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COMING TO TERMS WITH THE GREAT PLAGUE

by BRIAN STABLEFORD

[published in Omni Online December 1997]

It didn't help that the doctor's waiting-room was plastered with posters exhorting all and

sundry to CHECK YOUR MEMORIES REGULARLY. Others paraded dozens of mug-shots beneath the accusing

legend: DO YOU "REMEMBER" ANY OF THESE PEOPLE? Marilyn was there, of course, third from the left

on the second bottom row. I've always thought of myself as a hard-headed sort of person, but I

couldn't help feeling that they were trying to steal her away from me. Nor could I help hoping,

even though I knew full well that the hope was absurd, that in this one instance -- and only this

one instance -- they were quite mistaken about the fact of her non-existence.

It could be worse, I told myself, sternly, as my name was called. It would be worse if they

actually did exist -- especially for them. The problems that arise for all the people who remember

Marilyn are trivial compared with the problems a real Marilyn would face as a result of being

remembered.

Dr. Vernon took one look at me and said, in world-weary fashion: "What's the trouble, Mr.

Hayling? FMS?"

I blushed. I knew that the tabloids had taken to calling the FMS plague a pandemic, but he

surely had to play host to the usual crop of throat infections, arthritic joints and suspicious

lumps as well. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that I must look too robustly

healthy for it to be anything else.

"Which one?" he asked, in response to the tiniest of nods. I'd been hoping to lead up to it a

little more gently than that. I couldn't produce her name in the blunt and businesslike fashion

which seemed to be required of me; even though I knew full well what she was, it would have been a

kind of betrayal. False or not, the memories were good. We'd been so happy together, and it really

hadn't been her fault that we'd broken up. To dismiss her, utterly without ceremony, as the

product of a mysterious rogue infection might be necessary, but it still seemed rather a shabby

thing to do.

"It's all right," he said, impatiently. "I'm a doctor. I'm not going to tell anyone else, and

I'm certainly not going to attack you in a fit of unreasoning jealousy. Believe me, Mr. Hayling,

I've had a lot of experience dealing with FMS. By now, every doctor in the developed world is an

old hand."

I managed to stutter an M sound three or four times.

"Marilyn," he said. I didn't dare ask whether it was a fifty-fifty guess, or whether Marilyn

was significantly more common in the Thames Valley than Melanie, or whether there was some

particular quirk that marked me as a Marilyn type. The tabloids were quick to pounce on the least

rumor about patterns in the data, but they'd cried wolf so often that the man in the street

wouldn't stand a chance of identifying an authentic discovery in the chaos of speculation. There

had to be some real patterns in the data -- if there weren't, what was the point in people

reporting the details to their doctors? -- although there hadn't been the slightest whisper about

any effective treatment or possible cure.

Dr. Vernon called up a data-sheet that was already marked up with questions and boxes, so that

he could map my condition with a few deft clicks of his mouse. He was able to fill in a lot of the

boxes at one fell swoop, simply by transferring information from my file. "To what time-period do

the memories relate?" he asked, wincing at his own clumsy phraseology.

"Thirteen to fifteen years ago," I said. "I might never have figured out that they weren't the

real thing if her face hadn't kept coming up on the TV and posters like the one in your waiting-

room. I met her . . . that is, I remember meeting her . . . shortly after starting work with

VirtIconics in July 1993. She moved in with me after three months, and moved out again a year

after that. I heard from her . . . I remember hearing from her . . . half a dozen times more,

although I only saw her in the flesh once." Oh, the delicious pain of that meeting! The regrets,

the tears, the sense of tragedy! I coughed to cover my sudden discomfiture and hastened on.

"There's nothing at all after I first met Jill in '96 . . . that's my wife. She's real enough. She

has to be -- she works for a solicitor."

He didn't bother to contrive a polite grin to acknowledge the attempted witticism.

"Do you have any objective record of your movements between 1993 and 1996?" he asked.

"No. Who does? Who knew we were going to need them, way back then?"

"Not even a business diary with a record of appointments? A Sasco -- something like that?"

