The Forgetting Machine (7 page)

“Isn't that what flash drives
do
?”

“I don't think it's the same. I mean, I don't think you can store feelings and stuff on a chip. Like, I might remember stuff about you, but not why I liked you.”

He had a point. If he suddenly remembered everything about me, he might decide he didn't like me after all. But there was lots of good stuff I didn't want him to forget, like our first kiss.

“I bet it's all still in there,” I said. “Like the memories got compressed and stuck in some corner of your brain to make room for all that history. We just have to figure out how to unlock the files. We have to call Mr. Rausch.”

“Okay . . . but what if to fit you back into my head he has to take out something really important?”

I almost punched him again. But I didn't.

I
. Uh-huh.

Reaching Mr. Rausch turned out to be impossible. The only contact info Billy had for him was an old-fashioned e-mail address. I mean, who checks their e-mail?

Billy typed an urgent-sounding note and hit send. While we were waiting for a reply, I took the opportunity to tell him as many good things about myself as I could remember.

“For one thing, I introduced you to your dad,” I said. “Do you remember meeting Gilly?” Gilly, aka Billy's dad, had mysteriously disappeared when Billy was a toddler, and just turned up a few months ago to reclaim his position.

“Yes!” he said. “It was at the Crump's house. Gilly was friends with Mr. and Mrs. Crump, and he looked like a Sasquatch!”

“Yeah, he'd been living in the woods for ten years. Do you remember me being there?”

Billy knit his brow and thought. “I think there was a girl. . . . ”

“Yes! Me!”

“It's kind of fuzzy.”

I hoped he wasn't talking about my hair.

“Do you remember when we escaped from jail?” I asked.

He scrunched his brow. “You were there?”

I wanted to scream, but I held it in.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's all a blank.”

“What did that tutor
do
to you?”

“I don't exactly remember that, either. We were talking about the history book, and there were wires involved, and some sort of machine. The next thing I knew, my head was full of history and I never even had to read anything.”

“I don't see how that's possible,” I said.

“Well, this
is
Flinkwater.”

“True. Flinkwater should be named Strangetown, or maybe Weirdville. It would make my assignment easier, that's for sure.”

“Assignment?”

“I'm supposed to write about why Flinkwater is called Flinkwater. I told you all about that yesterday.”

“Sorry. Don't remember.”

“You know what really bugs me? How come you forgot
me
? Why not just forget your last few games of Interzone Apocalypse?”

“No! I've got over twelve trillion Interzone Crowns, and I'm a Third-Degree Zone Mage!”

“You're a third-degree idiot,” I said, more than a little miffed that his IA score seemed to mean more to him than our Eternal Love.

“Tell me again how come I like you?” he said. I must have been clenching my fists again, because he quickly added, “Kidding! Just kidding!”

“It's okay,” I said, forcing myself to relax. “I just don't like to think of myself as forgettable.”

We were interrupted by a metallic clatter and a startled exclamation from upstairs.

“That sounds like Gilly,” Billy said.

“We'd better tell him what's happened.”

We ran up the stairs and found Gilly sitting on the floor in the front hall reattaching Alfred's head to his torso.

“Don't you know you're not supposed to leave disassembled robots lying where someone could trip over them?” he said.

“Sorry. I was reprogramming him when I got interrupted,” Billy said.

“Why were you reprogramming Alfred?”

“He's got this little glitch.” Billy pointed at the damaged wall. “He punches holes in things.”

“Oh. Yes. That.” Gilly stood and lifted Alfred back onto his motilators.

Alfred and Gilly made an odd-looking couple. Gilly was tall and gangly with big features—like a beardless Abraham Lincoln, if you can imagine Lincoln in baggy shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian shirt. Being the founder and chief executive officer of an international high-tech company such as ACPOD comes with certain benefits like a private jet and oodles of money. But to Gilbert Bates, the most important benefit was that he could wear shorts and flip-flops to work.

Alfred, of course, was a robot.

“Are you online, Alfred?” Gilly asked.

Alfred rotated his sensor array 360 degrees. I took a step back, just in case.

“Thank you, sir. I am fully functional.”

“Excellent. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

“Very good, sir.” Alfred motilated off toward the kitchen to make tea.

“Dad, we have a problem,” Billy said.

“I'm sure Alfred will be fine,” Gilly said.

“Alfred's not the problem. It's that tutor you hired for me.”

“You mean Ernie Rausch?”

“Yeah,” I jumped in. “He filled up Billy's head with history, and now Billy doesn't even remember me.”

Gilly looked from Billy to me with a puzzled expression. “Billy doesn't remember you?”

“No!”

“Oh . . . umm . . . and who are you exactly?”

  •  •  •  

That was when things went from irritating and weird to flat-out scary. Because it's bad enough to be forgotten by your boyfriend. Boys, after all, are notorious for that sort of thing. But to be forgotten by
everybody
. . . TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!

And, frankly, terrifying.

“I'm
GINGER
!” I shrieked.

Seriously, it was a
shriek
. Both Gilly and Billy jumped back in alarm.

