memories!”

“Harold, now you listen to me. Those shows are helping us remember,” Eleanor’s voice was soft.

Harold’s head snapped to his wife’s face. “Remember what? The fake reality they’ve programed into you?”

“No, Harold. The realities we all chose to forget, and replace.”

From the coffee table, she picked up a manila envelope, opened it, and gave him a document; across the top was headlined, “Premium Memory Enhancement Services”.

He leafed through it. “No,” he whispered. “This isn’t… this can’t be…”

“None of this is real?” He eyed their family photos. “Our life together?”

“The love is real. The happiness is real. We just… had a trauma. I signed it, Harold. You did too.”

His own signature was there, right below hers. The blue ink on the page glared at him. He and Eleanor had both initialed, “Package Selected: Deep Memory Descaling.”

“We signed up first,” Patricia said, sitting with her husband. “We were mugged, Harold. Mugged! I can remember men who followed me home, but the details are gone. The trauma is gone.”

Thomas reached for his wife’s hand. “Thank God.”

“Me and Margaret had some hard times,” Bradly added. “We said some things, did some things we both regretted. Hell, I had a restraining order after the divorce. But we’re fixed up now. Don’t remember the details, like it was something we read in the paper, not us at all. Isn’t that right, dear?” He kissed his wife.

Harold collapsed into the couch. He’s not a victim of control. Sarah and Thomas CHOSE to forget the trauma of her rape; Bradly and Margaret stood by as the media EDITED AWAY their bitter divorce. We haven’t been brainwashed by social media; we’ve chosen to be reprogrammed. Yes, a nefarious Big Brother, but passed into the neurons of a willing populace fed what to believe.

Bradly bantered with his wife, Margaret. “It’s not really an adverse effect to the psyche when memories erase.”

“Unless they come back,” Margaret responded.

“True,” Bradly said. “But if it rains and we remember the sun, is that so bad?”

“But the signal analyzer can stop all this if we choose.” The group stared at Harold, frozen.

Eleanor finally broke the silence. “That’s the thing, Harold. The garage-lab has become your obsession. The reason for the intervention. We,” she spread her arms to take in the group, “think the effect is weakening on you. You’re starting to remember the truth about things we’ve chosen to… well, modify.”

“Why?” Harold said to himself out loud. He was leaning forward, shaking his head.

Eleanor opened her mouth, and Thomas reached out his hand to stop her. “We don’t want to talk about you and Eleanor, Harold. Forgive and forget, right? But you’re not taking enough dose, buddy. Your cellphone time is almost nothing. There are some great shows on TV. You don’t watch them.”

“You don’t even watch White Lotus.” Patricia twirled her hair. “How can you not watch White Lotus?”

“And Yellowstone,” Bradly said, jumping in. “I mean Kevin Costner is fantastic.”

Eleanor crouched on her knees in front of Harold. “You see, honey. We need you to be here, not in your lab. Do you think you could come around?”

But when you’re the only one seeing the monster, you don’t want it to eat you too. “Sure, I can do that.”

The signal analyzer continued its rhythmic hum, almost like a heartbeat. The monitor showed massive spikes in transmission. Yellow type scrolled down the screen with mathematical data. And now, with one touch of the ENTER key, he could restore reality. Fifty feet. That’s all the range he had. Fifty feet to expose a system that had been quietly rewriting humanity’s memories, erasing trauma, all with consent. Should he give people back their real lives, their true pain?

Thomas and Patricia had wanted to forget a mugging; Bradly and Margaret their divorce, what did he and Eleanor want to forget?

His finger paused over the key. Eleanor was behind him. “I’m begging you Harold,” she whispered. “Please. Please don’t do it."