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I shook my head. I'd kept my appointments on a Stone Age personal organizer with no hard disc

and I'd thrown my Sascos in the bin every new year, like any sane person.

"Are there any evident anomalies in the Marilyn memory-pattern, or is it entirely consistent

with your other memories of the period?"

"Sometimes I can get flashes of living alone during '94, but I can't seem to get a grip on

them; the false memories seem to have overlain and obliterated the true ones very efficiently.

There is one thing, though . . ." I hesitated. No sooner had I managed to slip into

clinical/objective mode than I'd been jerked right out of it again by a rush of resentment at the

thought that all this was private, too intimately personal to be discussed with some quack who'd

never understand in a million years what Marilyn and I had meant to one another.

"Please go on," he said. "Information about anomalies is vital to our attempt to comprehend the

FMS phenomenon."

"It may not mean anything. It's just that . . . well, everybody calls me Jack these days, but

that's because I'm married to Jill. Before we became an item I was always John to everyone . . .

but Marilyn called me Jack. It's not inconsistent, as such . . . I guess people who get close to

one another often use names that are different, their special prerogative . . . but Jack came from

Jill, you see . . . it's probably nothing."

"I wouldn't say so," said Dr. Vernon, showing a flicker of real interest for the first time.

"It's actually rather interesting. Even if it's simply evidence of incompetence on the part of the

agent, that kind of detail might help to tell us something about the way the agent plunders your

real memories in order to construct the false ones. It's also possible that it's something your

own mind did, subconsciously -- planting a booby-trap, as it were, to tip off the conscious mind

that something is amiss with the memory-pattern. If people are able to draw on the resources of

some kind of psychological immune-system to cancel out the agent's effects there might be hope of

recovery even while we haven't yet identified the agent or devised any kind of biochemical

treatment."

He accompanied the final statement with what was presumably intended to be a morale-boosting

smile. Doctors and biotechnologists always referred to the agent, even though there wasn't the

faintest trace, so far, of any physical cause for the false memories that were springing up here,

there and everywhere. It wasn't just a matter of needing a label -- it was a bid for property

rights, an insistence that the syndrome was their problem, not something that could be left to

therapists and other assorted charlatans.

"Can you make a reliable estimate of the time of origin of the false memories?" Dr. Vernon

asked, in a carefully elliptical fashion.

"They can't have been in place very long," I said, "or I'd have recognized the face in the TV

ads when they first began broadcasting it. I guess the memories crept up on me, so I can't be

absolutely sure, but it was about last Tuesday when I began thinking that the Marilyn they kept

showing with the FMS updates was uncannily like my Marilyn, and how awful it would be if she

turned out to be . . . well, I guess you know how it goes. I'd say the infection is about ten days

to a fortnight old."

"That's good. The sooner these things are spotted, the sooner you can start to work against

them. Have you made a preliminary record of the memory-complex yet?"

"It's not finished," I lied. I knew I had to use it, but I wasn't about to go public with it,

no matter how useful it might be as a research tool. He didn't seem surprised by my answer and he

didn't press the point.

"Just make sure it's as full as you can make it," he said. "Unless you record everything you

can presently remember, you won't be able to track the extension of the pattern. Not that it's

certain to grow, mind -- at the moment it looks like a relatively low-level invasion, not too

ambitious and conveniently distant, and it might well stay that way." He didn't sound optimistic.

The smile looked as if it might fall off at any moment and the fingers of his left hand were

fidgeting with the mouse in a fashion that seemed almost feverish.

"I'll get on to it," I assured him. "If I find any more anomalies, I'll be sure to let you

know."

"Have you told your wife what's happening?"

"Not yet."

His expression was more sorrowful than disapproving. "In my experience," he said, "it's better

to do it sooner than later. She'll catch on soon enough -- the time you put into record-keeping

will give you away eventually, even if there are no other signs. It's probable that she'll be

unable to avoid some feeling of jealousy, even if she accepts on a conscious and rational level

that you can't help what's happening to you. Some women, paradoxical as it may seem, think that

their partners starting to remember non-existent women is even worse than their actually being

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unfaithful."

