"I don't remember that," said Danny. "Are you sure I was there?"
Maddie raised her eyebrows. "I talked to you about it just last week," she said. "When I was asking you about what you'd like to do during summer vacation."
"I remember that," said Danny, uncurling slightly from his position on the couch. "I just don't remember the other thing. I... maybe we talked about something like it. When was it?"
"You were twelve," said Maddie. "It was just before your birthday."
Slowly, he shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "I remember, um... What other vacations did we have? Before the one where you thought I was crazy, it was, um..." He held his hands as if preparing to count on them. "We went to New York that one time. And then the Great Lakes before that... Oh! And that haunted house road trip."
He frowned down at his hands, and Maddie felt something unpleasant curl in her gut.
"Is that... All you remember?" she asked.
"Y-Yeah? I guess the others were from when I was too young to remember?"
"The haunted house trip was when you were five," said Maddie. "Danny... have you been," she didn't want to say it, didn't want to piece together other little oddities into a big picture, "have you been forgetting things?"
"No!" said Danny, defensively, sitting up straighter. "I'm just..." He chewed his lip. "It isn't as if I've forgotten anything recent."
His abysmal grades and missed curfews begged to differ.
"One second," said Maddie. "Stay here."
She went to her room and fetched one of her largest photo albums. Danny was still on the couch when she came back, picking at the hem of his pant leg, and staring blankly at the floor. Maddie sat next to him, making him jump. She opened the album to a random page.
"What were we doing here?" she asked.
"Um," said Danny, brows pinching together in confusion. "Shopping?"
"For?" prompted Maddie.
Danny shook his head. "It's just shopping. It isn't important."
"Danny, this is from when we got you that model spaceship. The one you have hanging up in your room."
Danny blinked, and slowly shook his head.
.
The doctor's office looked clean. It even smelled clean. Danny was still doing his level best not to touch anything. Maddie would have sighed at his behavior, but she was too tense. She met Jack's eye. He looked terrible too.
"There are no signs of Alzheimer's disease," said the doctor. All three of them sighed with relief. "However... You said the other symptoms, the difficulty in school, began after the electrical accident?"
"Yeah," said Danny.
The doctor nodded. "Electricity can do strange things to the brain, sometimes. We haven't been able to find any structural damage, but the activity levels..." He brought a colored image up on his computer screen. "This is where long-term memory is stored," he said.
"Doesn't red usually indicate high levels of activity?" asked Jack.
"It does," said the doctor. "This is actually higher than usual activity... Honestly, I don't know what's going on here. I would like to request that you make a record of things that you currently remember as happening in your life, and then come back a month from now."
"That's it?" demanded Maddie.
"Right now, since we don't know what's causing this," said the doctor, "the best we can do is monitor the situation. We don't even know if this is an ongoing deterioration, or something more gradual. On the upside, other than long-term memory, there doesn't appear to be any damage. Your timeline after your accident is clear and detailed. The cognitive tests we put you through actually put you significantly above average... This is what we can do."
Maddie didn't like it. Danny didn't look surprised. Or even particularly upset.
She caught Jack's eye again. They would have to be ready to support him, when the extent of what he had lost fully hit him.
.
Danny floated down the icy hallway next to Frostbite. "This isn't going to be one of those examinations where I have to get undressed, is it?" he asked.
Frostbite chuckled, but there was an undercurrent to it that usually wasn't present. "Only halfway." He paused to tap Danny on the chest. "Your mind is no longer entirely contained in your head, after all."
Danny rubbed at where Frostbite had tapped him. "You don't think that has anything to do with it, do you?"
"I'm unsure," said Frostbite as they reached the examination room. "It isn't unusual for ghosts to lose their memories of their lives, but that is both more immediate and more complete. Sit down here, and take your shirt off, Great One, and we can begin."
Danny made a face at the item that looked like an overly complicated dentist's chair with a large metal disk embedded in the back, but obeyed.
"Here we are," said Frostbite, pulling a complicated ring-shaped thing from the chair. "This part goes around your head," he said adjusting it to fit.
Despite his cold core, Danny shivered at the frigidity of the metal.
"These are to monitor your core, along with the matching one built into the chair," said Frostbite as he attached several flat disks to Danny's chest.
"Are they, like, ultrasound?" asked Danny, running his finger along the edge of one of them. He didn't like how they stuck to his skin.
"They work on a similar principle," said Frostbite. He turned on several nearby monitors. "With this, we will be able to see how your brain and core react in tandem. Can you transform for me a few times? I want to compare with the baseline readings we took from you when you first stayed with us."
"Sure," said Danny.
.
"Alright," said Frostbite. "Now, I am going to try sending a few low-intensity ectoplasmic pulses and currents through you. Is that alright?"
"Sure," said Danny.
The first few left Danny feeling lethargic and tingly. Other gave him so much energy he had to leave the room for a few minutes to burn some of it off. Another, interestingly, turned off his ghost half, not unlike the Plasmius Maximus.
There was a rest period in-between each test, to make sure that they weren't mixing results. During those times, Danny and Frostbite would laugh and tell jokes and...
... Danny trailed off in the middle of a sentence. "Frostbite?" he asked after a minute. "What was I just saying?"
.
"I want to stress that this is currently just a theory, Great One," said Frostbite.
"It's okay," said Danny. "Just... What is it?"
"Your memories are recorded in both your brain and your core. You know this, correct?"
"Yeah. You told me that a while back."
Frostbite nodded. "Normally, if one is turned off, the other one is still recording memories, and the memories will be transcribed."
Danny nodded.
"Or, if they are disconnected, in the case of the Plasmius Maximus, or your parents' 'Ghost Catcher,' they will swap memories. However..."
"Yes?"
"It is my theory that certain kinds of discrepancies between memories can lead to your core deciding that the discrepancy is an error and attempting to remedy it. Great One, your core did not exist prior to your accident."
"So, it thinks my memories from before that are wrong, and it's getting rid of them."
"I'm afraid it may be so."
"Can you stop it? I mean, you were able to artificially induce it, earlier..."
Frostbite made a face. "The only things I can think of that could stop this would be unhealthy in the long run. I do not believe you want to try to split yourself in two again."
"No," agreed Danny. "Any-Anything else?"
Frostbite sighed. "This is not something I can confirm," he said, "but I suspect that the reason for your odd pattern of your memory loss is that the memories you dwelled on most often vanished first."
"Oh," said Danny. "Because that would bring them to my core's attention..."
Frostbite nodded.
"Well. That's... not ideal."
"I'm sorry, Great One. Would that I could do more."
.
"It's all gone," he said, without preamble, as he stood at Jazz's door first thing in the morning.
She looked crushed. "Are you sure?"
Danny nodded. "I remember remembering, but I don't actually remember. It's weird and... actually kind of a relief," he said, tilting his head to one side.
Jazz blinked rapidly. "Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?"
He shook his head. As his memories had disappeared, so had most of his remaining trust in his parents. Between the memories of them caring for him, and the memories of them attacking or threatening him, the latter were more vivid.
He still loved them, and his ghostly desires, that he literally could not remember living without, still focused on them, but that and trust were two different things. It had been months since he'd started to fake retaining memories that he only knew about from reading his journals.
"Sam and Tucker?"
This time, Danny nodded, the gesture much more enthusiastic. "We were going to meet up later today, anyway. Do you want to come with us?"
"Sure," said Jazz. She rubbed at her eyes. "Give me a second."
Danny nodded. He wasn't in a hurry. "I'll be downstairs."
He could understand the grief. He had felt it. But it was over, now. The only thing left was to make new memories.