Damnatio Memoriae
Archival footage recovered from Hesperia’s House of Memory:
The floating man rode the wave of narcotics into REM sleep, sinking into memories of Martian basins under bombardment and hounds skulking around dead lands. Through them, he perceived the world in its making and unmaking. He could no longer recognize which of them belonged to him.
A siren’s shriek startled him. He scratched the back of his head and felt vibrations under his skin, just above the root of an intense migraine.
He heard a laugh. A voice saying, “I guess it’s true what they say about the Martian army. They teach you to sleep anywhere. Isn’t that so, Jarek?”
Jarek frowned at the name. Knowledge was not as forthcoming as it once had been. He prodded his mind for information, but only found mismatched fragments of an autobiography surrendered to a discordant void. He had one certainty. This was not Mars. Otherwise, he would not need to dream of gravity.
He spun in zero-g until he was facing a dim red light. His hair was short and dotted with a few streaks of grey that extended to an uncared beard. The lines running through his face blended with battlefield scars. He wore a polyester suit with the letters E.T.D.C. embroidered just above his heart. Eirene Terran Defense Corporation. He spelled the words in his mind, slowly and consciously, wondering how he remembered their meaning.
He prodded his thoughts until a flash of awareness hit him. Then, with the full might of an employee disturbed during a break, he bellowed, “Why are you bothering me? Has Quentin lost another dummy?”
“Quentin is dead.”
He hesitated. “Like hell he is.”
“Want to bet on it?” the operator said, cackling at the idea. “He tried to sneak into a shuttle going down to Madrid, but cheap jammers don’t do the trick anymore. His head exploded when he tried to pass through the first checkpoint. The cleaning team has just reached the docking bay.”
“He already had fifty missions. He should’ve been transferred to a holding facility on the surface,” Jarek said as he floated toward the hatch.
“We have no control over the speed of the transfers. We do what we can, but there’s too few of us and too many of you,” the operator said. “You’re welcome to return to Mars whenever you like.”
And you can go to hell, he thought. There had been no signs that suggested Quentin had lost his mind. He seemed fine, if only somewhat distant. This was a bad omen. Jarek already had forty-eight missions under his belt. Was he that close to the edge? Nothing guaranteed the same would happen to him. He dismissed the idea before the doubt solidified into madness.
“He left you some unfinished business though,” the operator said.
“Great. What got through this time?” Jarek said.
“A small cargo ship. It crashed in the California death zone an hour ago, probably hit some debris trying to slip past orbital defenses.”
Jarek opened the hatch and waited for gravity to kick in. “Crash site status?”
“Perimeter’s already closed and your Barghest has been deployed. There are no signs of hazardous materials in the atmosphere. We’re likely dealing with the usual desperadoes,” the operator said. “Your orders are to scout the area before the cleaning party shows up and see if there’s anything worth salvaging. Understood?”
“Yessir. Have you told Sophie?”
“She’s already waiting for you, hotshot. And Jarek,” said the operator, “Quentin was smart. He was a real tech savant, and he still got his brains blown out because he did something stupid.”
“I’m not Quentin. Shit, you talk as if you didn’t know me.”
“I don’t. Knowing you is not part of my job. I’d lose my mind if I had to remember every Martian that comes through this station. I’m telling you this because you are an effective asset. Martians kill each other for water concessions. We do not have that problem here. Not anymore. A few years of hard work will grant you a lifetime of leisure. If you want to throw that way for a firing squad, that’s your choice.”
#
The E.T.D.C. called Rhadamanthus station a temporary residence for displaced Martians. It was often translated as ‘bureaucratic purgatory’ into the Martian language. It was the stations that protected Earth from external threats, for example, people fleeing war-torn planets. It had been its main purpose for the better part of two centuries, and now it was almost senile in its functioning. If a piece had not fallen apart, then it was in the process of doing so.
Sophie was waiting in a crooked hallway. She was pacing back and forth, walking with a slight limp. She wore dark fatigues too big for her malnourished body. Her hands were shifting invisible gears, but she stopped to smile at Jarek.
He surmised he had always known that smile, though he was unaware of the fact until recently. He could mimic the expression with ease. Over time, it had become a gateway into a different life. He smiled and remembered prowling the tunnels of Brown City in search of food while a putrid smell hung stale in the air. Jarek had never been to Brown City, but Sophie was born there. Now, the feeling of waking into a dream never left him.
Jarek slouched against the wall. “Quentin. He’s…”
“Dead, I know,” Sophie said. “I told him that jammer was useless. I knew someone who could have helped him.”
“Your smuggler friend?”
