The Event

Chapter 1

Present, 2066

           Robbie stares at a rubbery paste so thick he imagines it growing legs and scurrying away under piles of dirty clothes, a pet that can live forever in his bedroom. One that doesn't need to be fed or washed or walked, his mother's main concerns when it comes to potential animal ownership. He doesn't tell her that he's ready for a dog or even a fish, and she doesn't ask him why he's unhappy.
    The film covers his arms and shoulders where he let his little brother smear it on in heavy, uneven layers, mostly to see what would happen. It turns out that emptying a bottle of glue on skin doesn't result in much of anything. It sticks and hardens and then peels in giant chunks if he takes the time to rip it off. The pink patches underneath look worse than before, more like week old plums than fresh strawberries, which he likes primarily because of the tiny seeds. Leaving sections of glue intact to give the experiment purpose only allows his mother more time to discover his decisions and deem them unacceptable. Once she watches him scrub clean, she leaves him with angry words and he walks back to his room unchanged.
      "Why's Mom always so mad?"
      Robbie turns towards the door he meant to shut against the house he knows too well. The walls know him too, the lime green shade he chose when he was ten and the faint shadows of Star Wars posters he's since tried to remove. It's no use; the house was here first, and he belongs to its first impression of him.
       "I don't know. Maybe it's because of the new rule."
       "That we have to wash our hands before and after dinner?"
        "That's just something Mom believes in. It's not a requirement."
         "What's a requirement?"
         "It's like you're eating ice cream, and you have to eat mint chocolate chip. You can't choose vanilla."
         Robbie steadies his hands on the side of his bed, remembering that Evan will one day see this memory played back. He doesn't want to talk down to someone who still has glue caked on his hands, but he can't let his brother see what he has to see.
         "What if I don't like ice cream?"
         Evan wrinkles his nose, his body swaying. Robbie knows what comes next, the steady stream of questions, the energy expelled as quick movements and too much sound. His brother's too young to be punished for meanings he may not know he intends, but they're already in dangerous territory. Robbie should not be divulging wisdom. He should tell Evan there are things he doesn't need to know; he should continue the game they were playing until Evan can concentrate on imaginary fighter pilots instead of their mother's flaws and fate.
          "You like ice cream."
         He ruffles his brother's hair and laughs for whoever may be watching or listening later, once he's uploaded today's memories onto the server. "Light," his mother used to whisper in his ear before he was too old for her to come too close, when tucking him in or preparing his bath would have raised questions. "Light on your feet, light with your thoughts."
           Now they've been keeping up their daily charade for so long that it feels almost charming. Coming up with creative ways to piss her off usually interests him, a teenager and his mother at odds in a way the rest of the world might expect them to be. Ordinary families thinking ordinary things.
           "Not required ice cream."
          Evan's R is a W, and Robbie's not sure what he's trying to teach him. His mother has warned him that Evan isn't ready. Just because he's her son and Robbie's brother, doesn't mean he's one of them.
          "We need to watch him, sense him, feel him," his mother once cautioned after ordering Robbie to wash the dishes and turning the water on high to cover their conversation, after he'd rolled his eyes and turned away to allow her to pull him back. He hates chores, hates standing near his mother. At least, that's what his memories show. Thoughts are not memories, and he can have as many of those as he likes, as long as he doesn't share them.
            Robbie sighs and stands, pushing Evan gently out the door with both hands.
            "Icecream's a treat. It will always be a treat, okay? I was only messing with you."
           "You promise?"
             Evan likes that word, Robbie knows. His brother clings to the syllables as if he can wrap his little hands around them, stick them in his pockets, and feel them lingering there, warm and full.
             "I do."
            It's the best he can do without knowing, without betraying. He watches as Evan looks back at him exactly as he should, inquisitive and unsure, his elbow resting against the doorframe. Maybe his brother is ready. He's almost ten after all, and who would suspect a child?
