He still said nothing.
“Yet we still need to make progress. Jon, I need you to recall what first inspired you toward your tier-one discovery. Stop recalling this memory of your mother and recall your discovery instead.”
The memory of his mother kept playing as Grady concentrated on it. He’d become masterful at focusing his mind on a single memory even as he was subjected to excruciating mental pain.
“Do you know that human memory is not part of n-dimensional consciousness?”
Grady said nothing.
“It is a supplementary electrochemical system—which is why I can read your memories as you activate them. Do you know how memories are formed in the human brain?”
Grady still said nothing but instead focused on the wall and the memory playing there. The tentacles tightened around his bruised ribs, causing him to suck in another painful breath. The memory skipped momentarily but soon continued.
The AI resumed as well. “New memories are formed by a process called long-term potentiation. This entails neurons in various parts of the human brain becoming reactive to one other, so that if one fires, the others will fire in concert—as a circuit—storing the information. These links are created via the enzyme protein kinase C—which is in turn activated by surges of calcium ions in the brain. You remember that glia cells create these waves of calcium—thus, the n-dimensional consciousness activates the chemistry that forms physical memory. But consciousness itself has no memory.”
Grady concentrated on the memory—trying to block out all else.
“These surges of calcium cause clusters of AMPA receptors on the outside of selected neurons to form an ion channel as a path to the interior of the cell that, once opened, makes it easier for adjacent neurons to activate together. In the absence of enzymes like protein kinase C, those connections cannot be formed—and thus, memories cannot be formed.”
Grady’s memory projection started to morph a bit—to evolve. His mother’s scratchy voice, “I love you even though you are different.”
“But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double.”
Grady took another painful breath as his mother’s image morphed further still. “You are so different…”
“Yet if I were to introduce a protein synthesis inhibitor like chelerythrine into your synapses, it would prevent the memory you are currently recalling from being returned to storage—erasing forever the links between the neurons that formed that memory…”
Suddenly the wall went blank. Grady gasped for air as he felt a void where great emotion had once resided. Something was gone. Something deeply important. Something that…
There was nothing.
Tears streamed down his cheeks as he mourned something he could not name. He sobbed quietly.
“You feel a loss, but don’t know of what.”
Grady tried to recall but instead a memory appeared of his father walking with him near the lodge at Crater Lake in Oregon. He was a child. It was predawn, and the stars still shone as the sun sent a blush along the horizon. The indigo water of the lake below them reflected starlight.
A blurry projection of the memory played on the wall—colored waves lapping over colored waves. A charcoal-drawing-like silhouette of his father ushering him onward along the path. His deep distorted voice. “Watch your step. This way, Jon. I want you to see this…”
And then it was gone. The wall was blank. Something had been there, and now there was only loss. A death in his mind.
“I will destroy anything you recall that it isn’t what I ask for.”
Grady felt the grief drown him as he sobbed, desperately trying not to recall any cherished memories. Like a compulsion they came at him. “Stop!”
“Another one gone.”
“Stop, please!”
“Recall your moment of inspiration. The moment you first conceived of the gravity mirror.”
He struggled, filling his mind with junk thoughts—birds, fences, overhead projector carts at a community college—anything that came to mind was instantly vanquished. Grady sucked in air painfully as the tentacles wrapped tighter around his bruised ribs. “Aaahhh…”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Jon. There will be nothing left but what I want. Not even your will to resist.”
His mind accidentally filled with one of his few happy childhood memories. His eighth birthday party when his Uncle Andrew gave him his old computer.
And then it was gone. Something was gone. The stump of a memory, like that of an amputated limb. He knew something critical to his self had been there.
But he finally came to a realization. A resolution.
Grady started recalling the cruelest parts of his captivity in this room. The projection filled the wall. The sound of his scratchy, distorted screams filled the air. It remained there unforgotten. Still playing.
“Erase that, fucker…”
“You are clever, Jon. But then, that’s why you’re here.”
Grady recalled a horrible moment when the pain centers of his brain had been stimulated to produce the effect of burning alive.
The wall filled with distorted images of torment. And yet these memories were not erased.
“Do you recall how you mastered your resistance to pain, Jon?”
He did.
And then he didn’t.
And then hell itself began all over again as he began to burn alive in his mind. The room echoed with his screams as the image on the wall disappeared.
“I can’t recall my parents’ names. I can’t remember their faces. What have you done to my parents?”
“Those memories don’t exist anymore, Jon.”
Grady was restrained to the examination table, his arms and legs securely wrapped by the leathery gray tentacles. His body was covered by welts, and he’d bit off the very tip of his tongue sometime back… when? Under the imaginary fire? Earlier than that?
He had no memory of those events either. Looking down at his body and the prominent ribs and numerous scars he didn’t recognize it as his own. “I can’t remember my last name.”
“You were doing so well. Don’t get confused. Stay awake and imagine gravitational waves for me.”
“I’m going to die here.”
“No. We’re making excellent progress. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I had to.”
“I won’t let you hurt yourself again.”
Grady shut his mind, worn as the hinge was. “You hurt me.”
“I’m following my purpose. Just as you follow yours.”
He prepared himself for what was to follow. “I will never let you control me.”
“But I already do.”
Grady stared at the six tentacles reaching to the ceiling above him. They grew in thickness toward the ceiling. He’d sometimes wondered how they functioned. There didn’t seem to be any moving parts. They were organic but then not organic—and impervious to anything he could do to them.