“She’s an ace. A few adjustments could’ve taken Quentin out of the station, only he wanted to leave as soon as possible. He said Eirene planned on raising the number of missions to sixty.”
“And will they?”
“Perhaps. Our salvage quota has fallen behind Minos and Aeacus by a wide margin.”
“I’m not surprised. They conscripted all the refugees they took in. Their death toll doubles the number of Martians living in Rhadamanthus.”
“Profit is the only language they understand around here.” Sophie sighed. “Can’t blame Quentin for trying though. He went through three fusion partners in the last six months, and compatible neurological partners are rare enough as is. Having all that information crashing his mind must have been hell. What do you become after that?”
“Collateral damage,” Jarek said. “Why do you think Earthlings stopped doing this?”
Sophie stared at him. She frowned but said nothing more of the matter. “They’re waiting for us. Come on. Let’s not give them a reason to kick us out.”
They entered a rust-colored room, where pipes lined up the walls of an industrial crypt. It was empty barring two chairs and the equipment protruding from them; half sarcophagus and half medieval torture device. Five technicians surrounded the equipment, all draped in greasy coveralls. They only acknowledged the newcomers by looking away.
Jarek and Sophie took a seat opposite to each other. Someone tied Jarek’s wrists and strapped his forehead with electrodes, then plugged a wire into the back of his head, right into where Eirene had carved an entry port connected to his spinal cord. The discomfort turned into pain, his brain seemingly swelling up inside his skull. He looked at Sophie. Blood was dripping from her nose and her forehead glistened with sweat. Her eyes were clouded, submerged in a trance-like, outward numbness.
A tall woman holding a clipboard stepped between them. She leaned closer to inspect Jarek, like some researcher staring upon a misbegotten species. “Your names and Eirene code,” she said in a low, but firm voice.
“Jarek Kartashov. Anima three-one-eight,” he said; then she said, “Sophie Corday. Animus six-three-zero.” Their voices were fragile.
Two other people set up a screen between them. The woman set her clipboard aside, typing mechanically on the keyboard. “They have been through forty-eight cognitive fusions.” She looked at them with narrowed eyes.
“Surprised?” Sophie said.
“Most people don’t remember their names after thirty.”
“Is that why they ask us to do fifty missions before seeing a consular officer?” Jarek said.
The woman did not hear him. She was focused on the screens. “The psych-soft’s ready,” someone told her and she nodded.
“Listen, I will mention an object and you will picture it in your mind. Keep it simple. We are not grading your creativity. This is for assessing the cognitive damage and probability of desertion.”
She picked up her clipboard, cleared her throat, and read with a booming voice, “A tall white fountain.”
The room fell silent. Everyone turned toward the screen. There, Jarek saw his imagination materialize. The result was volatile. It became a fountain in the broadest sense of the word. The tower and the tip had a flat coloring and sparse detail. It was a gouache of grey hues and white highlights. Utilitarian and drab. The picture on the other side of the screen, the one Sophie was looking at, was only different in height and width.
Both held a vague resemblance to the fountain he had seen in the recruitment center on Mars. He carried no likeness of home other than what he held in his heart. He had been young then, and dangerously devoted to survival. The colony had run out of water and those who had not joined the army were already dead, and those who did join would die soon after.
One of the machines vomited a paper. The woman picked it up and read it with narrowed eyes. “Cognitive fusion is now at sixty percent. The probability of desertion… fifteen percent. Good enough.” She started toward the exit, her group moving along. “Find their synchronicity point and prepare the blender.”
As he watched her go, Jarek’s sight became blurry. He felt lightheaded. The sensation turned into nausea. The wire connected to the back of his head sent a strong electric discharge that emptied him of everything he was, and darkness poured into the void until there was no trace of whatever he had been before.
#
The simulation could not turn back time. It could only attempt to catch a glimpse of its passing, like photographing a rare astronomical event. Even with a perfect memory, you were at risk of stumbling on the fact you had been dreaming all along. Still, to Jarek, this felt like homecoming.
Here was the truth as far as he could tell. They had met on a ship about to explode. A howitzer projectile had wiped out Jarek’s squad just a week before. He was the sole survivor, beaten by the winds and accosted by a ravenous wasteland. He lived despite a broken leg and a nearly depleted oxygen tank. His superiors gave him a medal for his courage. He found it ironic that, in their attempts to make him hate the enemy, they made him loathe the fighting. Perhaps that was why they sent him on his way with two gallons of water that he later traded for passage to the nearest interplanetary port. It was a safe bet. After all, he had never been in a shuttle that had not caught fire.
