.If you're listening to this recording, it means you don't remember. Hell, for all I know, I could be the one listening to this. It's only a matter of time before they find me, and once I forget, it's probably going to be too late for me.
I have no way of telling how much you know, so I'll assume you don't remember anything. Given the unprovoked wipes that have been taking place, it's a safe assumption.
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It all started with project Glass-Wall. Records of exactly how this got started are a bit sketchy at best, but we know the name, and some of its origins;
In the early twenty-first century, information was being spread freely across the internet, whether the original owner liked it or not. There was a saying "Information wants to be free". Information doesn't just mean news or general knowledge; we're talking about everything; music, stories, movies, technical specifications, anything and everything that doesn't need a physical presence to exist. Anything, in essence, that can exist in memory.
Once a person knows something, it can be passed to someone else. A picture can be re-drawn, a tune can be hummed, a story re-told, and sequences of data memorized and recreated. Of course, humans generally can't recreate anything perfectly from memory, but that's beside the point; once computers arrived on the scene, information could be shared and repeated endlessly and almost instantly. This, of course, upset a lot of people who wanted to keep a tight lid on what was passed around; be it pirated copies of the latest songs or news about the latest scandal that hasn't quite gone public yet. Attempts were made to stem the flow, but it was like trying to stopper Niagara Falls with a cork. New types of DRM were invented, trialled, but inevitably failed the test.
There is very little you can do to stop something from being recreated. Want to stop a piece of music from being listened to by anyone who hasn't paid for the privilege? If they listen to it at home, they can simply copy whatever medium it was delivered with. Made the medium un-duplicable? Even if you cross that unlikely hurdle, they can simply hold a microphone up to the speakers and record it onto another device with no restrictions. Perhaps you could force them to listen to it in a sound-proofed vault, after scanning them for any kind of recording devices? Even if you could persuade them to comply, they could still learn to play whichever instrument was used and create their own rendition. Of course, the complexity of the information makes replication harder for a human, so motion pictures were safe in that regard, but regardless, it demonstrates how hard it is to guard something with no physical existence.
Once again, it all comes back to the human memory. Once someone has seen or heard something, it exists in that person's memory. Nothing can destroy it, without destroying the entire mind that holds it. Or at least, that's how it used to be.
Glass-wall was an attempt to change that.
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As far as we can tell, it started with the stock-markets and banks; the people in charge needed their employees to be able to operate from day to day, but they couldn't be allowed access to sensitive data once their work was complete. After a particularly disastrous leak, funding was apparently promised to anyone who could come up with a solution to the problem. It was a university that solved the problem (Probably M.I.T. but we can't be absolutely sure). A researcher discovered the means to either temporarily or permanently seal off access to a particular memory, and that was it. The world started to change.
It was slow at first, but the change was still there. To start with, only the most powerful or paranoid companies used the new technology on their employees, but it was accepted surprisingly fast. For one thing, it meant it was pretty much impossible to take one's work home with them. If someone's supervisor asked why they hadn't completed a certain task, they could honestly say "I forgot", safe in the knowledge that they would be completely forgiven.
From here, it spread. First, smaller companies started using it with increasing frequency, to protect things as simple as alarm codes and security details. People leaving jobs would have their memory of key details wiped.
Then, it spread to the commercial market, and now that people were acclimated to it, the technology sold like wildfire. Had a night you'd rather not remember? Now you don't have to. Had a messy breakup? Forget all about the person in question and get over them instantly.
People most frequently used it to eliminate the memory of both physical and emotional trauma (Certainly not the healthiest option, but perhaps it prevented a few suicides), but it was used almost as often to forget pleasant experiences as well. Perhaps a relationship felt too safe; both partners could arrange to most of their memories of each other wiped, or even just temporarily suspended, and be sent on another first date. Hell, people used it to watch movies again for the first time.
A wildly successful reality TV show consisted of one person having their memory of a spouse or significant other suspended, then putting said spouse in a line with other men or women (And in some open-minded cases, other men and women) and asking the newly blank person who they'd like to ask out on a date. If they chose their original partner, they'd win a small price. If they chose poorly, they would have a very frosty ride home.
There was some misuse even then; perhaps someone with an agenda wants someone else to break up with a third person; all they'd have to do is remove the memories of the good times from Person B, leaving only the bad, and they would almost inevitably leave Person C behind. Done with care, it'd seem like it was Person B's idea all along, and no one would ever suspect foul play.
I should probably mention that all Glass-wall could do was disable or remove memories, not create new ones. There were a lot of attempts to do so, and to transplant memories from one person to another, but they met with limited success. Considering what happened even without this additional feature, I suppose it's probably a small mercy that no one ever succeeded.
