Paradise

Most people choose to forget on their own terms; pain and heartache and grief. They delete the memories as soon as they can. The key to a good life is to cut out the bad. Plain and simple.

But sometimes, they refuse. They hold on tight; clinging to memories that rot them from the inside. And they let that rot spread to those around them. These are the people that must be dealt with. They are the greatest threats to paradise.

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When memory tech first came in, it was all black boxes and red tape. No governmental agency was going to be able to peer through the looking glass. We had to respect people's privacy and their right to their own minds. I can respect that our society was built on the foundation of freedom. But after a while, we need to ask ourselves, at what price? When just a little less freedom, would help us save so many lives.

It took time, but inch by inch the courts were won over. And then the court of public opinion. It was one of the best days of my life when we were handed over the keys to the Kingdom. Memory surveillance became the most rapidly growing, hyper-effective division of the force.

Why analyse a crime scene, when you can just see a crime being committed through the criminal's own eyes? When you can see what the victim saw, hear what they heard? There is no reasonable doubt anymore. No innocent until proven guilty. We had them. All of them. And it was so easy.

Soon a team of science nerds figured out that we could go beyond surveillance. One of the many joys of memory tech was that it monitored its user's vitals. There was some technical reason for it; like making sure a hard drive didn't overheat. I didn't really care much for the science of all that. But it meant, we could monitor heart rates and cortisol and a whole load of other biological functions so that now we could now detect bad memories. We would be alerted to crimes as they happened.

At first, our analysts pulled up a whole load of nothing; anyone with slightly elevated stress levels. Business types about to enter big meetings. People who were expecting bad news at the hospital. Baseball fans waiting for a strikeout. Those kinds of things.

It took them a while, but soon they cracked it. Fear, true fear, leaves a trace. Their victim's terror would lead us right to them.

Of course, crime finds a way and all that. Thefts were the hardest to crack. No victim to frighten most of the time. The thieves themselves were tricky sons of bitches. The real ones, the ones that meant business, quickly figured out workarounds. They learnt that if they breathed deeply enough; we couldn't detect their stress levels. They wouldn't be flagged in our systems. A more crude method was closing their eyes before they took something. It wasn't foolproof, but at least if they were caught it created some doubt about the certainty of their guilt.

But the biggest threat was those that went for an illegal memory wipe.

Sure, any fool can delete a memory. That was the whole point of memory tech, forget the bad and all that's left is good. But there were always ways to trace it. Some server the memory was stored on, some way we could find it. The wipe left us with a whole lot of nothing.

Crime wasn't gone. It just had to evolve a bit, to keep up with the times.

It was a politician of all people - who had the idea. Don't stop crimes. Stop criminals. It sounded stupid at first. Until we realised he was right.

People do all kinds of horrible things. But usually for a reason. For pain or guilt or heartbreak or anger. To take revenge on a cheating wife. To stick it to the man. Because they can't think of a better way to make money. Because it's what they've been raised to do.

Each brick of memory builds a man. So, what if you took out a few bricks? Would he become something different? Something better? What if you could take all his pain away, and all he would be left with was good times? If he only remembered the good decisions he made. If he forgot the people that had wronged him. There would be no crime. No criminals. No evil.

It was basically what memory tech already did. We were just taking it a little bit further. Just evolving with the times.

Government experiments were conducted. At first, on hardened criminals. Murderers and pedophiles. Those who seemed beyond redemption. That's how we first learned about the House of Cards effect. Take a memory that forms the very core of a person, and they begin to crumble.

Like a husband, wanting to get revenge on a cheating wife. Every experience from the point he finds her rolling in the sheets with his pool boy is altered and filtered by that one memory. He'd think about it at the grocery store, on his way to work, in the shower. Every thought and moment is held in limbo, wrapped around this one memory until finally, it all becomes too much, and he snaps and does something about it.

But if you remove the memory of the cheating wife, all that follows doesn't make any sense. Those times he was crying in the shower. That time he punched a wall. All that anger and pain remain in the memories that come after but with no explainable cause. That memory became foundational to the life he built after it. Pull that card away, and the whole tower comes crumbling down.

When we first came up with the idea of memory extraction, it was a mess. The press got hold of it. I couldn't get to my office, without being spat at by a dozen hippies spinning their cardboard signs. But we got there eventually. The possibilities were too great.

At first, before a memory was extracted, there were committees and ethics boards. But they took so much time to make up their minds, by the time a decision was made it was too late. Too much time had passed, and removing the memory became too dangerous. We had to strike quick and fast, to minimise the damage. Before it was too late to save them from themselves.

Eventually, discrete task forces were formed throughout the country. I was asked to lead one of them. Together, we cut out all the rot. We extracted all bad memories, until only good ones remained. Until there was only paradise.