She sat in the cargo hold, tucked away in a corner. Blonde hair, matted and wild, outlined an oval-shaped face covered in soot and dry blood. Her expression made her seem like a sculpture under red lights. A pietà of flesh and bone that revealed a vast expanse and a great emptiness within.
Jarek sat next to her. The curiosity he felt was unknown and familiar at the same time. The product of brain fatigue, of seeing this memory play out the same way during every cognitive fusion. Jamais vu, something like a word that had lost its meaning.
She nodded to him. “Hey, man, you looking for a comfortable place to die?”
“I reckon it doesn’t matter where I sit.”
“Then you should’ve stayed on the surface. Easier to get killed down there.”
“I wanted to see Earth’s oceans.”
She frowned. “Really?”
“No, I don’t know why I said that.” He turned away, ashamed of his animalistic fear of death, and he crawled under thick shadows to hide his face. “Truth is I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Maybe you’re just like me,” she said.
“You don’t know me, stranger.”
“Don’t need to. The way you carry yourself tells me all I need to know. You’re a soldier who never had to crawl through tunnels as a kid,” she said. “Tharsis or Hesperia?”
“The former.”
“Why, then it’s a good thing we did not meet down there, otherwise I would’ve shot a bullet through your head. Why did you leave?”
“I had to. I had nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to.”
“Then you are just like me.”
“A fool?”
“Close.” She chuckled. “Someone looking for a way out of war.”
Jarek sneered. “You think there’s no war on Earth?”
She shrugged. “Haven’t been there.”
“You’re crazy.”
“If I have to choose between foolishness and insanity, I’d rather take the former.”
“Okay,” Jarek said. He became aware of her fear through their shared sensorial experience. She was tired from the sustained effort of self-reassurance. Everything will be okay, she kept thinking, and he sunk into the pool of her being until he was drowning in it. They ceased to be aware of each other soon after, composed into a gestalt of a single, silent consciousness.
#
The Barghest’s codename was Garm. It was an advanced military drone retrofitted for salvage operations carried out in highly radioactive zones. Its conscience was stored in Eirene’s data banks somewhere deep in the Nevada desert and it received orders from the signals that bounced from a multitude of comsats. It was fluent in procedural programming languages.
It shook its wolfish head and gnawed at a patch of irradiated synthetic skin that fell off, leaving behind a hole that exposed the nanofiber carapace that coated its quadruped frame. Then, it looked at its surroundings with eyes that were black as though there was no world, universe, or stars.
It radioed orbit to confirm the coordinates, then started trotting westward. The highway rattled and circled through wide stretches of dry land dotted with barren hills shaped like burial mounds. The wind blew hard, lifting radioactive dust off the ground and mounting it over the vestiges of ancient civilizations.
Garm reached the crash site within the hour. The ship lay at the bottom of a crater. It was a Martian industrial freighter, sometimes used by the guerrillas as kamikaze bullets against hydroponic fields. The serial number revealed it had been modified with cheap materials from Jovian shipyards. Garm learned this from Jarek’s memory bank because he had worked five years in a scrapyard.
Eirene could use the information, so Garm excised it with surgical precision out of Jarek’s mind. Unceremoniously, another piece of his past was dispatched to a corporate prison of ideas. Jarek’s contract stipulated he would get them back once he was on Earth.
Garm made a quick descent and entered the ship. Inside the cockpit, the pilot’s upper body rested above the console, draped in a military duster coat. Something had punctured his skull and half his face had burned down. The ground was covered with medals won in wars whose history only a few could remember.
Garm ripped a panel from underneath the controls and connected to the console through a wire coming out of its muzzle. It searched the interplanetary traffic database and found a match. The Géricault, a neutral vessel en route to Venus recently reported as missing. It had a special license, private docks in every Martian station, and a flight system loaded with interplanetary illegal routes. The cargo was also full of Terran-manufactured weapons, all of them illegal.
The pilot had radioed his location to Luna’s space traffic control. He had received a clearance to land on the satellite. Three minutes later, the ship vanished from radar screens. Garm used the data from the flight recorder to simulate the Géricault’s last moments. The ship flew across a transparent vacuum. The explosion was a blink in the simulation, the accident a matter of seconds. Its source was a neglected engine overheating. The ship fell off its course and then it was gone.
After downloading the data, Garm went down to the cargo hold to make a general catalog of the smuggled weapons. Most of them had been rendered useless, and the task would have ended there if not for the extra container at the bottom of the wreckage. The container had turned on itself, scratched and dented by the force of the impact. Garm sank its canines into the steel and pulled apart a piece of it. It stuck its head and turned on its lights.
