Our Collective Permanence
By Katie Robinson
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
The turbines of the off-shore windmills tumbled the air like rocks smoothed to uncover their secrets inside. Harnessing the wind should provide the city with clean energy—and it did—but it also scrambled our memories. They say that the molecules of Julius Caesar’s last breath ping pong around of atmosphere and you very well may breathe them in, uniting history and present for a brief moment. But why his in particular? So many breathed before and after Caesar during significant as well as insignificant moments. The added turbines, though, complicated our air flow and disturbed our processes.
All memory, human and animal and plant, is embedded in the air with each exhale. We didn’t know that at the time, and such awareness might alter your rhythm and trigger an anxiety attack. Am I inhaling at a steady rate? Am I breathing too quickly? Am I holding my breath? No one wanted to admit it at first, but we began experiencing new memories and losing some of our own. A great shuffle. The first recorded case was a girl in the fourth grade writing out complicated math equations in her journal and a mathematician at the university losing his knowledge base as well as tenure. Then Mrs. O’brien remembered murdering her wife (whom she never married) and a man in prison (who had previously confessed) swore he never committed the crime.
Some new memories were celebrated while others embarrassed us. The forgetting always brought shame. We lost more than we could even admit to because we only learned about forgetting when someone else tried to talk to us about a common experience we no longer shared. And when we did learn that we lost a memory, we often pretended to remember to save face.
These little transfers of memory added up with each breath and we finally confessed to recalling strange things and the disgrace of forgetting. We weren’t crazy or developing early on-set Alzheimer’s after all. It became an epidemic isolated to our coastal neighborhood, but spread through the city. They were called memory transfer incidents.
Some said it was the government or corporations gaslighting us. Some said it was a thought-control experiment. As the memory transfer incidents sprawled out, the world became fixated in finding the cause so it could be stopped before it became widespread. What if we learned the President’s secrets? What if you left the curling iron on and burnt down the house? Scientists and researchers studied our diets and routines and variables and controls. They sought to determine correlations and kept notes for fear of losing their train of thought or any breakthroughs. Everyone started writing a memoir, and tech companies promised to innovate a way to back-up our memories digitally on the cloud for a small monthly subscription.
Dr. Sven Betters discovered memories within air molecules on accident. He theorized that the memory transfer incidents were a result of bacteria in our drinking water—that our gut-brain connection released memories into our fecal matter and the drinking water had high bacteria levels. Somewhere along the way, he found memory within our breaths and he could quantify their vibrations, but then he forgot. An elderly man in a memory unit claimed that he gained Dr. Sven Betters’ discovery and designed a breathing unit that showed how changes in the vibrations caused memory splicing. And he said it was from the windmills. Their harnessing of the wind energy shattered the flow of air, causing the memories to bounce around at different speeds, like slamming on the brakes in a car without a seat belt.
Following the discovery, everyone felt conflicted. The obvious response is to turn off the windmills and reassess. But some say that won’t help because the windmills will still spin despite being powered down. A group wants the windmills removed, but what to do with them afterward? Sink them in the sea, one set says. And still another school of thought says to ramp up windmill production: the memory transfer incidents only strengthen us and bring us together as a collective. We function stronger as a group, rely on another, and have more in common. There is no precedent for such an event as this.
And then, one night, a teenaged boy saw a vision so horrible in his mind that he could not speak—some memory transfer incident that traumatized him. We speculated it may be a memory from war or a gruesome car accident or a treachery that made him question all of humanity. The boy slunk into a marina and stole a boat to travel to the windmills. A GPS alert on the boat signaled the owners of a theft and they called the Marine Police Department to track him down. The Marine Police identified his route and cut him off, expecting to find someone drunk out of their mind on a joy ride, but instead they met a boy in hysterics. They tried to reason with him and gave a gallant attempt at empathy, but they didn’t hold his memory. They couldn’t understand. The boy shouted about “their red-streaked faces” and leapt into the ocean, the dark waters consuming him.
After the tragedy at the windmills, we all wore breath-stabilizing masks. We weren’t sure how they worked, but we didn’t want to take any chances. When teachers forgot the curriculum, they relied on bots to regurgitate facts. Students were excused from the state standardized tests for three years. Each night in bed, we wore our uploader visors to connect to the cloud and back up our memories. To avoid our cloud storage being hacked and our information stolen and used against us, we subscribed to memory theft protection. Life was becoming normal again. The windmills still stand, but the memory transfer incidents decreased and now we will hold access to our histories and memories and secrets forever. We can’t help but wonder, though, if our collective permanence might be best forgotten and our hubris of archiving truth left to dissolve in the sea.
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Katie Robinson is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. She resides in coastal Virginia with her husband, two sons, and a flock of unruly hens.
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Author’s Note:
This piece came to me as I reflected on how experiences and memories shape our identities. Shared experiences (and trauma) can deepen our relationships, and I played with the idea of collective consciousness reprogramming from a speculative or science fiction angle--how it could be beneficial in developing community, but also damaging. As my grandmother's memory deteriorated from Alzheimer's over the past decade, I grappled with questions of identity and self-awareness in relation to memories. How important are memories in defining ourselves, and should we go out of our way to preserve those memories? Or should we trust a natural process that forces us to let go?