[Kaimee]: 5.Short stories.A Mother's Love

Mother’s Love
© Kate-Aimee Conrick. All rights reserved!

“Ah, Miss Annett I see, welcome back.” She glanced at the small, grey suited man holding the door for her and narrowed her eyes. “How do you know my name?” She demanded, “What do you mean by welcome back? I’ve never been here before.”
“Ah… just a little Memdep humour I’m afraid, don’t worry, of course you haven’t been here.” He assured the confused woman, and ignoring her small protestations he guided her past the counter to an unobtrusive door that she hadn’t noticed before. Glancing back she made a weak gesture to the counter. “But don’t I have to…?”
“No, no, that’s fine, you’ll be wanting to access the memories about your mother I assume? Yes, yes of course you would.” With long familiarity he lead her to a black leather chair, sunken into a huge stainless steel surface the size of a large table, and patting her arm, gently manoeuvred her into the couch.

Still confused about this strange little man who seemed to know exactly what she was here for, she lay back and mentally shrugged. So what if they knew who she was, that was the way things should be. She glanced impatiently at her timepiece and wondered if she’d make it to her lunch date on time. She had the feeling that her current man was set to propose, and she smiled to herself, wondering maliciously whether to dial him privately and cancel the date, or whether to send an impersonal message straight to his data stick… what was the perfect amount of devastation for this particular man? A soft murmuring intruded on her thoughts and she turned to the little man exasperatedly, wondering why they hadn’t started yet.

He stood quietly looking in sympathy at the tears pouring down the woman’s face, at the agonised sobbing he knew so well. Every week, or month, or 3 months someone would give one of these poor insufficient people some reason to be curious about their erased memories, and then he’d see them again.
Time after countless time he watched their minds bend to breaking as all the emotion of a lifetime was dumped back into their memories. He watched their mad eyes as they screamed to have it gone, to be empty and superior again, as they realised yet, and yet again, that they could not cope or did not want to cope with humanity.
“And the others?” he murmured, watching her crazed, sob wracked body twist towards him. “The others? THE OTHERS?!” her anguished cries turned into screams as he gently dialled the memories of her past visits to stream back into her head. Each visit a crazy, identical déjà vu of this same agonizing flood, each day of pain building up in her head. Her screams were the same screams she’d screamed before and they changed pitch at the same time as she realised that she had screamed those exact same screams before, countless times. Each one burning itself deeper into her brain as she remembered it, each second burning the agonising thousands of past seconds into her brain, a torture of memories each fresh and blazing.
A sudden quiet and an eerie moan escaped her lips, he knew this stage and she knew it too, and remembered each of the countless of thousands of times before when she’d begged, begged that quiet unprepossessing man to take them away again. Make her forget her mother’s love, her mother’s death, each second of that pain she couldn’t bare to exist with. That rough sharp edged pain still fresh from her death, never worn down into familiarity, never beaten bit by bit into a faded story with each little touch of her mind. Make her forget – oh, that she could go on living with this knowledge, those memories, it was impossible. Make her forget, let her forget - 

“Well?” She demanded, sitting up on one elbow in the chair, glaring at the unremarkable little man. “Get on with it.” He murmured something and her voice cracked out again with a sharp “What!”
Instead of replying he passed her a mirror and she looked with a tiny shock upon her wrecked beauty, and wet, streaked cheeks.
“Madam has assessed the memories, and decided they are not worth the storage space in her brain. The side effects here are simply from the process, not the memories themselves. Do not worry, the human body finds it difficult to cope with the sudden influx of information and instead expends the excess energy in such a way.”
“Oh. Well then,” she dabbed impatiently at her face, now assured that it was only a perfectly ordinary bodily function, “That’s it then?” she asked brusquely, already standing and patting her hair into place.

Passing over her account stick she considered the best way to crush the adoring man she would cancel her date with. A small smile toyed on her lips and she wondered with the satisfaction of the supremely wealthy whether one day she’d bother to erase this memory too. It really was quite convenient being able to store the tiresome recollections here in Memory Deposit.
Really, it was quite convenient, she thought as she went out into the corridor, on her way to break someone’s heart. 
Really, she thought, her automaton reactions flickering over her perfect face.
Really, it was quite convenient.

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Piece © Kate-Aimee Conrick. All rights reserved!