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But of course, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to use the Glass-wall technology in a new and monumentally stupid way?
No, in fairness I can't call it "stupid"; it worked, and there was genius behind its implementation, but people should never have accepted it. It's far too easy to underestimate the capability for humans to accept new ideas and methods, even if they once would have been considered wholly alien. It was the concept of renting information.
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By now, Glass-wall had progressed further than its inventors could have imagined. Where once it had required electrodes and even direct brain stimulation, it could now be triggered wirelessly from considerable distances, and time-delayed reactions had been perfected.
What this meant in practice, was that specific memories, or even certain times could be put on a time delay, to be remembered or forgotten after a certain amount of time had elapsed.
All it took was one person to try something radically different with it? We don't know exactly who started it, but we're pretty sure it started with a game.
For decades by that point, companies had been charging subscription fees for people to keep playing their games, but this only worked with multiplayer games, and more specifically MMOs. Trying to force someone to keep paying for single-player content had never worked. Now, however, one of the major companies started encoding their games with Glass-wall based technology. Almost as soon as a player put down their controller or stepped away from the keyboard, they would forget everything about what they had just been playing. All they would be left with was a nagging feeling of lost awesomeness. There was absolutely nothing preventing the player from keeping playing like this, and indeed, some people preferred it that way; picking up the controller again wouldn't bring back the memories. Every time you played would be the first time. That's probably the only reason they got away with it.
See, saved games were impossible, since you'd have no idea what you were doing before. It'd be like trying to watch Inception or Memento starting from the middle. Progression with a persistent character online was likewise impossible, since players returning to the game would have no idea where they were grinding, or in some cases even how to play.
The solution, of course? was to purchase the "memories subscription package". For a monthly fee, players would be made immune to the Glass-wall effect of their games. Temporarily. If the player stopped paying, their memories of the game would be suspended until they paid again.
The beauty of the system was that the Glass-wall encoding would remain in place even if the game was pirated. Pirates would have to subscribe just like everyone else to remember it afterwards. And of course, since it was still entirely possible to play the game without remembering it, the company was allowed to market the memory of the game as an optional extra.
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It never should have worked. Players should have refused to buy the tainted games. But even with the mass boycotts, Glass-wall was too ubiquitous, having softly crept into the public consciousness for decades, for anyone to really kick up a fuss.
Of course once it caught on, everyone started using it; not just the gaming industry. Films would disappear from your memory over time. Worse, a few geniuses thought to only encode the endings with Glass-wall, leaving the viewer's memory incomplete. All but the catchiest bars of songs would slip away, leaving people humming disconcerted refrains to tunes they couldn't recall.
Strangely, the Glass-wall encoding technology was made widely available rather than trying to make money off the technology itself. The developers had realised that unless everyone was using it, no one would use it.
Most of the entertainment industries started consolidating subscription fees to make them more manageable for consumers. Come the finish, there were only two competing film distributors, each with their own subscription, one single audio conglomeration, and three separate game distributors.
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Right about now, governments started rushing legislation through to outlaw excessive use of Glass-wall encoding? which were immediately overturned when other sections of government instead imposed a memory tax. Any company using Glass-wall subscription methods would have to pay a certain percentage, in addition to the usual sales tax, V.A.T. and equivalent. Content that law had been upheld to their standards, world governments sat back to rake in cash from the top of whatever cash the companies were raking in.
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This was when things started to get really bad. The subscriptions had already led to the production of Glass-wall towers being spread through populated areas. Supposedly they would only be used to restore memories, and not to wipe them. In theory, they would only be used to maintain the memories of loyal subscribers. Turns out, wiping and restoring memories are quite similar in terms of equipment. During a demonstration (Not actually related to Glass-wall) that turned violent, police proved that the towers could be used as anti-riot weapons.
Law enforcement had already started using Glass-wall based weaponry. Zap a charging rioter and he'd stop, wondering what he was doing and why he was holding a baseball bat and a Molotov cocktail. No more water cannons, no more rubber bullets, no more accidental fatalities. Unfortunately, the hand-held versions were slow and slightly cumbersome; the equivalent of using a flint-lock to fight off a hoard of angry zombies.
Anticipating bloodshed, a police technician commandeered the nearest tower, and repurposed it for area of effect. Within seconds, the entire crowd of rioters (along with several policemen and civilians caught in the effect) were suddenly left standing around with no idea what they'd been doing, or even what their names were.
