Shared Memories

Hector was walked into the dark room, escorted by two armed guards dressed in silver fatigues. His nostrils were immediately hit with the abrasive scent of bleach and Windex. It was bright in the room, harsh white light emitting from all four different tiles on the tall ceiling. There were no windows on any of the walls, nor were there any noticeable ventilation shafts he could see. Hector was trapped.

At the end of the room was a long stainless steel table with two chairs, one on either side. The guards brought Hector to the table. One pulled out the chair for him in a mock gesture of cordiality. Hector gave an exaggerated bow, his bound hands nearly sweeping the cold, white ceramic floor. Before he could sit down, the second guard threw him into the chair before slamming his head into the frigid steel. A blinding burst of pain in the form of stars flooded his vision, and his head throbbed violently from the collision.

“Jesus Christ,” Hector laughed, wiping blood dripping from his nose with bound hands. “I can see you guys take this hostage situation pretty seriously.”

“Quiet,” barked the guard behind him. “This isn’t a conversation. You don’t fucking talk unless one of us lets you.”

A nasty smile crept across Hector’s face before he bowed his head in mock obedience. Blood dripped from his nose, forming a dark red pool on the steel table.

“As you wish, milord,” Hector said. Another blow struck him across the face, this time from the guard who pulled the chair out. A loud crack bounced off the ceramic walls.

“What did he just say?” the guard barked. “No fucking talking.”

“And here I thought you were playing the good cop,” Hector said, cracking his nose back into place. Both guards were on him this time. He felt two pairs of rough hands grab him before a cool, soothing voice resounded across the room.

“That’ll do, boys. Thank you.” The guards’ grip relaxed, and the two of them snapped to attention, standing like two pillars of silver stone before exiting the room.

“Welcome, Hector,” said the disembodied voice. It was a woman’s voice, young by the sound of it. Early thirties by the sound of it. “Are you comfortable?”

Hector looked at his bound hands. “Could be better.” There was a soft laughter that filled his mind and set his body awash with a peaceful warmth the likes of which Hector had never felt. He closed his eyes and remembered summer days, fleeting memories of meadows, lakes with glittering sunshine dancing on the surface, a garden of peonies and lilies in bloom, memories of peace. They weren’t his memories. He knew that much.

When he opened his eyes, a woman sat opposite him, hands clasped together. She was strikingly attractive; olive-toned skin kissed by a sun he couldn’t remember, with a head of ebony hair cut short at the shoulders. Her eyes were wide and dark, deep pools of knowledge and secrets laid within, a well of infinite knowledge — so Hector thought.

“How’s this?” she said, and his bonds were undone upon her command. “Better?”

“Yeah,” Hector said. “Thanks. Who are you?”

“My name is Ana,” she said, outstretching her hand with her palm vertical.

Hector looked at the hand, hesitated, and then took it, awkwardly shaking it. “Hector,” he said. “What am I doing here? Why did you take me? I’m not exactly anything special.”

“Tell me, Hector,” Ana said. “What do you remember before being apprehended by the two guards?”

“I was walking down a street at night. It was raining and I was alone.”

“Good. And do you know what street or city you were in?”

“Uh, Los Angeles. The street name I can’t tell you. I don’t see how this matters. I just wanna get the hell home.”

“Tell me, Hector,” Ana continued, leaning in close to him. He could smell the faint scent of bleach on her clothes, and nothing on her body. “Where is home?”

“What?” Hector looked around, suddenly disoriented. “What do you mean ‘where’?”

“Where is home?” Ana’s voice had lost the warmth of a summer sun. “Do you remember?”

“This was going so well. I thought we were really hitting it off.”

“Hector,” Ana said, her words a breath of jagged frost that made his diaphragm tighten. “Enough frivolity.”

Her words stabbed Hector’s spirit like an ice pick. He obeyed and kept his mouth shut.

“Do you remember where you live, Hector?” she repeated.

Hector felt beads of sweat begin to roll down his spine. “Los Angeles,” he stammered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Hector, you gain nothing from lying.”

He rubbed the sweat from his brow. Some already got into his eyes, and they began to sting. “I—I’m not sure,” he said.

“Hector, what troubles you? Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” he said, but just then, hot tears started streaming down his cheeks, pooling at his chin until they fell into the puddle of blood.

“What are you doing to me?”

“Hector,” Ana said, her voice now honeysuckle-sweet, “I am not doing anything. You cannot remember where you are, or maybe even who you are.”

“Do you know that you, Hector, son of Halden, have committed seventeen acts of incitement to rebel against the Order? Are you aware that you’ve robbed, beaten, battered, and even killed? Do you still have those memories?”

Hector shot up from the table, stumbling back over the chair, sending it collapsing to the ground with a reverberating crash. Images of people — men, women, and even a few children, all of whom he didn’t know — stormed his visual cortex like a rogue wave. They were stacked high in a mass heap, a rotting pile of carcasses burning with black smoke rising toward the brilliance of the setting sun. Hector saw their faces, burned, frightened, in pain, crying out to stop it, to let them go, let the suffering go and succumb to the Order.

“Stop resisting!” they cried out in unison, one desperate voice like a hive mind whose sole, shared emotion was one of pain. Hector fell to his knees, doubled over, and puked.

“Hector, you don’t even know if your memories are even yours,” Ana said, a placid smile stretched across her olive face. If Hector didn’t want to throttle her, he’d have wanted to make love to her.

“Get out of my head, woman,” Hector said between gasps of breath. “I’m done with this game. I want to go home.”

“Home? You’ve no home. We are the ones in control. We have always been in control. We will always be in control. You’ve never truly had any power, not really.”

“Fuck you, bitch.” Hector spat a glob of spit and blood on Ana’s silver jacket. She laughed, not even flinching.

