Tokyo Cancelled

One day he was sitting having lunch in a cheap sandwich shop in Hackney. A woman sitting at the table next to him asked, ‘Are you a photographer?’ He looked at her. She gestured towards the camera.

‘Not really. I take pictures for fun.’

‘What do you take pictures of?’

She wore lithe urban gear that looked as if it had been born in a wind tunnel.

‘I don’t really know.’ He had not talked to anyone for several days and felt awkward. He thought for a moment. ‘I am trying to live entirely in the realm of the past. Trying to take pictures of what there was before.’ He looked at her to see if she was listening. ‘But I don’t seem to be able to find it. Sometimes it’s not there anymore. And sometimes when it is there, I can’t see it.’

She looked at him inquisitively.

‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Do you need a job?’

‘Actually I do. I have no money.’

‘Can you keep secrets?’

‘I don’t know anyone to tell secrets to.’

‘Come with me.’

She led him to an old, dilapidated brick building with a big front door of reinforced glass that buzzed open to her combination. They stepped into a tiny, filthy lift and she pressed ‘6’. They were standing very close to each other.

‘I’m Jo, by the way.’ She held out her hand. He shook it.

‘I’m Thomas. Pleased to meet you.’

The lift stopped inexplicably at the fourth floor. The doors opened to a bright display of Chinese dragons and calendars. Chinese men and women worked at sewing machines to the sound of zappy FM radio. The doors closed again.

On the sixth floor they stepped out into a vestibule with steel walls and a thick steel door. There were no signs to indicate what might lie inside.

‘Turn away please,’ said Jo.

He turned back to face the closing lift door as she entered another combination. He heard the sound of keys and a lock shifted weightily.

‘OK. Come on.’

He turned round and followed her inside. Computer lights blinked in the darkness for a moment; Jo pulled a big handle on the wall and, with a thud that echoed far away, rows of fluorescent lights flickered on irregularly down the length of a huge, empty expanse. The floor was concrete, speckled near the edges with recent whitewash whose smell still hung in the air. The large, uneven windows that lined one wall had recently been covered with thick steel grills. Near the door stood three desks with computers on them and a table with a printer and a coffee maker.

‘Have a seat, Thomas. Coffee?’

‘Yes please.’

She poured two mugs.

‘We are setting up probably the most extraordinary business you will ever encounter. I’d like your help and I think you’ll find it exciting. Your interests will qualify you very well for the task and I’ll pay you enough that you’ll be satisfied. I will need from you a great amount of effort and imagination–and, of course, your utter secrecy. OK?’

He nodded.

‘Right. About twelve years ago there was a round of secret meetings between the British and American intelligence agencies. They convened a panel of visionary military experts, sociologists, psychologists, and businesspeople to look at new roles that the agencies could play in the future–particularly commercial roles. It was felt that organizations like the CIA were spending vast amounts of money on technology and personnel and that it should be possible to make some return on that investment–in addition to their main security function.

‘The most radical idea to come out of this concerned the vast intelligence databases possessed by the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and a number of other police and military organizations and private companies. As you know, most of this information is collected so that security forces have some idea of who is doing what and antisocial or terrorist activities can be thwarted. One of the social psychologists suggested, however, that there might be a very different use for it. He pointed out that average memory horizons–that is, the amount of time that a person can clearly remember–had been shrinking for some time: people were forgetting the past more and more quickly. He predicted that memory horizons would shrink close to zero in about twelve years–i.e. now.

‘I won’t go over all the research and speculation about what kind of impact this mass amnesia would have on the individual, society, and the economy. But one thing became clear: the loss of personal memories would be experienced as a vague and debilitating anxiety that many people would spend money to alleviate. Our databases of conversations, events, photographs, letters, et cetera, could be repackaged and sold back to those individuals to replace their own memories. This would possibly be a huge market opportunity for us. It would also serve a valuable social and economic function in helping to reduce the impact of a problem that was likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in psychiatric treatment and several billions in lost labour.’