"Jill's not like that," I told him, wishing that I could be certain. "She'll understand." I was

sure that she'd try. Unfortunately, nobody understood why the FMS plague was happening at all, let

alone why the false memories suffered by men were almost invariably memories of hot love affairs

with beautiful women, while the false memories suffered by women were usually memories of children

they'd never actually borne. So far, Jill had shown no sign of any of those, despite the fact that

she and I were childless . . . or if she had, she'd kept them entirely to herself.

"I'll need to take a blood sample," the doctor said, reaching into a desk-drawer for a

hypodermic. "Part of it will be inspected; the rest will be frozen, so that it can be screened

retrospectively for any candidate agents thrown up by future research."

"The only problem with that," I pointed out, to show that I was a scientifically-sophisticated

person who was on the ball, "will be finding a reliable control group so you can check for the

candidate-agent's absence." Anyone with a grain of common sense could see that for every person

who managed to figure out that they were playing host to false memories there could easily be two

or three who couldn't, and two or three more who wouldn't admit it even if they could. I, being

ever skeptical of the competence and motives of my fellow human beings, had a sneaking suspicion

that by the time some hero identified a virus or a psychotropic molecule which might be

responsible for the plague, they might not be able to find a single unexposed person this side of

the arctic circle.

Dr. Vernon, who was presumably a realist himself, contented himself with a somber nod as he

carefully fitted the needle to the plastic syringe. I reflected on the painful irony of the fact

that although there were a dozen different ways of getting things into the body nowadays, there

was still only one effective method of taking blood out.

-<*>-

I wasn't particularly late getting to the office, and I was well into flexitime credit, but I

couldn't help feeling a paranoid suspicion that people were looking at me -- that they'd somehow

guessed where I'd been and what I'd confessed to the doctor. It was silly, but I was all too well

aware of the ways in which FMS sufferers could accidentally give themselves away, and of the awful

rapacity of office gossip. Nobody bothered speculating any more about people's real affairs -- in

fact, I sometimes wonder whether, in these troubled times, people actually bother having real

affairs any more.

There was nothing in the least unusual in the fact that as soon as five of us had gathered

around a table in the Turk's Head at lunchtime -- variously clutching our BLT toasties, pizza

wedges, baked potatoes and pints -- the conversation should instantly turn to FMS. Even so, I

couldn't help feeling horribly uncomfortable about it. I couldn't help wondering which of the

others might be feeling the same, and whether any of them might secretly be harboring fond

memories of passionate frolics with my Marilyn -- and I couldn't help suspecting that every single

word that was spoken was aimed directly at me, was really about me.

"If you see FMS in its proper historical perspective," Mike Gilbert said, as his bushy black

beard gradually filled up with crumbs, "it's bloody obvious what it is. It's psychological

warfare, that's what. I mean, where did it start? All those bloody therapists uncovering repressed

memories of sexual abuse suffered in childhood, setting generation against generation, sibling

against sibling. The purpose had to be disruption and destabilization of the entire social

structure -- and when people figured out that the memories were false the psychowarriors promptly

moved on to something more insidious. Every day you hear reports of men killing one another in

jealous rages over women who never even existed, but that's just the tip of the iceberg . . . the

real disruption is inside, in the way people look at one another suspiciously, saying nothing,

just wondering. The entire fabric of Western society is coming apart, stitch by stitch."

Ouch! I thought.

"Who's doing it, then?" Hal Mellor scoffed, after taking another gluttonous swig from a glass

that was already almost empty. "The ex-communists? The Pacific Rimmers? The green zealots?"

"Mike's right," Aileen McMurdo put in, in that deadly earnest tone she only ever used when she

was taking the piss. "You have to see it in its true historical context. It actually started

before the child abuse revelations, with all those stories about people being kidnapped aboard

UFOs and subjected to intensive examination by aliens. That's the key to the mystery."

"That didn't destabilize anything," Hal pointed out. "Who'd start a war in a crazy way like

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that?"

