Recollection

[*This story does contain some violent images and slight foul language.*]

Samantha Ward sat at her desk in her little basement office day-dreaming about what she would cook for dinner tonight. Well, it was already night, so maybe whatever she would cook for breakfast would be best. She was going over in her head all the different things. Waffles with syrup dripping down the sides into little pools of sticky and gooey sweetness, all of which is complemented only by the crispiest and most tender fried chicken that - Oh no!. . . seems to have gotten stuck in the pit of deliciousness. What a shame. You can almost hear its cry for help: "Save me! I'm going to be eaten if I stay here any longer!" Poor little piece of chicken. You sad, dead so--

"Open!"

Samantha jumped from her lapse of consciousness, her mouth dabbled with a slight amount of drool that bled and seeped through her lipstick. She grabbed the closest filing paper and dabbed her mouth, smearing the pink lipstick across the file paper. . . hopefully that wasn't important.

Just as Samantha dropped the smeared piece of filing paper into her already overflowing trash bin next to her desk, the voice-automated doors into her office flew open with a whacky exuberance that always seemed to startle Samantha. Her boss, Eldritch Pioesse (that's [Pee-Oh-Ess]), a son of French immigrants who are adamant on pride throughout the family, which, of course, makes any spawn of such a family incredibly obstinate and hard to get along with (such was Mr. Pioesse, Supervisor of Recollective Affairs [SRA for short]), came through the doors with a look of annoyance on his face. His eyebrows, bushy and unkempt, stood on top of his furrowed brow, sleeping like two black caterpillars awaiting the closest passerby to sting with its venom.

"You need to get that door fixed, Samantha." His voice terminally venomous, no care for feelings that might be fragile to such a tone. "If you don't, ask somebody from maintenance to come down here."

"I have asked, sir. I can't seem to fix it with the tool set they gave me and every time they schedule a team to come and fix it they get rerouted to some other person who needs help." In truth, Samantha liked the door being broken. It made it so that anyone who might think about talking to her would think again to spare themselves the trouble of dealing with the door to her office. Over a course of five years working for Internal Augmented Industries Samantha had found that she was much more comfortable talking and being with herself rather than her idiotic co-workers. She was not paid a lot for what she did and didn't receive any benefits, but she was always a careful person, never needing to invest in life-insurance for the reason that if she ever got hurt, her hypochondriac brain would probably kill her anyway.

"I don't like your sass, Ward," Pioesse said. Except, he had a lisp and his "s"' didn't come across very well, so Samantha really heard "I don't lie your ath."

You sure can't seem to look away from it, creep, Samantha thought to herself, almost muttering the phrase. She broke eye-contact for a moment to focus her words on what she was actually thinking of saying to Mr. Pioesse. "Sorry, sir," she said.

"Fine." Mr. Pioesse said it with, naturally, a sense of finality, saying that he wanted to end any sort of tension in the conversation.

Samantha looked down at her papers, staring especially at the piece of filing paper she had earlier used as a napkin. She looked up to Mr. Pioesse, his eyes not trained on her eyes but instead her figure, scoping the land out all the way down to her legs. You could almost see his mouth salivating. What a creep.

Pioesse's eyes flicked up with a shake of the head. "Did you recollect Mr. Darnum yet?"

Samantha closed her eyes, you stupid! that was due today! All you had to do was find the moment where he was on the swing-set when he was five years old! That wasn't hard!

Samantha opened her eyes, "Yes. . ."

Pioesse waited, his head shifting as if to say go on?

"I left it in my car." A lie of course, and Mr. Pioesse probably caught it too. He shifted his head slightly towards the ground, his eyes staying locked on hers, saying, sure, okay, you "left them in your car", yep! happens all the time. Just like children leave their homework at their house.

"Get it to my office by 7:00am." [theven]

"But I leave at 4:00am?"

"And Mr. Darnum is supposed to have his memory by 9:00am today. He remembers to pay his subscription to us every month so he gets the benefits."

"Okay, I'll run out and get it to you by seven."

Mr. Pioesse shook his head in an unapproving way and began to head out of the office. He marched up to the voice-automated doors. "Open!" he shouted at the broken receiver. This time, the receiver received perfectly and the door opened just fine. Mr. Pioesse looked surprised at that and began to go out the door. Suddenly, he turned around, his head just outside the door. "Oh, Samantha."

Looking up from her desk, "Yes?"