The effects were temporary, but lasted long enough for the authorities to clean up the mess. The trouble was; this showed people just what the technology could do. That gave someone ideas.
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Everything I've said so far is as close to accurate as is manageable. Most of it we pieced together from painstakingly recovered archives. It was difficult; most of the information was stored electronically, and in the events that followed, most of the electronic information held world-wide was wiped out. And of course, no one remembers it?
From here on out, much of what we know is speculative.
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The theory we're working with is that an unknown organization saw the Glass Towers as a means to an end. We don't know if the riot incident was what gave them the idea, or if it had already been in the works, and the incident forced their hand.
Most likely it was the latter. The operation was far too smooth, and it followed too closely on the heels of the incident for it to be a rush job. Hell, I'm of the opinion that the riot was a test. A police technician reconfiguring a tower to pull off something that had never been seen before in a matter of minutes? I don't care how gifted he was, that's just not possible.
Perhaps I'm just paranoid, but I suspect that this was the plan from the start. The spread of Glass-wall throughout society, the constant advancement of the technology, the spread of the towers? Someone had to be pulling the strings. No way could that have all come about by chance.
Like I said, this is all speculation. We don't know who took over; it could have been a major government, it could have been a crime-syndicate, it could have been the aforementioned organization. All we know is that they run the place now.
We don't even know when it was; we've narrowed the time down quite carefully, but there's a window of about a day or two when it happened. More than likely that's how long it took and everyone was shut down for that time.
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It started with the wipe. Everyone just woke up one morning and didn't know who the hell they were.
There was a public address. Someone (He never actually gave his name, he just spoke with a calm reassuring voice) announced that a mysterious virus had hit the population. It was theoretically non-lethal, but the amnesia that had hit the population was one of the symptoms. All bulls***, of course.
You might wonder why anyone believed it. Well it helped that after it hit, no one had ever heard of Glass-wall, and had no reason to doubt the public announcer. Hell, half the people didn't even know what country they were in, and a solid portion of them didn't even know what the word "Country" meant. That was? either a stroke of luck or a mark of ingenious planning. Varying the effects across the population lent credence to their story. Most of the worst affected recovered, but no one ever really remembered what life had been like before the wipe.
There was panic, of course, but it was well contained. Anyone who started rioting would be picked up on camera, and a Glass blast from the nearest tower would stop him in his tracks.
That was what everyone knew anyway; by now, subsequent smaller wipes mean that a lot of people have forgotten that the wipe even happened. Now people are used to having major parts of their memory eliminated.
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What people didn't know about were the planes with the Glass emitters. The towers only went so far; outlying areas of first-world nations were sparsely covered at best, and needed flybys to finish the job. Third-world countries without towers? I don't even know what happened to them. Since all this happened, contact with anyone outside the immediate area has been controlled carefully.
I'd love to believe that the countries we lost contact with were left to live in peace, but considering the thoroughness of the operation, and the disregard for life lost, I sadly rather doubt it.
And there was indeed life lost. People who lived solitary lives away from civilization were forgotten about, and forgot themselves in turn.
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But all of this only really affected people's memories. Physical and electronic media were left untouched. They were dealt with separately. Libraries were fire-bombed (By rioters, according to the authorities), and newspapers and magazines and their archives were destroyed en-mass. Any other physical media could be dealt with easily enough; wait for someone to start asking questions, wipe them, and destroy any books that prompted it.
As for the electronic storage, that was depressingly easy. Essentially they pulled the plug on the internet. That makes it sound a lot simpler than what actually happened, admittedly. Data-centres were hit, cables and uplinks were severed, servers were destroyed. It's not that hard to cripple, really, not if you can take down an ISP.
With the internet gone, electronic media ceased to matter. Even if vital information was stored on a server somewhere, no one could access it. Keep in mind, no one could remember how to use a computer at this point, let alone access a server farm from a remote terminal.
And with that, the world had been changed.
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There was a re-education period; people couldn't remember what jobs needed to be done, or how to do them. In theory, the world should have collapsed; no one was doing the jobs important for just keeping everyone alive.
Massive amounts of "a vaccine for the virus" were airdropped all over the world, to be rationed out amongst the population. No one questioned how it was developed so fast; everyone was desperate to use it. And it did seem to work; people could remember just enough about their former lives to start working again, and the world managed to avoid starvation.
It didn't ward against the effects completely, or for very long. It needed to be taken continuously in order to maintain a defence, and if it was neglected even for a relatively short time, memory would start to lapse. Taking the vaccine would help restore memory again, but memory of times when someone hadn't been taking a vaccine would be foggy at best, and more likely lost forever.
