Mem(ory)

If a technology existed that could erase your very worst memory, would you do it?

Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

I read a profound book this week: Bethany C. Morrow’s 2019 debut novel, Mem¹. You may recall her name from my list of books I read over the summer, no fewer than three of them were hers. When I find an author I really like I read everything they’ve published, or as many as I can find. Mem wasn’t on that list, however; it only recently became available to checkout at a time when I was in need of a new audiobook. Set in Montreal, Canada, in the 1920s (and ‘40s, it skips back and forth), the book follows the life of Delores Extract #1. Yes, that’s her name; her scientific name, anyway. The name she gives herself is Elsie. An unremarkable name for a truly remarkable person, remarkable because she is not supposed to be capable of such feats as naming herself. Delores Extract #1, Elsie, is a “Mem;” an extracted memory residing in a body that is the exact copy of her “Source” at the time that the memory originated. While other Mems live like zombies in the “Vault” which is their home, aware of nothing outside of the memory of which they are made, Elsie is different. She can think. She is aware of herself and the world around her, even capable of living on her own and making friends. No other Mem before or since has been so much like an actual person, and the scientists in charge of the extraction process and of caring for the extracted Mems are befuddled and fascinated. Elsie herself doesn’t know why she is different, but she knows that she is. For a while, that is enough.

And then Elsie, who had been living outside the Vault for nearly twenty years, is recalled. Her Source, the “real” Delores, wishes to “reprint” Elsie with a new memory. In the nineteen years since Elsie was extracted, Delores has had many, many more extractions. Too many, the scientists say. Her mind has fractured as a result. The professor who invented the process of extraction throws himself into a legal battle in an effort to protect Elsie from being obliterated through reprinting, and to prevent Delores from having any more memories extracted. Elsie herself is determined to discover why she, of all Mems, is the way she is. In the years since she was extracted her skin has grown darker and brighter, while other Mems grow pale and fade away, until they eventually expire. She probes the memory of other Mems, and her own memories. She questions the scientists. She takes notes. And, eventually, she is invited by Delores’s husband to visit her Source. The real Delores has become faded, exhausted from the constant need to invent her own stories to span the ragged gaps left in her memory. Next to her, vibrant Elsie seems to be the one most real. But then, of course she is; Elsie was never a mere memory at all, she is an epiphany.