The Great Forgetting Page 25

  Zaharie’s home was in that tony section of Shal Alam on the outer rim of Kuala Lumpur, near the golf course. It was a gated community, safe. Jack passed the main gate and took a turn down the running track that led along the Sungai Damansara, a muddy tributary, drainage for the monsoons. It was just after sunset and he could feel the trapped heat of the dirt trail evaporating into the night around him.

  “Hello, Jack,” came a high-pitched voice directly behind him.

  He whirled on his feet, nearly falling. And there it was. The Hound. Not just a Hound. The big guy. The one they called Scopes. Their leader. A foot away from him. Caught! And so close. Another three hours. That’s all he would have needed. He thought of running but saw the revolver in the holster at the Hound’s hip and knew that it would get the draw before he’d taken three steps.

  “Easy,” said Scopes. “I’m not here to kill you.”

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  Scopes looked to the river. On the far shore a man was trolling the bottom for carp with a homemade rod and reel. “I thought we could talk.”

  “You came all this way just to shoot the breeze?”

  The Hound’s eyes sparkled under the brim of his Panama hat. “I’m going to let you go to Mu. You and your family. You deserve it. To be happy. To be safe. It’s the last happy place on earth, didn’t you know? Better than Disneyland. Hell, I’ll join you there soon. We’ll drink lemonade on the beach and talk about our adventures.”

  Jack steeled himself, waited for the inevitable “but…”

  “But I want you to stay there. Don’t leave Mu. Don’t come back.”

  Jack looked closely at the Hound. He seemed sincere, earnest. What Jack really sensed was a sadness. A deep, old, stubborn sadness. Weary and tired.

  “How would I deserve that happiness if I knew that everyone back home was living in a world run by a couple capitalists who can rewrite our memories with a simple phone call? That’s not freedom.”

  “You think people want freedom? Everyone is scared. They don’t want freedom. They want to forget. They want to forget all the bad, scary things.”

  “The Great Forgetting was wrong,” said Jack. “But these new forgettings. Nobody voted for them. Why are they doing it? Do they think they’re making the world safer for us by making us forget again?”

  Scopes laughed. “They don’t care about making the world a better place. It’s not that complicated. All they want is money. Money and power. And power comes from money, so really, just money. Just money. Something out there messes with the price of oil, they make people forget. That simple. A storm in New Orleans wipes out a couple refineries? Boom, gone, forgotten. A sex scandal involving subcontractors in Iraq? Pick up the phone, tell the Maestro to delete six billion memories. It’s greed, Jack. Simple greed.”

  “So why are you helping them?”

  “Helping them? I own them. I told them about the Great Forgetting. I gave them the password for the Maestro.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s greed we should have forgotten. Not history. That’s what the founders didn’t understand. We forgot about all those bad things, but we left greed in the box and that’s why it didn’t work. Every war, every act of terrorism we’ve seen since we hit that reset button, it was all based in greed. It’ll never stop. The only thing left is to let greed run its course.”

  “Run its course?”

  Scopes nodded. “I found the two greediest men in the world, two brothers who want to control the world with their oil money. Buying influence. Stealing elections. They sank a hundred million dollars into the Tea Party last year, not because they’re patriots but because the Tea Party will do away with all regulation, the only thing keeping greed in check. Then corporations will run the world. They’re close. Very close. They control the Supreme Court, Congress. They’ll have the White House. It’s going to happen. And it will work. For a few years, it’ll work brilliantly. They will be rich beyond even their dreams. It’ll work right up until their laborers begin to starve to death. When that happens, the workers will finally rise up and murder everyone at the top. It will implode. Everything. The world will fall. And the only culture remaining will be the one that never forgot, the culture of Mu. We can rebuild then. We’ll have our history back, all of it. Because, Jack, and here’s the thing: the only thing that could ever keep our greed in check is the horror of our shared history.”

  Jack took it in. The idea overwhelmed him. It was so dark. And yet hopeful. Seductive. Perverse. “How many people will die when it all comes apart? Do you have any idea?”