"You don't have a c--" the door slammed cutting off the sentence and almost cutting off Pioesse's nose.

It was true. Samantha did not own a car. But she would be damned if she didn't have that memory on his desk by seven.

After organizing the pieces of paper on her desk Samantha booted up her employee-issued desktop. As the machine slowly turned on - you would think for the late twenty-first century they would have fixed this problem by now - Samantha went through her planner/notebook, searching for the file about Mr. Darnum. She ruffled the dividers: [Daggart] [Daphney] Ah-[Darnum]. She opened the page to the name and started reading.

Darnum:

Theodore Pedros Darnum has requested his monthly memory of a time in the first grade when he was swinging on the school swing-set while he held hands with his childhood crush. Please locate the file, isolate it, and transmute it into viewing mode so Mr. Darnum can enjoy this memory once again. Thank you! As always, keep in mind, you are a valued employee.

The rest of the file was the data that she would have to type into her desktop in order to pull up the file memory. It was just an array of numbers and letters that, to someone born in the new-coding-world, would make perfect sense but would just look like abstract art to everybody else.

Due to the large font on the front of the note that held the request and, of course, the "employee encouragement", the first page of Mr. Darnum's life was only his infancy and his time as a toddler. Starting pre-school and first grade wouldn't happen until page two.

Samantha flipped over, and noticed that the time-date was off. It skipped from 2023, the year Mr. Darnum turned 3, all the way to 2028, the year Darnum turned 8. The part in between was missing.

"It must have fallen out somewhere," Samantha said to herself. She lifted the notebook to check if the paper was scattered underneath. She checked the floor, to see if it had somehow fallen from it's perch upon the table. She checked the drawers on her desk. Nothing. The paper was nowhere. "Wait a minute. . ."

Samantha looked down to the trash can and saw the piece of paper, smeared with pink lipstick and stained with a little bit of saliva. The title at the top:

Theodore Pedros Darnum

2024-2027

"Stupid!" Samantha said slapping her forehead. She retrieved the file page from the pile of dead trees. It wasn't crumpled too much, and most of the letters were still readable so. . . nothing happened really. . .

Samantha put the file on her desk in front of her keyboard. She opened up the application for Recollection and opened a new document.

A small computer voice gave a friendly but startling "Hello! We're sooo happy to have you on board with us for a great year-" Samantha cut the voice short. It was the common "employee encouragement" that was really meant to tell the employees, "Hey, I know you work for us an everything, but in order to not pay you anything substantial, we're just going to butter you up and hope you feel wanted! Thanks. Bye!"

Samantha started to type in the data from her sheet. She had always practiced typing ever since she was in high school and had been able to reach a typing speed of 133 wpm. Pretty impressive for a non-competitive type-racer. The input, small print and a little hard to read from the smear of lipstick, was dedicated to a certain point in time. Each paragraph was a year of that person's memory and each letter or number in that paragraph was a series of moments that the person typing the input could see. All Samantha had to do was type in the first letter of the paragraph and the last letter of the paragraph to get an estimate of when those two events actually happened. Mr. Darnum was born, conveniently enough, in the year of September. Right when school starts. The event happened when Mr. Darnum was five so all Samantha had to do was put the letter F at the beginning of the paragraph and skip to the end and put the number 5.

A short clip appeared on the screen in front of Samantha. The clip played out from a first person point of view. Opening eyes with young Ted Darnum getting out of his bed on his birthday, his parents waiting down stairs with a cake, his mother and father both dressed in business attire, his father carrying a briefcase that had the title "Darnum & Darnum, Attorneys at Law". Samantha fast-forwarded through most of the day, until she got to the point in which young Darnum was having recess. There were swings of course but no crush and no holding hands. Fail.

Samantha moved on to the next letter or number in the list searching through each of the different recesses to finally find the one where they were holding hands. [F R 2 4 4 6 C G K 8 U] all failures. Finally, Samantha opened up one of the codes [Y] and went through the day to the point in which recess took its course.

There it was. The holy grail; the diamond in the rough; the lost jewel of Ireland; the sword of Honjo Masamune; the Sarcophagus of Menkaure; the lost treasure of Jesse James.

The children swung on the swing-set, their hands gripped tightly together, there smiles plastered on their child faces with no care for anything else in the world. The air was romantic, in an innocent way, promising joy and prosper.