“How colorful your language is, Hector. But you’ve only ever learned from us. We made you who you are.”

“You didn’t make shit.”

“You don’t even know who you are. How could you even tell? Without me, you wouldn’t even know you were a sadistic, child-killing rebel who murdered in the name of a baseless cause. In the name of freedom? Freedom from what? What oppression could you possibly be feeling, Hector? All your short life, you’ve had everything you could have ever wanted. You want for nothing, and all we ask in return is simple obedience. A small price to pay for such power — access to such raw, untapped energy at your fingertips.”

A sharp pain like a thousand needles poking through the surface of his brain consumed his head.

“Stop it! Get out, get out!” he cried out, holding his head with two hands, curling in a ball on the floor.

“Oh, Hector,” Ana said, voice as soothing as cough syrup. “But you had to go and be the hero. You had to bite the hand which feeds you, so they say. The saying starts with a simple ‘don’t’ if I’m not mistaken.”

She got up from her chair, walked over to Hector, who was beginning to convulse from the pain, and stroked his dark hair.

“My sweet boy,” she said. “I wish it hadn’t come to this. We had such great hopes for you.”

Though his mind was overridden with suffering, he could see Ana up close — her dark eyes that shone bright in the artificial light, her skin smoother than any human being he’d seen before, her lips full and red like ripe cherries from Kyushu in March. He’d never seen someone as beautiful as her. He’d never hated someone as he hated her.

“What are we gonna do, my brave Hector?” She touched his face, and in an instant, Hector saw a lifetime of this age.

Memories flooded to the forefront of his mind, images both spectacular and harrowing rotating before him. He knew neither what the images were nor whose they were. Images of desert dunes and mountain ranges capped in snow, brilliant bursts of stars millions of light-years away that he floated past in a white suit made of clouds — until a hole of night larger than life turned his cloud suit into spaghetti, and there, elongated in strands of yellow gold, he saw a snake drinking a cup of coffee, a city comprised of three-dimensional blueprint sketches with a thousand different images of felines labeled “House Cat.”

Hector saw people sitting at a computer in between two small mountains the size of ant hills — on one side, an inflatable pool of water, and on the other, cows grazing on charred grass. In his spaghetti form, he floated over to the people on computers, took a look at their screens, and saw his own image. He turned and saw the person using the computer was Ana, more beautiful and terrible than ever, a glint of deviousness reflecting in her black-rimmed glasses.

And then, he stretched and was Hector once more — but younger, a child even — and saw the world how he grew up with it: a flaming ball with pockets of steel where people hunkered down in. There was no grass, no cows — at least none that ever actually grazed. There were no people sitting at computers; only government employees did that or scientists on government contracts. He saw his home, his Earth, suspended in a sea of infinite black — a void so endless, so desolate it made one wish they could spend their lives floating through it, aimless, wandering forever in search of some meaning the earth you grew up on could never offer you.

And then, as soon as it had begun, the vision ended, and Hector was lying motionless on the cold ceramic tile of the room.

Ana stood above him. “Well, Hector?” she asked. “What are we going to do about this?”

Hector lay there for a moment, trying to remember, but everything his mind tried to recall felt like a faraway dream. And then, he got to his feet.

“This.” He shoved Ana as hard as he could, sending her heels-over-head over the table.

He made a break for the door — a mad dash like a wounded animal. He was halfway there (the room was a lot larger than he realized) when he heard Ana on the PA:

“Subject 17 escaping. I repeat: Subject 17 is escaping. Proceed as planned.” Subject 17? Who the fuck was that? Was that Hector? Subject of what and for what plan? It didn’t matter. What mattered was getting the goddamn door open.

Hector turned the handle — it was unlocked, to his surprise — flung the door open and ran out into the dark corridor.

He ran for ten minutes, ceasing to stop to catch his breath. He felt like he didn’t need to catch his breath — that he could run forever without ever stopping. He put his fingers to his pulse. Steady. It didn’t matter, he had to keep going.

When Hector got to the end of the corridor, there was a path left and a path right. Neither had any indication that they might lead anywhere. There were heavy footsteps coming from behind. Ten, no twelve guards, each weighing approximately one hundred eighty to two hundred and thirty pounds. Each carrying telescopic batons — made of steel, Chinese-made — and a 9mm pistol, American-made. They were pursuing him at an approximately 6-miles-per-hour pace. They’d catch him in no less than three minutes.

Hector didn’t question how these facts came to his head, the same way a calculator doesn’t question how it answers what two times two is. It just knows.

He bolted down the right path, sprinting as fast as he could until he saw a faint light emitting from the bottom of a doorway. He threw his shoulder against the door with so much force he himself flew through the heavy steel doors, landing hard upon the concrete floor.

Seagulls cawed overhead. Waves could be heard crashing against the earth far below. The cold sea wind bit and gnawed at Hector’s face as he struggled to his feet.

He looked up. The sun! He could feel the sun, and at last, he had his first memory. Finally, after years, or months, or days, or maybe even hours, Hector could see an something clearly in his mind’s eye. No pain, no death. No screaming or misery, confusion or suffering. There was only light. There was only peace. He found himself trying to analyze it, to understand it at its core, but he stopped when he realized he couldn’t. There was only a warmth that surpassed all possible logic.

“So,” he said, eyes closed, filling his lungs with salty air and letting the cold warmth of sun wash over his body, “that’s what it feels like.”

Hector didn’t hear the door open. He didn’t hear the gunshot. He didn’t feel the bullet pierce his heart nor did he hear the cold, sultry winter voice of Ana tell her men, “Bring him back to the Training Room. We need to recalibrate some minor details.”

The last thing Hector felt was the cool wind upon his face, the living sunlight engulf his body, and the bittersweet taste of freedom on his lips.