             Robbie and his mother could be wrong, anyway. They could be living only with his mother's unfounded paranoia, a sullen side effect of the illegal tests she insists on running in her company's lab and the database she's needed to build to store those memories until she can determine what to do with them. They can't be emptied during the evenings' storage shows, she reminds him in times he's allowed her to notice his frustration; not when their family is one of many on the public server. She can't be certain the memories won't slip in between two others, overlap with another moment of her day that she's already forgotten was there. Better to dump them immediately afterwards into a safe space she can access whenever she needs.
            She is right about one thing: it's a risk to leave them in her head, to simply have them. It's unclear whether the government can tell if someone is holding on to their own memories, exercising a muscle no longer needed. Most people wouldn't dare anyway, not when it meant they might lose them entirely. "You can't be expected to remember your life yourself," the colorful ads parade across the TV. "Use e-cloud, and you'll never need to let go of anything," a spokesperson shouts as if they all have a choice.
            "You're fine," Robbie says aloud because his brother hasn't moved. "Go play."
            He's nearly sixteen and can't any longer, so he needs his brother to enjoy himself.
            "But mom..."
            Evan's voice trails off, his hands grabbing at nothing as if unconsciously mimicking the emptiness of their conversation. He finally settles for rapping them against the wall, the beat worse than their mother's favorite clock that hangs in the kitchen. She can turn the ticking up and down at random; sometimes Robbie wonders what she's plotting, but he doesn't dare ask.
             Robbie ignores his brother and inches towards his dresser. He pictures the items in the top drawer, the ones he can always turn to. The notebook is thick and wide, lined with plain black sheets. A rarity taken from the stacks his nameless father left in the attic, and he can't take it to school because he's afraid it will be stolen; of course, he could get it back by requesting an e-cloud viewing of the hours it went missing, but cases like this are not worth the government's time, and there may be a future penalty for the abuse.
            Next to the notebook are the two lines of thin, colored sticks, the blues and greens worn farther down than the purples. He likes to write with chalk because it's easy to erase and start again if he runs out of space or changes his mind. In a world filled with memory, he likes the thrill of forgetting.
           "Robbie?"
           "What?"
           "I don't like when mom gets mad."
           Robbie shrugs carefully at what feels like an acceptable angle. Sometimes he measures his movements against his classmates', trying to decide who else may be manipulating actions to save the best versions of memories. Sometimes he worries about playing them back and seeing too much sadness, anger. He's afraid he'll look differently than he expects himself to appear.
            "Moms get mad. It's what they do."
            "How do you know?"
            "It's the same for everyone. Haven't you heard kids at school talk about how annoying their parents are?"
             "Not really."
             "Are you paying attention?"
             "We have a lot of contests. The most food you can eat during lunch. The most candies you can steal from the cafeteria."
              Now that memories have become truth, competition is easy. Arguments are prepared for and sought after, if only for later entertainment. Spontaneity is offensive, a reminder that they should have been more prepared to execute, to succeed. Memories are crafted, not made. This is what he writes and erases, knows and pretends to forget.
              "Mom's fine," he relents, his voice flat, blameless.
              Truthfully, the government's new rule, the one he hasn't bothered to explain to his brother, has made things easier for her. Though Robbie understands why she's worried about every household suddenly being asked to erase one old family memory every night. If the government believes the e-cloud is exceeding capacity, the American people risk losing their history, their identities. Or if the e-cyber team is lying, they may be covering up for something else, something more worrisome. Do the memories really vanish when they hit delete? Will they be asked to delete the memory of hitting delete? Or will they cautiously offer up their one family memory and let an e-builder delete it for them, so they don't even have to know when it's gone? Why bother keeping track of what's being taken when you have full and constant access to everything you have?
              He's suddenly too tired to finish distracting Evan, to bother pushing him back to his games and away from their mother.
               "I'm going to bed," he announces, though it's far too early. The image of his notebook and sticks of chalk slowly retreat, disgusting him even. He can't change this--can't help his mother, can't save his brother, can't find his father. There's nowhere to go. There's nothing to write. There's nothing to see that he doesn't already expect to exist.