“Of course you are,” said Gilly in the sort of voice you might use to calm a suicide bomber.

“I'm
Ginger Crump
,” I said in a slightly more reasonable tone, “and you've known me for months.”

“Crump,” Gilly said. “Do you belong to Royce and Amanda Crump?”

“I don't
belong
to anyone. They're my parents.”

“It's true,” Billy said. “She showed me selfies of us and everything, but my memory of her is gone, same as yours.”

Alfred rolled up, carrying a tray with a porcelain cup balanced upon it. “Your tea, sir.”

Gilly took the cup. I noticed his hand was shaking.

Alfred pointed his sensor array at me. “Ms. Crump, would you care for a beverage?”

At least the robot hadn't forgotten me.

“No thank you, Alfred.”

Gilly said, “Alfred, has Ms. Crump visited us before?”

“On eight occasions since I came online, sir.”

“Was I present?”

“Yes, sir, on three of those occasions.”

“So it's true,” Gilly touched the side of his chin with a long forefinger. “I am experiencing some form of selective amnesia. I wonder what else is missing.”

“Do you remember when you were the Sasquatch of Flinkwater Park?”

“Certainly . . . although I wasn't a
real
Sasquatch.”

“Did Mr. Rausch do some sort of memory thing to you?” I asked.

“He helped me remember the entire code sequence on the antigravity dro—” Gilly stopped talking abruptly and shot me a look.

“It's okay,” I said. “I know all about the secret antigravity drone you're working on.”

“You do?” he said.

“Billy told me.”

“I did?” Billy said.

“Don't worry, you can trust me. I've known you since you were a Sasquatch.”

Gilly nodded thoughtfully. “Alfred!” he said.

“Sir?”

“Get Ernest Rausch on the phone, please.”

Alfred buzzed and blinked. A few seconds later, Mr. Rausch's voice issued from Alfred's speaker.

“Hello?”

“Rausch, this is Gilbert Bates.”

“Oh! Hello, Mr. Bates,” said Mr. Rausch.

“I'm having a little problem. I seem to have forgotten something.”

“I can help! What is it you want to remember?”

“If I could remember what I don't remember, I wouldn't have a problem now, would I?”

“Of course! I'm sure it's a minor adjustment to your dynamic engram interface. Can you meet me at the neuroprosthetics lab? I can be there in half an hour.”

“The sooner the better,” Gilly said. “I'm on my way.”

Billy wanted to go, but Gilly told him to stay home.

“Let me find out exactly what happened. If Rausch can restore my memories successfully, then we'll see what he can do for you. In any case, just to be safe, I'm shutting down the REMEMBER program. We can't have people losing memories willy-nilly. If I've forgotten Jennifer here—”

“Ginger!” I said.

“Yes, Ginger. Sorry. If I've forgotten you, then who knows what else I've forgotten?”

“My dad forgot we have a cat,” I said.

“And your father is . . . ?”

“Royce Crump!”

“Oh, that's right.”

“I think you should go see Mr. Rausch,” I said.

  •  •  •  

After Gilly left, I asked Billy to help me with
Charlotte's Web
. He might not remember that he was in love with me, but he was still a boy genius. I explained what had happened, and how I suspected the Tisks were behind it.

It took him only a few minutes to find the problem. Sort of.

“All the digital files have been corrupted,” he reported.

“Way to go, Sherlock,” I said sarcastically. “Like I didn't figure that out on my own!”

“No,” he said. “I mean,
all
the files. Not just your tablet, and not just the Flinkwater County Library system. Every library in the country got hit. Even the source files at the publisher have been replaced with this edited version. In other words, the original
Charlotte's Web
no longer exists. Somebody wrote a really nasty little worm, like a computer version of the Ebola virus, only worse. The Net is saturated with it. Anybody who has an unaltered copy of
Charlotte's Web
on their device loses it the instant they access the Net. It's quite brilliant, actually. You say Mr. Tisk is behind it? I thought he was a preacher.”

“He threatened to get rid of every last copy of
Charlotte's Web
, so yeah, I'd say he's our number one suspect.”

“I don't see an IP address at his house . . . or at his church, either. I don't see how he could create a virus like this without being plugged into the Web.”

“Maybe he hired some hacker to do it for him.”

Billy nodded. “Let me see what I can find.”

Watching Billy on his computer was like seeing a movie in fast motion. Screen after screen flickered by; I really couldn't follow what he was doing. After a few minutes he slumped back in his chair.

“I tracked the virus back to an ACPOD server here in Flinkwater, but from there it leads to a cascading series of proxies—basically, just about every IP address within five hundred miles of here, with Flinkwater as the geographical center. Whoever did this is local, and they're good. It's like looking for a needle the size of an eyelash in a haystack the size of Iowa.”

“So there's no way to prove who did it?”

“Eventually. I sent a webhound after it.”

“Webhound?”

“A tracking program I wrote. But it might take a few hours. Or maybe longer, like a few days, if it has to chew through a lot of firewalls.

“How do we fix
Charlotte's Web
in the meantime?” I asked.

“We can't. It's gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone.”