  The Hound shrugged. “Something like three billion. Give or take a hundred million.”

  Jack’s heart raced in his chest. Was this some kind of grand decision he alone was faced with, here, now? No. No, this couldn’t be his decision to make. Not really. He couldn’t believe that. Nothing he could do could have an impact on the future of the human race. That was ludicrous. But what else were they discussing?

  “Why don’t we just let them remember?” asked Jack. “Maybe if they remembered before all that other stuff happened…”

  Scopes shook his head. “They’re not ready for that.”

  Jack looked back at Zaharie’s house. He could just make it out on the hill, behind a row of langsat trees.

  “Here,” said Scopes. He had two belts crisscrossed around his waist like a gunslinger. He disconnected the buckle from one and handed it to Jack. It felt heavy, heavier than it should.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a bit of the forgotten tech we had from Before. The marines called them ripcords or boomerang belts. Something to do with quantum entanglement. Whatever. Essentially, the buckle is still attached to the belt and always will be. You click this button—” Scopes turned the buckle around in Jack’s hand and on the back was a red button—“and it will bring me to you. When you get to Mu, bring me over.”

  For a moment, Jack said nothing. Then, gritting his teeth, he threw the buckle into the river.

  “No,” he said. “I won’t do it your way. I won’t just watch the world destroy itself. I’d rather you killed me first.”

  Scopes surprised Jack with a smile. “Maybe,” he said. “But not today. You still might change your mind.” He tipped his hat to Jack and walked away, toward the night markets of Kuala Lumpur.

  7 Later that night, back at Le Meridien, in a suite overlooking the sea, Scopes sat on the edge of his bed, the nine-millimeter in his hairy hand. He’d thought of doing this before. Tonight was as good a night as any. Jack had proved it to him. Nothing ever changes.

  * * *

  When he was little his name was Yohance and his mother played music to him in their apartment at night. It helped with his headaches, which sometimes felt like fire inside his skull.

  Memories: a gentle hand that smelled of tallow; the sound of her cotton dress swishing over her legs; her music—she plucked at a wooden saucer with bent metal keys that sounded at once like a piano and a steel drum. Music of his mother’s father, who had constructed the instrument from the trunk of a tree at the edge of a forest.

  Yohance lived with his mother in a brown and yellow apartment on the hospital grounds. Sometimes when he thought about what they were doing to him, he cried so much his eyes burned.

  “Why?” he asked her once.

  “It’s a very pointless question,” she said.

  He didn’t like school. The old priests wouldn’t look at him. The priests were afraid of them. Of Yohance and his classmates.

  There was no arguing the essential truth: he and his friends were special. But he most of all. Because of his mother, Ambala. His mother was a bright light in the hospital. The staff called the other mothers “bush babies,” but not Ambala. She was smarter. Smarter than some of the doctors, he thought, though she had never gone to school and had been abducted from the bush like the rest of the women.

  Maybe it was the music, he’d wonder later.

  Yohance susp
ected the migraine headaches that plagued his childhood came from the stuff they injected him with. The doctors wanted to know what side effects the medicine would have. Maybe suffering these headaches had saved countless people from enduring their own migraines during the Great Forgetting. Probably that was the case. Why else would they have done it? And for so long?

  Memory: a sunlit morning, amber light through the window. His mother was packing, tossing clothes into a potato sack. She stopped when she saw him and came to him and placed her long hands on his wrinkly cheeks. That dark skin. Flawless. Warm to the touch.

  “Yohance,” she said. “Yohance, we must flee.”

  “Why?”

  “The doctors lied to us. They want you to protect them after the Great Forgetting. They want to continue using you. There will be no freedom for you in their new world.”

  “But … why?”

  “They don’t see you as human. But you’re no more an animal than any of the men. You. Are. Human.”

  “I don’t feel human.”

  “You will know grace. That is being human. Come.”

  They ran. Out into the world that was hot and loud and full of people who looked at him as if he were diseased. They fled from village to village, over the road that led back to Ambala’s people. There was war everywhere in those days. Tribes fighting tribes over a tiny well or a truckload of rice.