The girl, started swinging higher and higher, the boy following suit and swinging higher and higher as well. Caught in a perpetual pendulum of positive emotions that permeated through any scraped knee or cut lip. Smiles, with teeth missing and gums bleeding from flossing too hard. Childish apple-pie breath seeping in sighs of joy.

The girl goes higher. The boy, however, stays at his height. Tugging on the girl's arm, making her spin in all directions as she flails on the swing back and forth, high low forward backward.

The girl is scared now, her smile changing to a grimace of fear, her eyes tearing from the cool September breeze, her mouth emitting a sharp but not loud cry.

The boy lets go of the girl's hand. The girl falls. The girl falls on her head. Her spine bends forward over her slumped down head, snapping under the pressure of her own weight. The girl lets out a meek and pitiful cry of pain.

The other children look at the scene. The boy remains on the swing, swinging back and forth, laughing and giggling at the funny joke that just got told.

Samantha pauses the video, her heart dropping in beats slowly till a heavy ping starts to drag through her chest. She places her hand over her heart, her eyes concentrated on the picture of the little girl, legs bent over head, spine obviously broken. Horror.

Her eyes stuck on the horrible picture of the mangled heap of flesh that had once been an adorable little girl in a pink dress, Samantha begins to pick up her phone. She dials the numbers, 9 - 1 - . . . She stops. She hits the off-button on the receiver, clearing the numbers from the small screen of the phone. She can't call the police.

When she went to work at IAI, she signed a contract saying that no matter what she sees, she cannot report any of the findings to the police due to the User-Corporate Trust Agreement that every customer signs at the beginning of their subscription. Recollections are not to be used in any way to incriminate anybody for any crime that happened. Anyway, why would she need to call the police. It was just a tragedy. The boy didn't mean to make the girl fall. . . right?

Samantha puts the phone back in the receiver, her eyes still glued to the picture. Maybe the girl survived? Samantha tells herself. Probably not.

Samantha moves the mouse attached to her desktop over to the "cut" feature on the software. She isolates the video length in which the horrible event happened. Once the file is completely isolated, she transfers it to a flash-drive in the desk top. She takes the flash drive and plugs it into a small machine in the corner of her office. The machine has a headset on it. A small device that goes over the top of a person's head and allows them to experience any moment from any portion of data collected by any individual. She moves the file over to the software of the machine. Puts the file on a small document titled "Swing-set".

Part of Samantha's job is to test all of the recordings that she isolates and transmutes to a Recollection recording. She selects the document on the machine.

Her breathing is shallow, her heart rate is increasing. She is putting on the headset:

She is on a swing-set, her hand intertwined with the hand of a small girl. The girl is wearing a pink dress. Her smile is adorable, her eyes full of wonder and joy at the wonderful swing-set that is rocking her and Samantha back and forth.

They go higher and higher, Samantha, seems to be laughing as they do this. Though, deep inside, she is crying and trying to force herself off of the swing-set. She tries to get up, but notices her legs are the legs of a boy, not herself. She is stuck.

The girl goes higher and higher but Samantha stays where she is. Feeling the breeze on her head and through her hair, which is significantly shorter than it was when she was in her office, Samantha does not go higher. Instead, she tugs on the girls arm, sending her twirling and hurling. The girls face, cringing, screams out for Samantha to help her. Samantha does nothing. She just keeps swinging.

The girl twirls more and more until she flies off the swing and lands on her head, her spine careening over her neck and snapping in two.

Samantha is laughing.

The clip ends and Samantha rips off her headset, her hair mussed and her eyes filled with tears of terror and confusion. She felt all that the boy felt. She felt the wind against her skin and eyes as she swung up and down on the swing-set. She felt the joy of laughing at each other as they swung faster and higher. She felt the demonic pleasure the boy felt when the girl was flung off the swing-set into her doom.

She felt sick. Samantha rushed over to the over-flowing trash-bin and vomited her stomach into it. She lay there, occasionally throwing up and occasionally crying. She had never had to do something like that before. Not once in her career had she had to recollect the death of a small child.

But Samantha Ward had a job to do, and she was going to do it. She downloaded the document onto a separate flash-drive. The time was 3:30am. Another thirty minutes until she would go home and not eat chicken and waffles. She didn't care.

Samantha grabbed her stuff from her desk, not bothering to turn her computer off or put the Recollection device in the corner on sleep mode. She grabbed the trash can that was full of crumpled paper and a bile smoothie of half-digested food and drink.

She walked up to the voice-automated door.

"Open."

It did.