Pillars of Creation

Takedown

When he woke, his head was throbbing. It took him a full minute to remember who he was; the memories slowly drifting back into their accustomed places.

Martin. I'm Martin. I'm thirty-one years old. I live with my wife. Yesterday I got up, went to work. I had sandwiches for lunch. Martin went through the events of the previous day. It was something that he did every morning when he woke with a headache - an audit of his memories to see what was missing. It did not take long for Martin to find the holes in his mind. They were not just blanks. They were literal gaps where the memories had been torn from him, excised by the power of the ICOnograph. Martin raised his hands and knuckled his temples in an attempt to relieve the pain, and groaned.

"Rough night?" Alice rolled to face her husband, flashing him a look of concern.

"No." Martin sat up, ducking his head to avoid the showerhead-like nozzle of the ICOnograph. He dreaded waking up and forgetting Alice. "It's just that - ." He stopped as Alice reached across to put an arm around his shoulders.

"You ought to see the doctor about it. It's not meant to hurt."

Martin shook his head. "No. It's not that." He took a deep breath and forced a reassuring smile to his face, then turned to look at his wife. "Maybe I will see the doctor." Martin lifted Alice's hand from him, squeezing it gently.

"You do that."

* * *

Martin had been sitting in the waiting room at the clinic, waiting for the receptionist to call his name. He had arrived on time, and was slightly annoyed to find that the doctor was behind schedule. So, when he finally got to see the doctor, Martin was not in the best of moods.

The doctor greeted him. "Mr Pullman - what seems to be the problem?"

Martin grunted. "As I said when I made the appointment, I've been experiencing headaches. Bad ones." He described his symptoms to the doctor, who listened carefully, taking notes and nodding sympathetically.

When Martin had finished, the doctor got up from behind his desk. "It sounds like a migraine headache to me - or something that most people would think of as a migraine. I need to do some simple tests: blood pressure, response to light. That sort of thing." The doctor arranged the necessary instruments on a wheeled table, then pushed it over to where Martin was sitting. "Now, what did you say your job was?"

"I didn't." Martin raised a hand in apology. "Sorry. I'm a copywriter. I work for an advertising agency."

"I see," the doctor said. "And you said that you've been having these headaches since you started using an ICOnograph?" He busied himself wrapping a pressure cuff around Martin's upper left arm.

"It's a condition of my employment," Martin explained. "My agency wants to make sure that any ideas we come up with are original. There's a problem with copyright squatters and intellectual property theft. So, to make sure that we aren't copying other companies - even inadvertently - the company insists we use an ICOnograph."

The doctor took a note of Martin's blood pressure, then picked up a penlight. Martin winced as the bright light was shone into his eyes. "And what does that do?" the doctor asked.

"It's supposed to go through our memories. Then, if it finds something that has already been copyrighted or registered somewhere, it erases the memory."

The doctor finished the examination. "I think that's definitely the problem, then."

"But it's meant to be safe!"

"Yes." The doctor retrieved a pad of forms from a desk drawer and began to scribble on it. "But different people react in different ways. I think that you're feeling the effects of the ICOnograph. I'm going to prescribe you some painkillers. How often do you use it - the ICOnograph?"