The Forgetting Machine by Pete Hautman Page B

Billy, he probably would try to rescue me himself.
    â€œWhy am I doing this?” Rausch chuckled in a not nice way. “Why does the sun rise? Because it must. And why should I not receive credit for my accomplishments?”
    â€œBut what are you going to do? I mean, your machine isn’t much good if people have to forget as much stuff as they remember.”
    â€œThat is where you are wrong! Forgetting is underrated. You must have seen things or done things that you would just as soon forget, yes?”
    I thought for a moment. There were a few things, like the time I threw up on Danton Wills in biology class, and the time I accidentally killed my goldfish by giving him too much fish food—or maybe it was the gummy worms. But I wasn’t going to admit that to Rausch.
    â€œI like all my memories,” I said.
    â€œIn any case, you don’t get to choose. Your new memories will simply replace whatever you were thinking in the hours before downloading the new memories. The more complex and lengthy the introduced memories, the more you forget. If I were to give you, say, War and Peace , you would forget this conversation, and whatever you are thinking about right now, and probably everything you experienced or thought for the past twelve hours. But if I downloaded, as you suggested, the Library of Congress, you might forget how to breathe.”
    â€œThat seems kind of random,” I said.
    â€œI’m still working on selective memory extraction. Such a technology would be tremendously useful. For example, if a man commits armed robbery, instead of sending him to prison, one could simply erase his memory of having committed the crime. There would then be no need to punish him. It would be as though he had never done it.”
    â€œThe people who got robbed might disagree.”
    Rausch shrugged. “They remain robbed, but the person who did the robbing becomes innocent.”
    â€œThat doesn’t seem exactly fair.”
    â€œI’m sure such minor details will iron themselves out. In the meantime, have you decided what you want to remember?”
    â€œI’m thinking about it.” I looked at the machine. “Obviously this is a brilliant, amazing, innovative, and incredibly valuable invention—”
    â€œThank you.” He smiled a real smile. “I am, as you may have noticed, rather proud of it.”
    â€œI hadn’t noticed—you seem so modest.” Was I laying it on too thick?
    â€œI try not to be too boastful,” he said. Was he blushing ?
    â€œHow does your machine work?” I asked.
    â€œHo-ho, wouldn’t you and everyone else like to know!”
    â€œI would like to know,” I said. “I mean, since you’re going to wipe my memory of today anyway, it won’t matter if you tell me, right?”
    â€œTrue,” he said, stroking his wispy, almost invisible goatee and looking lovingly at his REMEMBER machine. I looked past him out the window. A familiar dark shape rose into view, with my cell dangling from its underside by a scrap of tape.
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    I . You could read about it in . . . oh, never mind.

27

The Rauschinator
    â€œREMEMBER works by altering existing memory engrams,” Rausch said. “New information is implanted by flooding your brain with packets of trinary infocicles.”
    â€œIs ‘infocicle’ really a word?” I asked.
    â€œI made it up,” he said proudly. “REMEMBER is so revolutionary it demands a whole new language. For example, the altered engrams are known as rauschions, and the memory insertion process is called rauschination, and the headset above you is the Rauschinator.”
    â€œIt looks like a bike helmet.”
    â€œIt was once a bicycle helmet,” he said. “Now it is a Rauschinator.”
    â€œThat’s brilliant,” I said. “Tell me more!” The drone was still hovering outside the window. I wondered how much Billy could see