"The aliens would," Aileen came back, springing the trap. "It was all double bluff, see. They

planted lots of false memories of abduction to make sure that the people who'd really been

abducted wouldn't be believed -- and what they found out from all those tests was how to screw up

our minds utterly and completely. They found out how to refine their weapons for maximum effect on

human beings, and now they're using the second-generation stuff. By the time the invasion fleet

gets here we'll all be psychological wrecks, every vestige of our real pasts consumed by obsessive

nostalgia for lost lovers and dead babies. We won't offer a whimper of resistance -- in fact,

we'll probably be queuing up to be first into the gas chambers."

"Did you make that one up all by yourself?" Mike asked, in a mock-admiring tone which was

something of a double bluff itself.

"No, she didn't," said Helen Chambers, who spent far too much time exchanging intricate jokes

with Aileen for her own good. "She's being paid to put it about. She's an agent provocateur for

the real masterminds."

"Who are?" I put in. I had to play my part, lest my silence should become suspicious.

"Don't pretend you don't know, Jack," she said, with a broad and exceedingly discomfiting wink.

"We're all friends here. We all know who it really is, even though we've all been sworn to

secrecy."

"No harm in telling us, then, is there?" I countered.

"Well, it's us, isn't it?" she said. "VirtIconics, traders in synthetic reality. It's the

market research department testing the water, trying to figure out what kinds of virtual reality

will sell best . . . and maybe breaking down consumer resistance a little. After all, what's the

ideal consumer profile for buyers of high-powered virtual reality hardware? People whose grip on

reality is so weak that they can't even trust their own memories. We humble designers of machine-

generated dreams are merely cogs in a much vaster system, whose ambition to extend the limits of

human experience is literally unlimited."

"You want to be careful, Helen," Aileen said. "At least one of these guys must be a spy for the

suits upstairs. They'll be down on you like a ton of bricks if they find out you've been giving

away the company's darkest secrets. Anyway, it can't be the marketing department -- they wouldn't

bother with trivia like sexual passion and mother love if they could get down to the real nitty-

gritty of product placement. If they really had FMS down to fine art and crude technology those

warning broadcasts would be full of pictures of canned beers and drain-cleaners and laser-discs

that aren't available in any video-stores. What kind of a world do you think we're living in, for

God's sake?"

"This is getting silly," Mike observed, affably. He was probably feeling pleased because he'd

kicked the whole thing off, or maybe because Hal's patience had run out and he was bringing back a

second round of drinks before anyone else had finished their first.

"Except, of course," Hal said, as he plonked the glasses down on the crowded tabletop, "that if

they ever do find the cause, it could stop being a plague and start being a technology. If it

isn't us, it could end up being the competition which will wipe us out. We could end up taking our

VR products into a marketplace where we'd have to compete with people selling designer memories.

Can you see the ads? ALL THE HOLIDAYS OF A LIFETIME . . . THE PAST IS A THOUSAND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

. . . WHATEVER YOU WANT, YOU CAN REMEMBER . . . MEMORIES ARE MADE OF . . . hell, this really isn't

very funny, is it? We could be left high and dry, showing off our Sopwith Camels the day after

someone else invented the supersonic jet."

"And it wouldn't just be one lifetime," I said, judiciously striking the same note of fake

anxiety just in case any real anxiety happened to show through. "Like Mike and Aileen said, we

have to remember the historical context. Before the child abuse there were the aliens, and before

the aliens there were the past lives, when everybody was finding out that they'd been Napoleon or

Cleopatra in a former incarnation. That can't have been our marketing department, unless all our

memories are false. IBM maybe, or AT&T, but definitely not us."

"Forget marketing," Aileen said. "The bozos up there don't have the imagination. It's

definitely aliens. That reincarnation stuff was just more of their disinformation. Of course, they

might not be planning to invade at all. They might actually be benign, intent on helping us to

fulfill our true evolutionary potential. Maybe the whole FMS saga is just a series of

psychological adaptations, which will culminate when we've finally been pressured into becoming

true masters of memory, able to take mature responsibility for the reconstruction of our

personalities, fit for membership of the galactic community."

