Theseus

It took a few hours of work collectively, but we got everything sent away into the woods. I'd grown bored of just staring into the distance looking for someone though. I'd begun writing a script to scan my sensors for movement deviating from a certain norm. Sure I couldn't finish anything that complex in the time it took the ground crew to unload our cargo, but I could make it modular enough to be useful in just about any scenario like this with a little tweaking.

Something else came to mind though. A dark thought that made me shiver. I wondered if I could activate the psionic damper again, less as a countermeasure and more as an efficiency tool. After all, if I had a specific goal to do, maybe being locked into a fully machine-like mental state would allow me to work at that speed and not be so distressed. I frowned at the thought. Efficiency at the cost of my soul. I'd been raised to respect such a horrifying thing. To practically worship it. I shook my head and rejected the thought. It was disgusting. The damper was a safety tool, nothing more. Who knew what kind of effect it could have on me if I tried to abuse it? I knew that I'd probably be capable of functioning at computational speeds, but I had already felt like I was going mad after only two consecutive seconds of use.

No, I was much better off as a distracted person casually coding while I watched out for wild animal attacks. Maybe if there was some kind of emergency where time wasn’t on my side, I could justify it, but the thought of using it at all for anything still made me feel awful. Perhaps Doc had been right that I should try to become accustomed to using it.

I also had to wonder where Ray was. How long could it take to ask around a few people about a few public menaces? I guess I had never really had to gather information like that before, maybe it was akin to cooking: an art that I’d never considered the complexity of before.

“Meryll.” I heard from my heart. Doc was sitting at the terminal, watching my vitals as if he were expecting them to change “I need to talk to you. About my suspicions. I thought now would be a good time, while we’re just waiting.”

I tapped into his tablet and messaged, trying not to sound like I was worried about what he had to say ‘About time. You figured anything out yet?’

“No.” He started, but I could feel the ‘but’ coming. “I have some questions for you, though. I need to clarify some things.”

‘I’m not hiding anything. Ask away.’ As far as I considered it, my old life was over. I had no secrets left to hide. If it got me closer to figuring this whole thing out, I’d tell him things that I’d have saved for my diary in another life.

“Okay, good.” He spoke quietly, trying to get comfortable. It was clear he didn’t want to have this discussion. I was too curious to know what was going through his head by now. “You said that you were coming from Mars on your way to Titan when we… found your crashed transport. What were you doing on Mars?”

‘I was meeting with a client. They had a new proprietary interface they were implementing internally, but it was a mess. They ran me ragged trying to fix it, and it’s probably already broken again by now because their requests were impossible.’ I rolled my eyes. I didn’t think I’d ever have to discuss my work as an IT consultant again. They’d all been such assholes about everything that I wanted to forget about it before I’d even become a starship.

Doc nodded, taking down notes about my response and then taking a deep breath before he asked “And what’s this interface do?”

I raised an eyebrow. I really had to wonder how that could possibly be relevant. ‘Why? It’s just some bullshit corpo tech that’s never going to leave a failing startup.’

“Meryll, you’ll see in a minute if I’m right about this, but it’s really important that you focus on this question now.” Doc said with a deadly serious tone that caught me off-guard. “What did the project you worked on do?”

I had no idea what he could possibly be getting at, it was just some idiot’s middle management pipedream. I really didn’t want to think about it. But he was so intensely focused on the question, I suppose I should have at least humored him.

As I threw away the thought of how stupid this line of questioning was, however, I found myself growing confused. I knew that I’d worked long and hard on that job, I was exhausted by the end of it after all. But when I tried to think about it, I couldn’t actually recall what I’d done specifically in that time. I wracked my brain for several minutes until I heard “Meryll?” and noticed that he’d been waiting for me to say anything at all.

It’s not like the project had been interesting, but the fact that I couldn’t recall a single detail was puzzling to me ‘I don’t remember.’ I finally answered. I supposed that the last couple of weeks had made me forget the boring dread of my old job.

“You don’t remember any of it?” he asked, curiously. He took a deep breath and began to speak more quickly “Your boss’s name? Face? The computer you worked on? Any detail at all. What clothes you wore? What was the room you stayed in like?”

I had to open my eyes to think. I went over his rapid questions, trying to piece together a single shred of memory on any of the specific details, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a vague feeling about the subjects I was being pointed toward. I only remembered these things in broad strokes, and when I put them under scrutiny, they vanished. “Meryll.” He called again, more gently this time.

‘What is this?’ I had to ask directly. I was beginning to become distressed. Was there something wrong with my memory?

