Release date: June 12, 2019
Subgenre: Cyberpunk
About Memory Aether:
Earth is at war, and a secret mission depends on Alexia modifying her
boyfriend Michael’s memory, erasing herself completely from his mind.
She holds onto his memories in the hope that someday she can reinstate
them. But something goes wrong and Michael is captured as a prisoner of
war, held on a distant moon. Alexia must work with old friends to decode
the memories she extracted. A government agent with his own agenda
shows up at just the right time, equipping them with what they need.
Alexia doesn’t trust him, but working with him is the only way she can
save Michael.
Excerpt:
Alexia shook so
badly that the holo interface struggled to register her movements. Michael’s
life depended on her command inputs being precise, so she buried her emotions
and tried to think of him as just another patient.
Every time she
looked at him, sedated in the operating chair, while her fingers maneuvered
through the air, she thought of how much she would miss him. Erasing her
boyfriend’s memory was not how she thought her day was going to go.
Michael had
showed up in her operating room an hour ago, and, at first, she thought it
might be a surprise romantic visit. It was not. His shoulders arched ever
slightly upward, and his face sagged.
“What happened?”
she asked. Scenarios sparked to life in her head: someone close had died, Earth
had been dealt a serious blow in the war with Bayama, Michael was leaving on a
dangerous mission.
Michael’s eyes
wandered around the room for a few seconds until he finally looked at her.
“I can’t tell
you.” The spark she usually saw in him was replaced with regret. “How much
would you have to erase to get rid of this frame?”
He showed her a
sequence of numbers on his com-watch: memory frame references. She couldn’t
imagine where he acquired them or learned what they even meant. Bewildered, she
studied them and ran quick calculations in her head.
“Total removal or
partial recall?” she asked.
“Total. I need
them completely removed. Please.” The tension in his voice caused her
adrenaline to spike. She knew that tone: the same desperation she heard when he
lost his brother or as he waited for his name to be cleared of treason charges.
The carefully measured cadence with which he delivered the news that her mother
had passed.
“Umm,” she
stalled for time trying to think, “the time frame—, this is yesterday you want
erased?”
Under normal
circumstances, a memory consultant would put together a plan, and the procedure
would stretch over half-hour sessions once a week. The plan would include
reference numbers of specific memories causing the patient problems, and the
consultant would gradually shift those frames back in time. The patient would
remember their troubling incidents as happening a year ago, then five years,
then twenty, further back until the effects of the memories gradually
diminished. In severe cases where total removal was necessary, a whole
collection of frames surrounding the event would be moved back before the
patient’s memory had even formed, then one-hundred blank memory frames would be
inserted between the incident and the patient’s earliest memory.
Then there was
the complication of associated threads: anything the brain had chosen to relate
to the displaced memory. Every thought was connected, like threads in a
spider’s web, and modifying a memory wasn’t as simple as doing some
neurological photoshopping. She would have to place sirens around each
modification, encouraging the patient’s brain to ignore any external references
to the erased memory. Michael may have been able to come up with the memory
frame numbers, but what he didn’t understand was how expansive a procedure this
was. It required hundreds of frame removals, and the risk for developing
personality disorders later on would be high. Michael had asked her to do it in
a single afternoon.
Amazon
About R.J. Rugroden:
Reesha Rugroden is an administrator by day and a writer by night,
with a side of technical writing and being a virtual assistant for
authors. She never sleeps. She has an extreme case of optimism and
suspension of disbelief. She lives in Minnesota with her husband,
two children, and a cat. Her interests are varied and esoteric, from RPGs and video
games to Origami, Scherenschnitte, and Kickboxing.
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