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Cash

For those who wish to remember...

By Brendan HanniganPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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“Tell me again.”

Malcolm drew in a breath. His eyes were still closed.

“Tell me what you think you saw.”

He opened his eyes. Slowly and with great difficulty, as if struggling to the surface of a viscous fluid, he began to become aware of his surroundings. A small, dimly lit room gradually came into focus.

It was very different from the rooms he was accustomed to in Eco-Compound 712, a floating residential module anchored just off the western coast of the North American Monocity. Every room in EC712 was a perfect windowless hexagon roughly five meters in diameter, lit by a continuous strip of white LEDs that zigzagged from the ceiling to the floor and back across each wall. (The Architects had determined, long ago, that this was the most energy-efficient means of lighting a hexagon of these dimensions, so it became the standard for all residential modules built after 2050.) That encircling wreath of six glowing white Vs had become so ubiquitous that residential modules were colloquially called “V-vaults”.

So it was to be expected, perhaps, that the first thing Malcolm noticed was the unusual quality of the light in the room. It was a warm, amber glow that filled him with a strange and poignant nostalgia, the source of which he could not quite place. It reminded him of the popular historical movies in which lawless mercenaries—their lean and hungry faces painted with the mutinous glow of torches, oil lamps, bonfires, and other forms of “dirty” light that had long since been banned—bartered for venison and bullets in the ruins of abandoned buildings.

He tried to turn his head, only to find that it was held firmly in place. At that moment he realized that his legs and arms were also bound, a fact that struck him as curious but not particularly important. It occurred to him that he should be alarmed, but every flicker of anxiety within him was swiftly extinguished by a heavy blanket of serene, almost stuporous calm that embraced all of his thoughts like a warm cocoon.

“Malcolm.” The voice spoke again.

He looked up to see a small man with glasses, a shining bald head, and a pointed white goatee sitting in a leather armchair at the center of the room. He was holding a pen and a clipboard, and there was a glass of water on a small end table at his right. There were bookshelves—how strange to see them in real life!—on the walls, and a small window covered completely by a heavy green curtain. The room was like something out of a television series in the alternate-history fantasy genre, of the type that imagined what life might have been like in the pre-Architect age if humans had been naturally orderly and cooperative instead of violent, anarchic savages. Just the other day, he had watched a series on his Webflix portal that featured rooms very much like this one, full of leather armchairs and bookshelves and heavy velvet curtains.

But everyone knew that those fantasy worlds were purely fictional. Until this moment he had not even known that books really existed. Like everyone else, he had been taught that they were a whimsical invention, based on the impossible premise of an orderly, functional society existing in the time before the miraculous technological revolution of the Architects.

“Tell me what you think you saw.”

It was so difficult to remember anything at all, or to hold a thought in his mind for more than a couple of seconds. Memory was such a useless skill anyway, now that everything was monitored and surveilled, and everyone knew everything about everyone else. What was there to remember? All the information you ever needed was fed to you on your devices, and every day, week, month, and year were largely the same as any other.

But somehow, through that pleasant stupor that seemed to erase every thought almost before it could even occur, he understood that there was something special that he was supposed to remember—something unusual, something outside of the comfortable normalcy of days spent in the V-vaults watching Webflix, eating Eco-Rations that arrived by automated delivery three times a day, video-chatting with friends or hanging out in the Common Dome (wearing your Steril-Suit, of course) playing ping pong or video games. What was it?

Slowly, painfully, some fragments began to coalesce. A scheduled work shift, standard for Eco-Compound residents, which usually involved routine maintenance of some aspect of the compound’s infrastructure. The Eco-Compounds were so flawlessly and intuitively designed that with a little guidance from the cloud, any child or adult could perform the tasks required to maintain them without much difficulty. So many people lived in each module that you rarely had to work for longer than an hour or two every couple of months. In any case, shirking your work duties was punishable by withdrawal of rations or, in extreme cases, a three-day suspension from your Webflix account.

“I think I was sent to one of the outer maintenance platforms to check something…I don’t remember what…why am I strapped down?”

“Don’t worry about that. Tell me more.”

“It was a sunny day and the sea was calm. I always like the work assignments where you get to go outside on the maintenance platforms. I know sunlight is toxic without a Steril-Suit on, but it can be rather beautiful, all the same.”

The man waited, his expression inscrutable. “And?”

“There was something floating in the water. At first I thought someone had dropped a thermos from one of the V-vaults, but…”

“What did it look like?”

“It was sort of a long cylinder with a cap on either end, made of stainless steel. It was partly covered in seaweed and it looked like it hadn’t been touched for a long while.”

“And you opened it?”

“I couldn’t help myself. The caps were pretty tight but I was able to get one of them loose. And inside there was—”

Here Malcolm stopped himself. By now he remembered very clearly what he had seen, but he was painfully conscious of how insane he would sound if he said it.

