The Memobrarian

“Hi, sir. How can I help you?”

“I need to recover information from the memory of my late grandmother to cover a hole in my investigation.”

“What is the date of her disappearance?”

“She left us on the tenth of January, 2135.”

“Ok, we should have her memories as the Memory-Catchers have stored them since 2042. Would you like to check this here or at home?”

“I can do it here. Hopefully, I’ve gotten all the right clues to access the memory I need. How long would it take for you to access it?”

“At least two hours. This is not an exact science.”

While the customer was filling out the forms, the Memobrarian, Carl, called the Telepath for her to be ready to transmit the memory to the grandchild of the deceased woman once he had found it. But first, an extensive search had to be completed. They were not stored by dates or under an index; the memories were accessed through interconnected information following stimuli based on the clues provided by the customer. Apart from that, the primary filter was the name of the person.

Back in the year 2029, Claudius, a Memory-Catcher, together with the best Plasma-Handler of his time, conceived a way to concentrate the memories of dying people inside a plasmasphere. At first, his only purpose was to save the memory of brilliant scientists; so that the future generations could see through those scientists’ eyes. The system would allow them to access their memories as they were reliving the moment, going through their process of reasoning. Later, another group of people, powerful ones, wanted to preserve their own memories for their families and business partners. Claudius and their team didn’t like the idea of including some selfish beings inside their Brain of Plasma. Still, they needed the resources to continue developing their project.

After successfully storing the memories, the problem was to retrieve them. Many different kinds of Telepaths did many trials; Claudius almost gave up.

He couldn’t work around the issue of retrieving the memories. The regular Telepaths could read only current thoughts, but a solution was on its way. A young boy from the Special Academy of Mentally Gifted, his alma mater, had recently discovered his powers. He was a Telepath, but unlike any other. He was capable of reading the plasma as though it were a living mind. He could browse among all sixteen people’s memories that had already been transferred back then to the Plasma Brain. Carl became an asset to the system; it wouldn’t work without him. 

“This should be enough. I have written all the details, and the ideas my granny and I were having before her passing. What do you think, Mr. Memobrarian?”

“It looks good. Please wait while I do my job.”

The Memobrarian reviewed the data provided by the customer. Then he checked that the grandmother was the creator of a vaccine for a respiratory disease that was taking the lives of 27 out of 100 people in countries that prior to the year 2103 hadn’t bordered with an ocean. Her grandson was fighting now a similar micro-enemy and needed her vision. 

Once Carl finished acquiring the memories needed, the Telepath retrieved them from him while at the same time, she was projecting them to the customer’s mind.

The Memobrarian always felt wasted after doing his job; therefore, a different Telepath had to transmit his readings.

There was something in the granny’s memories that made Carl think and see things differently. Her objective and abstract thinking were mixed with creativity and images of the outdoors; she was an explorer and used the exterior world for inspiration. She didn’t spend her whole life inside a laboratory but went there once her mind had the pieces in place to make her indoor seclusion time effective. This granny was the first scientist with that kind of balance whose memories the Memobrarian had ever read.

Carl had been kept alive longer than most people because no one could have replaced him. He was one of the ten individuals in the world whose life got extended by the Master of Time. The original Memory-Catcher was part of the plasma among much other former personnel who had died from natural aging. He, the only survivor of the founder team, had desperately wished for someone to take over for a long time. None of the Telepaths he trained were able to develop his ability. Two of them even lost their minds before so many memories, and cloning didn’t work. At some point, he stopped trying and went numb about his lifestyle. He had embraced resignation.

Around 700.000 selected minds were inside the Plasma Brain. The only relief Carl felt was when accessing memories led to discoveries and understanding of a problem to find solutions. 

Although Carl was a slave of the system and wanted to change his job, he was wealthy, listed in the Top 10. But with little chance of leisure time. The weekends were his only opportunity to rest, isolated, and far away from other minds, yet he had to work on weekends for emergencies.

This old young man could go on vacation only in his mind, reliving the best moments of his childhood before being discovered as a powerful Telepath.

He was capable of smelling and feeling everything as he was in the time and place of his memories. However, after so many years of delimited and repetitive happy past thoughts, he got bored. He needed to create new images in his brain by experiencing new things that were his and not borrowed; it was time to free himself —the memories of the granny awoken something in him.

After more than one hundred years, he was finally willing to break free from his routine, thinking that he owed more to himself. However, he felt what he was doing was worth it; humans had advanced much faster thanks to his ability. He was conflicted and needed to find an alternative for him to leave without regrets. Therefore, to gain some clarity, he accessed the memory of his latest mentor, Samuel, who was younger than Carl, but wiser.

While reading the memory, he realized that Samuel was theorizing about a way to induce the birth of someone like him. Cloning didn’t work because clones couldn’t reach maturity before having multiple organ failures, but his mentor was considering other methods.  He died before testing his idea, but he managed to produce a modified embryo that carried the genetic characteristics of Carl. Samuel’s team of geneticists re-engineered the DNA of healthy regular embryos given by unknown donors, replicating what made Carl special. 

