Uncontrolled Emotion

Everyone at the company started with a signed contract and a memory wipe.

Contract first, obviously. Who would agree to wipe away all their personal memories for a job without finalizing paperwork first?

Really, who would agree to a memory wipe?

Dermot kept a copy of his contract in his desk drawer. He pulled the drawer out to stare at it sometimes, the signature that his muscle memory said was correct, there on the dotted line. Dated a few days before his working memories began—starting with Orientation. Icebreakers with his coworkers and bosses, with the handlers and the HR reps. With the lawyers, endlessly. And then the dark-suited security officers who seemed to have too much fun with probing game-questions, designed to open you up whether you wanted them to or not.

My life must have been bad, to forget it for a job, Dermot told himself. He closed his desk drawer and returned to his work. Voices filled his headphones as auto-transcribed conversations scrolled past on his screen rapidly. The most obvious infractions were already marked by the company’s proprietary program. Dermot was a safety censor, watching for any new trending subtext or cipher that hadn’t been caught by the wider Analytics department yet. Slang. Code. You could flag a meaningful silence these days, if you were persuasive enough about how you read the gaps between words.

Dermot was good at it.

He must have liked it, to get so good at it. Must have believed in the practice, to sign his memories away and keep on doing it.

—can’t believe he missed the wedding, though I guess it couldn’t be helped.

Dermot flagged the silence that hung on the line before a younger, wearier voice replied.

No contact means no contact, Ma. You can’t blame him for wanting—

A loud thump.

Fist on a table, most likely. Dermot flagged that for uncontrolled emotion, rolling his shoulders as the old woman’s creaky voice rasped too close through the speakers.

I can. I can blame him. We were all there for his wedding. We all made it, even with the—

She stopped short, but not short enough for Dermot not to fill the gap with travel bans. If they said anything that clarified the timeframe, he could make a stronger case for that insertion. He made another mark for himself, then listlessly cracked his drawer open to stare at the contract again, only the bottom signatures showing.

But he didn’t . . . The younger voice trailed off, her silence too broad to come into focus fully.

He did, the woman rasped, sounding short of breath. Even if he didn’t intend . . . He still followed her. He went where they could get him—

Mom. The daughter meant well by the sharp warning, but her tone was enough to get a flag on its own. Marks all over this conversation, like a thousand Dermot had heard before.

I miss him. The old woman was crying.

Uncontrolled emotion.

Dermot’s cursor hovered over the marking tool as she went on.

I miss Dermot.

He froze as the younger woman made another sharp sound, a cascade starting in his brain. Not a cascade of pennies dropping, memories returning, rekindled passions for life and family dousing him like a bucket of ice water.

What the company took from its employees, it took forever, as stipulated in the contract.

But the shock of his own name stilled his hand momentarily as he listened to the women crying over the line.

Uncontrolled emotion.

How many Dermots were there in the world? And they were talking about a wedding, about a her who could’ve been anyone.

There was no line to draw between two points. No link. Just a name, two women whispering. And a man, listening.

His desk drawer still showed a sliver of paper confirming all his past choices, the track he’d set his course down years ago.

The date that started the life he remembered. The name they said was his.

He’d been with the company for four years now—too long for any mourning this fresh. And Dermot was so good at this job, surely, he would have made sure any family members of his knew better than to talk on unsecured lines.

He glanced back at the glass wall of his cubicle, then brought his fist down hard against his thigh, uniform pants stifling the sound.

The program pinged at him, waiting for him to submit his report; the women had hung up with barely any goodbye, before even quieting their tears.

Dermot blanked out all his markings but the most glaringly obvious, writing quickly.

No deeper meanings found.

He pressed submit, then loaded the next conversation, like a thousand before it and a billion still to come.