"Oh, sure," said Helen, who was never particularly squeamish about hitting below the belt when

she was lashing out at random. "The way these guys keep inventing women that never existed to

compensate for their failures with real women, and then get into fights about who the imaginary

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women really liked best, is a giant leap forward for mankind. We're well on the way to true

maturity now, aren't we?"

It was a step too far. I bit my lip, but Hal -- who'd put away his second pint in double-quick

time -- didn't. "Exactly what made you so sour about men, Helen?" he asked, before he could stop

himself. "Some guy leave you holding a baby boy that died, or what?"

That killed the conversation stone dead -- and made me wonder exactly what, and exactly who,

was accelerating Hal's drinking problem.

-<*>-

By the time I got home I'd decided to make a clean breast of things, but I had to wait for the

right moment -- you can't just blurt these things out as you cross the threshold when you know

perfectly well that you've both had an absolutely bloody day at the office. Jill was as whacked as

I was. If it hadn't been for a strong desire to keep things as normal as possible I'd have

volunteered to cook, even though it was her turn.

By the time we were fed and suitably relaxed the weary temptation stole upon me to leave it for

another day, but I knew it wasn't a good idea. The bullet had to be bitten, and if she hadn't

noticed already that something was amiss she soon would.

"I had to pop in to see the doctor on my way to work this morning," I told her, tentatively,

while we'd both collapsed on the couch in front of the TV. It was showing a soap opera, one of

whose chief characters was just beginning to get to grips with the legacy of his intense imaginary

involvement with an entirely fictitious Veronica. I steeled myself against the anticipated look of

alarm.

She did turn her gray-green eyes full on me, but there was more reproach in the gaze than

alarm.

"I thought something was up," she murmured, sadly. "I suppose it had to come."

"It's not serious," I hastened to tell her. "Dr. Vernon confirmed that. Distant past, short

duration. Hardly anything, really."

"But it could get worse, couldn't it?" she said. "There's no knowing how far it will go. You

hear stories about people reconstructing their entire pasts from day one, losing themselves

entirely."

"That's very rare," I told her. "The tabloids exaggerate. One in ten Britons are suffering from

the syndrome, but life goes on. The country hasn't ground to a halt. Personally, I think the

epidemic's losing its force. They do, you know. Even the most devastating diseases weaken over

time. We may not have an effective treatment yet but the simple fact that we know about it and are

on our guard makes a big difference. It's much harder for the false memories to take hold and

spread now we can recognize them for what they are. I'm keeping proper records, and I'll do the

checks every day. I'm fighting it, Jill, and if determination is enough to win, I'll beat it."

I had begun to babble, and would have rambled on, but she cut me short. "It's a girl, isn't

it," she said. She was trying to keep her voice level, but I could hear the sense of injury, the

dark fear that she was being crowded out of my past by someone younger and more beautiful.

"It's just the form the disease usually takes," I told her, taking her hand in mine and

caressing it with all the reassurance I could muster. "It doesn't mean anything."

She didn't pull her hand away but I could feel the tension in the muscles. "That's what they

all say," she said. "It doesn't mean anything. I can't help it. It's just a stray virus. It could

happen to anyone. All very convenient, isn't it? You don't have to do anything, except lie back

and enjoy it. You don't have to take responsibility for the fact that your innermost soul is being

colonized by some little whore who's doing the same for ten per cent of the fucking population."

She wasn't babbling, and she wasn't angry. Indeed, she was frighteningly articulate. Actually,

less than five per cent of the population had the form of FMS involving female lovers and less

than five per cent of that five per cent had the form involving Marilyn, but it was no time to be

pedantic.

"It is a disease," I said, feebly. "It really is." There were, of course, some people who

argued that it wasn't, that the spread of the syndrome was due to the power of auto-suggestion

aided and abetted by the media -- the modern day equivalent of absent-mindedly scanning a few

pages of a medical encyclopedia and convincing yourself that you have everything from asthma to

bilharzia. They even had a jargon for it, borrowed from the sociobiologists. According to them,

Marilyn and all her sisters were just memes: infectious ideas designed by natural selection to

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Brian Stableford - Coming to Terms with the Great Plague.pdf

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