  The doctors caught up with them outside Otukpo. A group of six men in white jackets led by that German with the slick hair. “Guter boy,” said Dr. Mengele. “Come wit me.” And they put him in a Jeep and he never saw her again. Ambala.

  The doctors paid special attention to Yohance after that. Mengele recognized that he was different, that Yohance understood their numbers and abtractions. Algebra. Geometry. And language. Mengele brought him books of poetry. Keats. Tennyson. Eliot. His favorite, Angelou, reminded him of his mother. He devoured the literature.

  For a time, Yohance was Mengele’s favorite. And then one day Mengele brought with him a man with a strange voice and an odd hump on his back. Yohance did not like this man. He had just enough brains to be dangerous. Yohance made fun of the humpback. He called this man “Maestro.” It was supposed to be ironic. But he didn’t get it. The weird man loved it so much he told everyone to call him Maestro. And in return, he bestowed nicknames on Yohance and his kind, naming most of them after apes from silly comic books and movies. He called Yohance “Scopes,” because he thought it was funny. But it wasn’t funny. Or at least it wasn’t smart humor. All the more unbearable because the Maestro thought he was being gracious. Eventually the Maestro figured it out, that Yohance had been making fun of him. And from that point on, they were all called the Hounds. And even Yohance knew where that had come from. He’d read Bradbury.

  Came a time when the great scientist Stephen Hawking visited Lagos. The young scientist was the architect of the Great Forgetting and he wanted to live for a hundred years to see it completed. He tested his longevity drug on the Hounds first, Scopes being one of them. They put it in their Kool-Aid. Now Scopes would live forever in a world with no place for his kind. And when the Collectors were all retired and the Maestro had nothing more for them to do? Where would they go? Who cared?

  The time of the Great Forgetting arrived at last. As Yohance boarded the helicopter that would take him to the staging area, he watched a marine with a flamethrower torch the bundle of reeds that covered the warren where two male bonobos lived. Was one of them his father?

  The last thing Mengele did was make Titano their leader. Titano the brute. Titano the simpleton.

  “Why?” Yohance asked Mengele when they were alone on the eve of the Forgetting.

  “Because you think you’re better than us.”

  Years. Years watching over the Collectors, hiding under the mountains. Years watching humanity corrupt the vision of the Great Forgetting, babies shitting in their cribs. Three short years after they reset the calendar to 1964, America found its way back to war. This time in Vietnam. Like they couldn’t wait. And Yohance was smart enough to see that this war, like all wars, was not about peace, but money. Wars create billionaires out of the men who own the companies that make the guns and bullets. Greed was an instinct that humans had not evolved beyond. It was the virus in their code.

  But Yohance had a secret. He had learned to translate the code that went out from HAARP. The read-only files that contained the bits and bytes of the Maestro’s algorithm were accessible from any computer in the Underground if you knew where to look. He taught himself to interpret its structure, to appreciate its elegance. And so when the Maestro began fucking with it, Yohance noticed right away. He spotted the broken fractals jutting from the original algorithm like melanoma. The Maestro had come to see the folly of human redemption, too, it seemed. And he’d begun to take measures to fix it.

  The Maestro was trying to wake people up to the Great Forgetting, give them a chance to bring it down themselves. What would that accomplish? They’d already showed they had no capacity for transcendence. Truth: humans love to forget.

  As he’d predicted, the Maestro’s meddling went awry. Tim McVeigh had seemed like a safe bet. Intelligent. Gulf War vet. The Maestro recruited him, told him about the Great Forgetting, showed him how to keep his memories safe. Guy went fucking nuts. Blew up a relay but killed 168 people, and how many of those were children? After that the Maestro trod more carefully. He used a gradient. It would go on and on until the Maestro finally succeeded. And when that happened, if there was something like a Great Remembering, what then would humanity do to the Hounds? He knew. He had only to remember the men with American flags on their sleeves torching the primate cave.