It was full of bodies. Dozens of them. Their limbs twisted in odd angles and stretched to lengths that tore them down. The lights lengthened the shadows over their gaunt faces. The young suddenly became old. There was no pain in their expressions and their eyes reflected no knowledge of their passing.
Martian refugees. There had been many attempted break-ins lately. People who had nothing to offer save for their lives. Garm took in the sight in silence, black eyes staring into dead worlds. It left the ship after the silence had revealed all it knew.
Outside, it was raining. Garm sent a copy of the footage and a request to search for the smuggler’s liaison in Luna. The reply arrived a moment later: Delete the ship’s log and the manifest. The cleaning team was on its way.
Garm stopped, if only briefly because the Martians in its head resisted the order. It was futile, like trying to stop the rain, for anything tuned by the hands of god could not be made into anything other than what it already was. Eirene was Garm’s god, its creator, and its master. It had not programmed Garm to disobey orders.
Garm stood with its sides moving in and out, as though it were breathing. It twisted its head and stood again, lifting its head to look around as if someone were watching it move. Without a sound, it turned back to the ship.
#
The E.T.D.C. drafted a report with short and simple sentences and sent a copy to the governing ministry of Martian interstellar travel. The pilot was the only reported casualty.
Jarek and Sophie returned to their cubicle in the outer layer of Rhadamanthus, where they suffered through the fusion’s comedown. A strange paranoia flared in Jarek’s chest, and the walls seemed to fall in on him. He was in a constant state of confusion and he spent several days not knowing where he was. He woke up sweating and vomited bile. He dry-swallowed some pills and tried to sleep.
He no longer dreamed of Mars. Instead, he fell victim to nightmares in which he faced a pile of bodies, and he was met with empty eye sockets looking at him. He stood as testimony to their silence. He concluded that his escape from such fate perhaps meant that there was no fate at all and that people were hard-coded to follow a set path despite their choosing otherwise. Then, soon after waking, its meaning was already lost to him.
While they rested, the E.T.D.C. raised the number of missions to sixty.
Jarek woke up feeling stuffed with nausea. Sophie stared at him. Her eyes were swollen and wet. She was looking at him as if he were a stranger. He wanted to hold her in his arms, to tell her everything would be okay despite not meaning it.
“Another nightmare? Do you want to talk?” she said.
“I’d rather not.” He turned and shut his eyes. Then he sat again. “You know, I saw you and my first thought was ‘Who are you?’”
Sophie stared at him.
“We’ve been in that churn too many times,” Jarek said. “Every so often I feel I woke up in the wrong body with the wrong memories. You know how it is.”
She sat. She looked at him as though he were a madman, but then he realized she might be thinking that she was mad herself.
“Listen. I know,” Jarek said. “I see them too. Hell. I can’t remember much else these days, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Wrong.” Her smile was almost innocent. “See, remember that smuggler, the one who pays for Eirene’s data? She hooked me with a recording device, so I could get better footage during missions.”
“Of course she did,” he said. “Even so, what’s there for us to do? We’ll become a drooling mess if someone finds out.”
“It’s absurd, I know.”
“No, you don’t. If you did we would not be discussing this.”
“We won’t make it through the next loyalty test. Chances are they’re already drafting our dismissals.”
“Give it some time. Maybe we’ll forget about this too,” Jarek said.
“But do I really want to forget?” Sophie shook her head. She incorporated and so did he. Their movements were a perfect reflection of each other.
She sighed. “Look. There’s no point in fighting over who owns what. You have access to every corner of my mind, and I’ve seen everything you have to offer. We remember everything that never happened and only a few things that did happen,” she said. “But whatever’s on Earth cannot be worth all these deaths. Eirene wants pawns, not people with history.”
He blinked and ran one hand across his sweaty face. “So that smuggler of yours gets the data. I suppose she can also leak it to a few Martian networks. Then we pray something comes out of it. That’s the plan?”
“Right on.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m amnesiac, Jarek.” She smiled. “Let us finish this before we forget we ever dared to act.”
Jarek’s lips curved into a wry smile. They nodded to each other and they sent the information. Nothing had changed in the order of things when they reopened their eyes. Perhaps, Jarek thought, change escaped any attempt to understand it.
They sat and shared the silence. Two strangers awaiting their reckoning, feeling like fate had already passed them over. He thanked her for keeping him alive in every breath she took, every memory she spoke into being, and every word carried the weight of a long goodbye.
César Esparza studied History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, specializing in World History. He has been attending writing workshops for years and hopes to put good use to his learning of English by delving into the myriads of futures science fiction can offer.