“Take a deep breath, Meryll. Try to calm yourself.” He said. Looking at the terminal in front of him, my heart rate had risen. He was right, I had to remain calm. I opened my eyes and breathed deep of the lubricant, trying to clear my head. “I just want to be sure of some things, I swear I’ll explain, but I need you to ask some more questions first.”

I nodded, knowing he couldn’t see me, but I felt vulnerable and found it difficult to bring my thoughts to words. Something was terribly wrong, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready for what I was about to hear.

“Do you remember what you had with you on the ferry?” he asked next.

‘My computer and the clothes I’d packed.’ I answered, slightly relieved that I’d been able to recall that much.

“What make was your computer? What did the outfits you have look like?” he asked, and left me confused once again. No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn’t actually picture either thing in my head specifically. I vaguely knew what was in my luggage, but when I tried to picture the console or my wardrobe itself, I couldn’t think of what they actually looked like. My memories made sense until I inspected them too closely, and saw that critical details were missing.

‘I don’t remember.’ I typed out one word at a time, hoping that something of what he was asking me would just snap into my head while I was typing it. Nothing. I started to type frantically ‘I’m serious Doc, what is this? What’s happening?’

He paused for just a moment. Looking down as if he were trying to avoid my gaze “You mentioned to me once that your parents are back on Titan. What are their names? What do they look like?” he asked next.

It didn’t take more than a moment for me to message back this time, panic growing quickly ‘Doc, what the fuck?’ I was wondering if maybe I was having trouble thinking in general. Maybe this line of questioning was making my head spin too fast and I was forgetting things, CRITICAL details, because I was already in distress. Or maybe this was the result of grafting the ship to my brain. Maybe humans really weren’t meant to do this. Maybe it had done irreparable harm to my mind. Had becoming Theseus made me lose some part of Meryll?

“Meryll, when were you born?” he finally asked. Frantically, I accessed his tablet and looked into my medical file. The date of birth field was empty. I hadn’t even thought to look over the patient data portion of my file since I’d thought the actual health condition was what was important, but there was simple data missing all over it. It was as if I had glossed over it on purpose on my previous reads.

‘Please stop. Doc. You’re scaring me. Tell me what the hell is happening here.’ I typed out, but he seemed to be mulling something over silently. I was going crazy wondering what this could possibly mean, and in a panicked fit, I accessed the intercom and shouted “DOC!” with the best approximation of my voice as I could.

He flinched slightly at the buzzing electrical noise that accompanied my cry “I…” he started, letting out a frustrated sigh “There’s always the possibility that the grafting process has had an effect on you. This is essentially a new science, after all. But given the evidence, I think someone may have manufactured your past. Manipulated your memory… somehow. I don’t know who or how or why, but judging by the fact that they can apparently create official documents good enough to fool a casual observer, someone powerful has… effectively erased you. From the record and from yourself, by the sound of your responses.”

‘That’s impossible.’ I typed instantly, a mixture of fear and anger that I had failed to answer every functionally easy personal question about my past that he’d asked me overwhelmed me ‘I know my memories, I have to! Ask me more!’

He shook his head “Favorite… childhood video program? What songs do you like to listen to? What’s the best food you’ve ever had?” he asked, clearly pulling questions off the top of his head now.

‘Cheeseburger at Shelby’s.’ I typed in slowly, my eyes opening wide. I shut off my sensors and minimized the data stream. I couldn’t work like this. I couldn’t do anything like this. My world was crumbling around me. What did all of this mean? I frantically tried to grasp at any memory I had before boarding Theseus, but every minutia I should have remembered fell apart when I tried to get close enough to it to remember any specific detail. I had no trouble acquiring new memories since that day, it seemed, but my life before that was a blank slate.

I knew details of common knowledge things. I knew how to operate computers like an expert. No, like a computer myself. I understood language and critical thinking skills. But anything about my personal life gave way under scrutiny. Was any of it real? What memories could I trust? Everything since I’d woken up in this very core module over a week ago was crystal clear, but anything before that was beginning to feel alien the more I thought of them. They felt false. I’d been telling myself this entire trip that I was abandoning my past, but did I even have a past to abandon?

Who was I? What was I? I felt a ping, but I ignored it. Even after it momentarily became more insistent, I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes, and whoever was on the other end must have given up. I couldn’t perform my tasks as Theseus right now. I needed to be alone. I needed to think. I needed to find something that I could anchor myself to. Anything. I needed some piece of my past that made sense. At all.