The Beginning: Lucian Ffogg

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The first beginning

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Other people’s memories were once an undiscovered country, as strange as the surface of some gaseous planet. And the Government facility in which they are now kept is no less alien: a monstrosity like a nuclear farmstead in a desert valley.

The desert here is all rock, sand, yucca plants, and heat. Impossible, rock-cracking, geo-physical heat. Mustard-coloured sunsets. Nights as dark and empty as the sea at its deepest point – somewhere near the Rift Valley. Only much, much drier.

Ridges of rock unfurl like grey matter. Pebbles and scattered scree are desert amygdalae and hippocampi. This desert is a sun-baked brain with mountain ranges to the north, south, east and west. A rain shadow. A dry, unearthly kind of place.

The compound quivers – a central control tower and its outhouses; a dream under the guillotine of the sun. Seen from a Government plane cruising above them at 25,000 feet, these buildings resemble a rusting sword and several dead armadillos on chapped earth.

You don’t know these leviathan hangars exist. But they do. There are hundreds of them dotted around, in out-of-the-way places only birds with incredibly large wingspans ever bother to visit. Some of them in the deserts; some near the Tranquelle Belt; others far from it.

And this particular Memory Processing Plant is watched over by one solitary Government employee – a certain Lucian Ffogg.

Who is Lucian Ffogg?

How is Lucian Ffogg?

It’s classified. He’s not at liberty to say.

But he will soon have to. You can’t keep secrets from Government Inspectors.  

The second beginning

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The City in its geodesic dome is surrounded by a wide, circular expanse of desert. Then comes the Tranquelle Belt – a bright purple Eden. And then desert again. Oblivion orbiting.

In the centre of the City is the Temple. A monument to truth.

Inside the Temple are the Brethren, who have built an empire of paper. And no sense of irony.  

On one of the papers, framed in the entrance hall, are the Tenets.

It is on this strong foundation that the City is built.

It is written:

Tenet 1. That paper and the ink upon it are sacred.

Tenet 2. That the digital is opium. We renounce digital memory. We rely only on paper records.

Tenet 3. No Tranquelle shall pass a brother’s lips. We are sober.

Tenet 4. We shall not engage in illegal activities of any kind.  

Tenet 5. No killing. Only Forgetting.

Tenet 6. Long Live Frome. We promise to water the fragile flower of the relationship between the Temple and the Bureau.

Tenet 7. Remember. No Tranquelle.

Tenet 8. Forgive, for we cannot forget.

Tenet 9. We will go out into the world and find other Brothers to join us.

Tenet 10. There must be ten tenets.

These are the Tenets of the Brethren.

The third beginning

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The City gate stands tall and glistening. A portal into the homeostasis of the dome world. Border control guards cluster around the opening. They guard the City jealously. Like treasure. Like the last of the water in a drying world. In their regulation Government suits – hydrophobic, crime-phobic. Only mildly xenophobic. The sick-sticks they use to stun any would-be gatecrashers to the City party hang at their waists. Green candy canes, but with a less than veiled threat of violence. This border checkpoint is the customs gate through which all goods squeezed from the Tranquelle Belt pass, by means of a kind of vehicular peristalsis, feeding the urban mass behind the gate.

The City. The State. iRemember.

If it looks familiar, that’s because we’ve been here before. It is said that this is humanity’s fifth ride on the rollercoaster of time. Deep in the Library of the Temple there’s an ancient, obscure book written by a Brother Derek who posits that the universe plays and replays itself. Or that, as he puts it: ‘…humanity is a fish caught in the endlessly loosening and tightening net of Father Time. Over the centuries he fishes. Yet the fish he catches is always the same.’

Let’s suppose Brother Derek is right. That there used to be other timelines, other futures, not unlike this one. Those futures are in the past now. But they were the present once. When the climate was rapidly changing, and technology was rapidly evolving. The people living then must have had similarly large brains and an ability to manipulate surveillance tools. They too must have searched for the meaning in life. Witnessed the daily fight of good against bad. The fight of the weak against the strong. There was a lot of fighting, and the battles were the kind where everyone lost.

Most Citizens of iRemember haven’t heard of Brother Derek. The Citizens know, or think they know, that time runs in a line, and not in a circle. It’s called a timeline, after all, isn’t it?

Their City is permanent and beautiful.

And if there are other futures, they are living in the brightest of the lot.