“Where is this, embryo?” asked Carl to himself. He couldn’t find the exact location; the last image on Samuel’s thoughts was delegating the embryo to his people to a facility where they could preserve it with cryogenics or develop it. Later that day, he suffered a fatal heart-attack, Carl felt his pain from the last minutes.   Ten years had passed since Samuel’s death.

The next day the Memobrarian went to the Genetic Improvement Center, where Samuel used to work as a Telepath to link the minds of the scientists there. This interaction inevitably made Samuel knowledgeable on the subject of genetics, hence his ideas to help Carl finding a path to live a different life.  Once there, Carl requested to talk to the person in the memory; she was still working there.

“I’m glad to have found you, Ms. Hermann,” said Carl.

“Samuel talked a lot about you; he cared for you.”

“That’s true. He was probably at the top of my best friends, more like a brother.”

“Well, please tell me why I’m so lucky to have you here,” said Ms. Hermann with a smile.

“I wonder what happened to an embryo he was working on, just before his death.”

“Would you help me remember telepathically?”

Carl projected what he saw to Ms. Hermann’s mind. Although he could have scanned her, it was not polite and was forbidden to read people’s minds without consent.

“Thank you, Memobrarian. That embryo you saw I took, together with five more, was sent to Growing Future Foundation, where they were developed to test Samuel’s theory. This was done with you in mind, but it is part of a bigger plan.”

“What do you mean by ‘bigger plan’?”

“Unified Universal Interests considers the Plasma Brain as an asset for humanity, and they requested Samuel to replicate the system in a different location.”

“How come I didn’t know about this, he never told me.”

“He would have told you, but not before proving his theory. He knew how hard you tried to find a substitute to no avail.”

“I see, that is so him. Well, did he posthumously succeed?”

“I would say so, but it is still early. Only one of the six developed embryos has the skills, but the boy needs proper training. So far, he has shown to be better than many but not enough. We are not certain he’ll develop your abilities, that is why no one had told you.”

“I wasn’t able to do what I do until after my fourteenth birthday and some practice.”

“Would you mind…?”

“…to, train him?” said Carl to complete the question.

“Yes, would you?”

“I haven’t tried this since thirty years ago, but I feel like I owe it to Samuel. He deserves that someone finishes his project despite my lack of hope.”

The Memobrarian had to rethink his intention of moving on quickly; after all, he didn’t have any other choice or a better idea. “It looks like there is a chance for me to have a replacement finally. Anyway, I couldn’t have left without one, to be honest to myself,” thought Carl.

The boy, Alfor (A.L.4), was the fourth embryo to complete gestation. The first three were in foster care being raised like regular kids, while numbers five and six were still kept at the Foundation, hoping their powers would manifest later. As soon as Alfor and Carl met, their teacher-student relationship started.

After four years of training, Alfor became proficient in retrieving memories from the Plasma Brain. A.L.5 and A.L.6, one boy and one girl, had been training with Carl during the previous two years when he finally got time off for himself with no scheduled return.  The three children replaced him during his vacations. However, three new Plasma Brains were waiting to start operation, so four Memobrarians would be required. Meanwhile, the Memory-Catchers and Plasma-Handlers of each site were storing the memories into the new Plasma Brains.

Carl had the resources to go wherever he wanted. It was time to enhance his collection of memories. As soon as he was “out of office,” he took the first Cruise to see Earth from space. He spent a week orbiting Earth, and from there, he chose the places that appealed the most to him, offered before his eyes by The Big Bluer, 80% water 20% ground. He visited locations such as the Submerged Caribbean, the Sunken Mansions of Florida, and the Big Lake of Amazonas, also socialized anywhere he went meeting thousands of people. One day after four hundred and twenty-seven Globe’s rotations, he stopped traveling. The Memobrarian was full of images, sounds, smells, flavors, experiences, feelings that were his own, plus borrowed memories of a variety of individuals who voluntarily shared them with him. He was ready to go back.

Once Carl got back, he only found Alfor, the other two children were already working at two separate facilities, so one Plasma Brain was idle; his presence was needed. He had stopped longing for a different life and was willing to continue working, knowing he had a plethora of memories to relive, and this time, he was confident that his retirement was feasible.

The Foundation developed a new modified embryo A.L.7; this one turned out to be as powerful as Carl. Finally, twelve years after the birth of A.L.7, someone was ready to take his place. Samuel’s idea helped his apprentice and ensured a better life for the new generation of Memobrarians, who would be replaceable.

The first Memobrarian in history retired at the age of 135, looking 25 years old like the day when his aging was paused. He would be aging naturally from then on, enjoying his fortune, the accumulation of knowledge that made him wise and the memories he could relive, with the freedom of getting new ones.

This story was written by Lunyzbreid Lopez for the weekly contest at Reedsy, following this prompt: Write a story about someone who can pause time or re-live old memories at will.