  There was only one chance for the Hounds: a clean slate. No money to fight over. Everyone equal again. Those who survived, anyway. The world was bent on destruction, anyway. Why not give them a little push?

  And when the world began to fall, he’d retire to Mu and watch the mushroom clouds from the beach, and when the smoke cleared he might return and do a little better.

  * * *

  Scopes set the gun down.

  EIGHT

  THE LAST FLIGHT

  1 The Captain called it a Triple-7, but to Jack it was just another big damn jet. They watched it taxi to the gate from their seats in the terminal. Zaharie was speaking quietly with the steward at the ticket counter, arranging their seats for the red-eye to Beijing, even though China was no longer their destination.

  “I feel sick,” said Nils, holding his head between his large legs.

  “That’s normal,” the Captain told him. “Nerves.”

  As soon as the jet parked outside, the passengers formed a line at the door. Most were Chinese, Jack noticed, on a simple flight home.

  Sam gripped Jack’s arm and whispered in his ear. “We’re going to scare the shit out of these people.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But they’ll forget it all. Quick detour to Mu. Then on to Beijing. When they get home, HAARP will wipe their memories. For once we get to use the Great Forgetting to our advantage.”

  “Boarding has begun for Flight 370, nonstop to Beijing,” the steward said into the mic. He took an old man’s ticket and waved him through the open door and down the ramp.

  Zaharie returned with their tickets. He was dressed in his black-and-white pilot’s uniform. He’d left his family behind. The flight was not without risk. One day he’d come back.

  “Ready?” Zaharie asked the Captain.

  “Ready,” he said.

  Zaharie had arranged first-class tickets near the cockpit. Jack sat by Sam. The Captain and Cole took seats across the aisle. Nils ended up nearer to the bathroom. The big guy looked pale. Was it really nerves? Jack pushed the thought aside. There were more important things to worry about than Nils’s upset stomach.

  The other pilot arrived and Zaharie shut the cockpit door. A stewardess closed and latched the entrance. Then the jet pulled away from the gate and rolled toward the runway. It was thirty minutes p
ast midnight according to Tony’s watch.

  2 As soon as they were in the air and the seat-belt light came on, Nils stood and walked to the bathroom. The first-class amenities were larger than those in coach, but still, he was a tight fit.

  I should have told them, thought Nils, looking at himself in the frosted mirror.

  He lifted his shirt. His chest was mottled, marked by dark patches like bruises. He moved his fingers across a black circle near the center of his chest. He felt another fiber poking out of his skin there. He took it by his fingernails like he’d done in the bathroom at Zaharie’s mansion. Grabbed it and pulled. It was another corkscrewed fiber, nine inches long, green like the inside of a kiwi, rigid like a steel spring. He tossed it in the toilet. Since yesterday, he’d pulled twenty of them out of his body. Mostly from his chest and underarms. But he’d also found one in the skin beside his balls.

  What’s happening to me?

  That day in the Maestro’s house when Sam had come through the door. The Hounds had shot at them and he’d thought a bit of shrapnel had hit him. That was when it had started. He’d felt feverish that night. One of the damn Hounds had shot him with something. Something poisonous, or worse.

  He didn’t want to bother anyone until this next part was over. Everyone else had so much on their minds already. He could wait another four or five hours. Then he would tell them. There would be doctors on Mu, right? Someone who could help him. Maybe someone there could tell him what the fuck he was dealing with.

  He looked at the fiber in the toilet bowl. It was a parasite’s egg, he knew. There was no other explanation. There were things crawling around under his skin. He could feel them sometimes, moving like thin fingers along his chest. These were eggs. Had to be.

  Nils closed the lid and flushed away the matter. He stood there and shivered.

  3 An hour into the flight, Jack felt the jet buck a little, as if they’d flown through a patch of turbulance. Then the cockpit door opened and Zaharie stepped out. There was a stewardess in the front alcove, microwaving bowls of minced pork noodles. She turned to him, alarmed to find the pilot out of the cockpit, unannounced. They exchanged whispered words and then she nodded and walked through the curtain into coach.