“What was inside, Malcolm?”

“It was…” He could hardly bring himself to pronounce the word, so ridiculous did it sound. “Well, it was…it was cash.”

The silence in the room was humiliating. Everyone knew that cash was the stuff of historical fantasy. Rumors still persisted that at one time people had exchanged little slips of paper with numbers and pictures on them in lieu of primitive bartering or violence, but the Architects flatly denied that such a system had ever existed. After all, it was commonly agreed that human beings were by nature vicious, unruly, and violent, incapable of voluntary cooperation, and that only the constant benevolent surveillance of the Nanomesh enabled them to live in orderly, peaceful societies. The existence of cash, and by extension the idea of an organized society before the age of the Architects, was therefore a logical impossibility. How the Architects and the Nanomesh had originally come into being was a question so meaningless that no one ever bothered to ask it. It would be like asking what lies north of the north pole. The Nanomesh made everything possible; without it, the very concept of human society was a laughable fiction.

And in any case, whatever existed before was irrelevant. Some people’s great-grandparents claimed to remember a time when the Nanomesh had had its opponents, but such an antiquated attitude seemed almost too silly to be real. It was nonsense to oppose something so obviously beneficial, so clearly necessary. For any sane individual, it was a great comfort to wake up in the early morning hours and feel the telltale tingling in the tips of the fingers, that pleasant daily reminder that thousands of tiny nanobots were scanning your blood for the slightest signs of illness or abnormality. Lying, stealing, and crime were relegated to Webflix pulp series, long since eradicated by the all-seeing eyes of the Nanomesh, if indeed they had ever existed. No one had anything to hide. If ever the thought occurred that anything could be different, it was usually the result of a momentary chemical imbalance that the Nanomesh swiftly detected and corrected with an adjustment in the composition of one’s Eco-Rations.

And yet…Malcolm could not deny the memory, clear as daylight by now, of the heavy stack of crisp green rectangles, printed with the number 100 in each corner and decorated with strange pictures and symbols, that had fallen into his hand from inside the cylinder. There must have been at least two hundred of them, all emblazoned with the name of a country that all official accounts held to be purely fictional: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

The bald man spoke again.

“Was there anything else in the cylinder?”

Malcolm closed his eyes. The memory was already beginning to fade.

“Yes. A little black notebook. About the size of a small tablet, with a leather binding and a bit of elastic to hold the cover. I opened it and there was something written inside. Just one sentence…”

“What did it say, Malcolm?”

“It said, ‘For those who wish to remember.’”

The man fell silent once again. After a long pause, he gave an almost imperceptible sigh, slowly removed his glasses, and set them on the table next to him.

“Malcolm, where do you think we are right now?”

“I have no idea. Somewhere on the mainland, I assume. One of the old Architect buildings. There are no rooms like this in the Eco-Compounds.”

“And why do you think the window is covered?”

“Because sunlight is toxic without a Steril-Suit. I assume every window in the building is covered.”

The man sighed again, rose from his chair, walked to the window, and removed the curtain. A golden stream of afternoon sunlight poured suddenly into the room.

Malcolm screamed in terror. In a blind panic, he struggled against his restraints, screaming curses at the man with the goatee, who stood calmly by the window, watching.

After a few minutes, Malcolm stopped struggling—soaked with sweat, chest heaving, blinking against the sunlight, he looked at the little man by the window with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

“What the hell is going on?”

“You’re in a psychiatric hospital, Malcolm. My name is Dr. Golding. You’ve been fixated on a series of escalating delusions, centered on the conviction that you live in a futuristic society designed by a group of people you call the Architects, monitored and controlled by a network of microscopic robots called the Nanomesh. You believe you were brought here for questioning after discovering suppressed evidence of organized human society before the age of the Architects. You believe that direct sunlight is toxic unless you are wearing something you call a ‘Steril-Suit.’ You believe your memory and faculties are muddled because your society gives you no reason to use them, but in fact you’ve been administered a powerful tranquilizer and restrained because the last time we attempted this form of exposure therapy you went into a panic, damaged my office, and injured yourself.”

There was a pause. “Shall I go on?”

Malcolm looked back at him in stunned silence.

“Last year, you bought 50 shares of GameStop stock on a tip from an internet forum. Three months ago, you woke up to find that the value of your shares had suddenly increased by more than $20,000. The shock seems to have precipitated a psychotic episode. You immediately sold your shares, withdrew the money, and promptly went missing. You were found three days later floating in a small inflatable raft off the coast of Malibu, California.”

Another pause.

“We’ve repeated this exact conversation every day since you arrived here.”

Malcolm stared blankly into space, unable to speak. Dr. Golding sighed again and said softly, “It’s time for dinner, Malcolm. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

science fiction
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