Jo took a sip of coffee. ‘Is this making sense?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

‘We started with a small group of people and started to record everything they did. We looked at what systems we had available and invented new ones. We put cameras absolutely everywhere. We developed technologies that recognized an individual’s voice, face, handwriting and everything so that the minimum human intervention was required to link one person’s memories to each other in a single narrative. Gradually these systems were expanded to cover more and more people. We finally reached 100 per cent coverage of the populations of the US and UK around nine years ago, and we have been working with partners in other countries to gather similar data there too. This is the largest collection of data ever to exist. We will be able to give our future customers CD-ROMs with photographs of them getting on a plane to go on holiday, recordings of phone conversations with their mother, videos of them playing with their son in a park or sitting at their desk at work…It will really be a phenomenal product.

‘Now we’re ready for all that work to pay off. We have the stuff to sell. We’re working with an advertising agency on a campaign to launch it in the next few months. We just need to work out a few final details. That’s where you come in.

‘You see there is one issue we didn’t think about very carefully when we started this project. Some memories, of course, are not pleasant. We are making all kinds of disclaimers about the memories we are selling, but we would still like to minimize the risk of severe psychological trauma caused by the rediscovery of painful memories that had been lost. There’s no point selling bad memories when we know what kind of an impact they will have on individuals’ ability to perform well in the home and the workplace. So we want to take them out.

‘This is going to be a massive job that calls for someone with your unusual empathy with the past. What we need you to do is to go through the memories manually and produce a large sample of the kind we’re talking about–the most traumatic memories. We will analyse that sample and find all the parameters that have a perfect correlation with memories of this sort. Then we can simply run a search on all our databases for memories matching those parameters and delete them. But we need to go through a lot of memories to get there. The statisticians tell us we need a sample of not less than twelve thousand traumatic memories in order for the system to be perfect.’

Jo stopped talking. Thomas said nothing. The idea was so far-reaching that he did not have an adequate response.

‘Do you have any questions?’

He searched within himself for the most urgent of his doubts.

‘Assuming that everything you’ve said is true–from the shrinking memory horizons to this massive database of memories–and it still seems rather incredible–I can see why people might want to come to you to retrieve some of the memories they have lost. That makes sense. But isn’t it only fair to them to give them everything? Who are you to edit their memories for them? They are a product of the bad as well as the good, after all.’

‘Thomas: we are not making any promises of completeness. We are providing a unique service and it’s totally up to us how we want to design it. It has been decided that we are not prepared to sell just any memory for fear of the risk to us or our customers. That’s that. Any other questions?’

He could find only platitudes.

‘What is the company called?’

‘Up to now we’ve been working with a codename for the project: Memory Mine. That name will no doubt fade out as the advertising agency comes up with a new identity for us.’

A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines went off in Thomas’s head. Was this what the old woman had been talking about? Was this where the prediction was supposed to take him?

‘So are you going to do it?’

‘I think so. At least–Yes.’

Thomas began work the next day. Each morning he would arrive at the office in Hackney and he and Jo would sit in silence at their computers at one end of this huge empty space. He would wear headphones to listen to recorded phone calls and video; the room was entirely still.

‘We have short-listed around a hundred thousand memories that you can work from. They’ve been selected on the basis of a number of parameters–facial grimacing, high decibel level, obscene language–that are likely to be correlated with traumatic memories. It’s a good place to start. Within these you are looking for the very worst: memories of extreme pain or shock, memories of unpleasant or criminal behaviour. Apply the logic of common sense: would someone want to remember this? Think of yourself like a film censor: if the family can’t sit together and watch it, it’s out.’

Some were obvious. A woman watches her husband being run down by a car that mounts the pavement at high speed and drives him through the door of a second-hand record store; two boys stick a machete into the mouth of an old man while they empty his pockets and take his watch–a sign in the video image says Portsmouth City Council; four men go to the house of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to collect a loan–when he can’t pay they shoot him in the knees; the police inform a mother by telephone that her daughter has been violently raped while taking a cigarette break from her job as a supermarket cashier and has almost died from loss of blood.