They call me the Receiver, but I know now that I am nothing but a Theif.
I have stolen people's identities, their knowledge, everything that makes a man different from the beasts that crawl across the ground, I have stolen from them. I have taken their lives and replaced them with cheap two-dimensional paintings of what a life could be. And the worst part is that I have stolen their ability to understand that they have been stolen from; they cannot tell that they wander through a mere reflection of life, because that is all they can remember.
The only salve I once had; that they had come to me willingly to have their memories stolen, has been snatched away from me. Five months ago, I only took from those who came forward of their free will. But then the Operation became mandatory, for the peace of the world, they said. I started to see patients who were grudging, who shot me sullen looks and muttered to themselves until it was over.
And today I stole from the first of a long line of prisoners. People who had run, criminals against the state who were willing to risk total death rather than live in the world of twilight that we offered.
In the past, it had always been optional. I had been helping those who wanted to be helped. I took memories of death and pain, of lost children and mothers, of stubbed toes and broken ribs. The patients came with lines around their eyes and left with faint smiles quirking at the corners of their lips. I took the hurt into my own mind and wiped it cleanly from their recall. Now, if you ask them what it's like to lose a husband of forty years, or fall from a second-story roof, they shake their heads and shrug before going back to their daily business. They do not remember.
The price of the loss of pain is the loss of all memory that connects with pain. In order to erase the hurt of a drowned daughter, I had to steal all memories associated with the daughter. So now I, a man of twenty-one, know what it is like to give childbirth. I remember the ache of stretching muscles, the painful twinge of contractions, the difficulty of breath. I know what it is to nurse a babe from my own body, even though it's not actually my body that I remember having. I know what it is to watch the child grow and form, to imagine what futures she might embark on, to idly wonder if the neighbor's boy will fall in love with the little beauty when they are grown. And I know what it is to have my heart torn out and force-fed to me when she falls out of a row-boat at age four because I did not watch her closely enough, I turned my back for a moment to kiss my husband, and she was lost to the water.
The mother is free now. She vaguely recalls a girl in her life, but it passes in a sense of deja vu. She has lost the joyful days with her firstborn, but she traded it freely for peace.
I hold these and a hundred-thousand more painful memories within my own mind, tormenting me day and night, never to give me peace. If I make my peace with one memory of guilt and shame, another one is there, tag-teaming me, seeing to it that I have no moment of release. The memories of blinding physical pain are nothing compared to the emotional agony of failure and loss, of love not realized until too late, of futures never lived, of mistakes made without a chance to redeem myself.
But then the State wanted more. They realized that they could not protect the people from themselves, that the evil memories were gone, but more began piling in before they had a chance to learn and grow. More loss, more pain, more disappointment. In order to keep a child from breaking his arm while sledding down a snowy hill, one had to remove the memory of how to sled, or even that such a thing were possible. But you also had to remove the thought from every human's mind, or someone else would show him how to sled again, and it would be for nought.
So the Operation, or the 'Wipe' as the antagonists within the State called it, became mandatory, and the list of memories I was to take from them grew longer than my arm. I had to take memory of heat, of cold, of sadness, of joy, of color, of difference, anything that could cause strife or agony. I took everything that could possibly harm them, and left them in a world of uneasy peace, built only by the lack of true life. A world of gray and white, once it was decided that those were the only colors that would be safe, a world permanently trapped at 65 degrees, the optimum temperature, a world with no snow and no rain and no sun and no love.
And then the State started hunting down anyone who was not in the record as 'Post Patient'. Anyone who had chosen to keep their own identity, their memories, their pain, their emotional strife. They hunted them and caught them like rats in electrocuted nets. They used tasers and stun guns and sleeping potion. They used drugs and syringes and trickery. They packed them together in warehouses and prisons until they could be brought to me, one at a time, and Wiped.
I know this, because today was the first day I Wiped an unwilling participant. I Wiped one-hundred-and-thirty-two prisoners today, and their memories are mine. I remember the first strike of fear when I heard that the State was considering making the Operation mandatory. I remember the day that I caught sight of a flat screen with a news reporter on it, telling me that freedom was no longer mine to own, that instead I was now owned by the State, and they had taken my right to Remember. I remember the pounding in my heart as I rushed home with two-hundred-sixty-four feet, ran to inform my family, or to gather up a precious item, or to fill a car with canned food before fleeing for a safe haven, anywhere I could go.
I remember the way I was captured, whether at a checkpoint where my papers were not in order, or betrayed and turned in by a parent, a sibling, a lover. I remember frantic physical struggles, the sound of handcuffs snapping over my wrists, the flavour of blood in my mouth.
I remember the last moments of waiting in the warehouse. Of snatching a kiss with a strange boy just to feel what it was like, of clutching my wife, of the helpless and doomed struggle against a man three times me size as my younger brother was dragged away before me.
I remember the hatred that these people felt for me. For the State. For what we were doing to them.
Sometimes I am so lost in a whirl of a million minds and personalities, that I cannot be any one person, I am all of them, forced to carry on the past of a million lives that continue to be unlived. But when I am lost, if I can find it, I latch on to a particular memory that I know is mine, mine not because I stole it, but because I lived it.
It is the memory of the first Unwilling that I Wiped. She was just a girl, a rebel from the time she had taken first breath. She was 15 and a half, but I didn't know this until after I stole her identity.
They dragged her into the room, two Authorities, with her hands cuffed behind her back. They uncuffed her and strapped her to the table, since experiments showed that memories could not be removed if the patient was under drugs. She was yelling obscenities the entire time, but after the men left, she went quiet.
She was beautiful. There was too great of an age gap for me to be attracted to her in a romantic way, but something about her struck me. My hands were shaking as I realized what I was going to have to do, and I clenched them behind my back so that she couldn't see.
"It's really for the best, you know." I said, to stall for time until my breath came in less short gasps.
She glared at me from behind smudged eyeliner.
"Pig," She tried to spit on me, but I was standing across the white room, too far for her to reach.
"I just want to help," I said. "It wasn't my idea to force people to have the Operation."
"You're going along with it, aren't you?"
I didn't know what to say.
"These are my thoughts," The girl said. "My emotions. My past. You have no right to take them."
"The State says I do."
"To hell with the State. If you had any sort of backbone at all you would walk out of this building before you lay a finger on me, while your hands are still clean of blood. But the moment you take away a single memory, you've as good as murdered me. The others that came to you are lemmings. Cattle. They wanted peace and they got it. But if you steal an unwilling person's identity, you become the worst kind of criminal."
I don't know why I let her talk. Maybe because I knew she was right, and I knew that I had to fully comprehend what I was about to do, because it would be the turning point of my life. But I listened, I let her rant, and then I laid my hands on her arms and sucked her memories away.
So many memories. So much life that had been lived in so short a time. Birthdays and Christmasses, places visited, and so very many thoughts and emotions. She had read, so many books. Philosophers, authors, thinkers. She had learned from the best.
And so much pain, for such a little thing. She held not only her own pain, but the pain of her friends, pain of complete strangers that she had never met. But her heart ached for the world, for the pain and the suffering. It hurt her so much that she had thought of ending it all, just to get away from it. But she had pushed that away and lived all the harder, sucking in every experience and every thought that came her way. She was more alive than I ever had been, and I took her life.
They call me the Receiver of Memory, because I hold the memories of the world. But I now know that I am a murderer.