The vaccine comes in several grades and types, depending on the desired effect. The cheapest stuff is enough to keep someone alive and sane, but they become more like automatons than humans. It's what the working class have to survive on. Higher grades allow more complete memory, but only the very rich and powerful can afford to keep taking the highest grade vaccine with any regularity.
Of course, according to the authorities, the vaccine is in short supply. That initial emergency supply supposedly drained their resources, hence the extortionate cost.
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It's all just more bulls*** though. Why the hell would they give out something that provides immunity to the Glass effect? Nah, we've checked the vaccine, and as far as we can tell, it's just saline, with the odd drug thrown in for good measure, to encourage apathy and cooperation. No, the real key is the "idecs"; the identity cards everyone's been issued with.
Since everyone's in the habit of forgetting who they are, the new government issued official electronic identity cards which hold information about each person, where they live (in case they forget), and when their last dose of vaccine was. It's that last part that's so crucial.
Again, we're getting into theoretical stuff here; most of this is conjecture, but we've taken apart a few idecs, and studied what happens when things go wrong with the towers, so we're probably on the right lines.
As far as we can tell, the towers leave a time-delayed response in the memory of all those affected. If the shutdown isn't countermanded, they start to lose more and more of themselves until they're little more than walking shells. The towers periodically reset the count-down to memory loss, based on the vaccine a person has been taking. The idecs tell the towers how much of the full Glass effect the tower should give each person. The weaker and longer ago the dosage, the more memory loss the tower causes, and the shorter the count-down to complete failure.
The beauty of it is, the idec has to be scanned whenever a dosage is given. Since storage of the vaccine is supposedly extremely difficult, it has to be given by an authorised doctor, who scans the idec, and administers the vaccine there and then. There's no way to hoard vaccine at home, or acquire it by any other means. It won't work. And the excuse for it not working is that it was improperly stored.
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The reason they give for the idec recording dosage information is the really insidious bit.
Everyone knows that fear is the best way to keep people in line, and it works best if it's directed at people who step out of line. So rumours were spread that taking tainted vaccine, or not taking it at all, can cause violent insanity. Again, just more rubbish, but it meant that the new government had carte-blanche to pick up anyone they wanted with the excuse that they were in danger of having a violent episode.
People were encouraged to warn the authorities if someone had been a long time without vaccine, and it was hinted that anyone asking too many questions might well have succumbed to an early onset of insanity. Reporting on neighbours was rewarded, naturally. Anyone without an idec would be automatically arrested on the grounds that no one knew how long it had been since their last dose of vaccine (their memory obviously can't be trusted).
Whenever someone ran completely out of vaccine or the funds to make more, they'd be shipped off to somewhere else. No one ever really knew where they went. As far as anyone knew, it was somewhere were the insanity could be contained, and hopefully suppressed.
As far as I know, they get put to work doing manual labour. You don't need much of your memory for heavy lifting or? other services.
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Control is almost absolute?
Except for us.
We don't really have a name for ourselves; we just survive. We've pieced together the truth, while hiding from the law. We stay separate, and never communicate directly. We've pieced together some of the internet, which is how we started to find out the truth.
One of our number, and none of us actually know who (Safer that way), discovered Glass-wall technical specifications. Most of the old Glass terminals were removed during the Operation and are supposed to be reported as dangerous machinery, but we managed to salvage a few of them, letting us keep our sanity intact. It's not perfect, but at least this way I know that I don't have to fear the gradual loss of my mind. If it goes, it's because I've been wiped, and it's all over.
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I don't know what we can do to change all this, but there's still hope. Faint hope, yes, but still hope. Anyone who leaves the effect of the towers will inevitably lose their minds, but we're working on a way to delay the count-down even further, or even prevent it altogether.
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So if you're listening, don't give up.
We're all still fighting, and while I can call a single neuron my own, I know I'll never stop.
All you need to remember is...
Is...
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Sorry, what was I saying?
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Perhaps a bit of context would be nice at this point
I've been up since a ludicrous hour this morning, and this idea for a short story came to me in the shower. It only took a few hours to get it all down, and I'm sure it'll show.
For the record, this was *not* intended as an attack on DRM, despite how it might seem part way through. I don't think DRM will destroy the world, although I don't think it's going to do much at all.
I actually started with the idea of an Orwellian nightmare where memories are a kind of currency, and the idea kind of grew from there. I know this is nothing new; the idea's been done before, and probably far better than I've managed. Still, this was fun to write, and that's what counts. I just hope one or two people managed to stagger through to the end and found it vaguely entertaining
