Project Memory
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
The theories floated to explain the Event range from the insane to the incomprehensible, from the notion of some Transcendental Tourist awakening from his long dream of the Sunshine State, to the so-called Quantum Occlusion Hypothesis, which appears to be gaining traction among the world’s leading physicists. All of them stink of desperation, and none even try explaining why the borders of Georgia and Alabama were so precisely honored that they didn’t lose a square foot of territory.
All we know, and probably ever will know is, that on February 17th, thirty-eight months ago, at 8:36 p.m., the entire state of Florida disappeared from the earth. The deep, stormy sea that now fills that void, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the colder waters of the Atlantic, has been closed to fishing and any other use except scientific, until further notice.
After a period allowed for mourning, the U.S. State Department sent out formal summons to all Floridians who happened to be out of the state at the time of the disappearance, former residents and even frequent visitors with extensive memories of the peninsula, “requiring” them to report to a hastily-prepared facility, a former industrial park a few miles north of Washington D.C. for an indefinite period of “national service,” purpose unknown, to begin in less than a month.
My name is Matthew Stoltzman. Having spent close to forty years in central Florida before moving to the Washington area in 1993, I received my notice in the mail along with two hundred and ninety-three thousand other people. The large number of people asked to report necessitated building several facilities around the country, each housing around thirty thousand.
I had to wind up my affairs in less than a month before reporting to the hastily prepared facility closest to my home, named Van Horn Park, formerly a sprawling, run-down industrial park just outside Beltsville, Maryland. It was traumatic for my family, not to mention me and the business I own and run, but the disappearance of a 54,000-square-mile peninsula, human population at last count 21.48 million people, was so horrendous, so beyond imagination, that the idea of refusing to go never occurred to me.
There were apparently some people who attempted to avoid what was dubbed the Sunshine Draft by the news media, and a few who even fled their homes and went into hiding, only to discover that, in the modern world, living off the grid is a condition more mythic than actual. But the uniqueness and sheer scale of the crisis gave the government a leverage over its citizenry that it has rarely had outside of wartime, and in the end most of us arrived on the appointed date.
It was a disorienting experience, to say the least. While still in a state of shock and grief over the disappeared, among them, in many cases, family and friends, we were then plucked out of the midst of our lives, thrust among strangers and asked to share military-style barracks, public bathrooms, and cafeteria meals, not to mention give ourselves over completely to a project that few of us could even understand, much less endorse.
I don’t happen to believe, as some here do, that the breathless speed of our relocation was purposeful, in order to more easily accomplish our remolding into what we have since become, by a rapid, almost violent unlearning of the rituals of daily life. I believe that the government was and is genuinely committed to finding an answer. Whether they have or ever will is debatable.
After a brief orientation, we were put through intense immersion training for the enormous task that lay ahead: nothing less, we were told, than the archival restoration of the entire state, formed out of our collective memories, dreams and sensory impressions of its almost numberless living creatures, its rivers, lakes, pastures, sprawling cities, turnpikes, retirees, beaches, hyacinth-choked drainage canals, the overwhelming sun and punishing humidity, afternoon thunderstorms, wading birds, manatees, live oaks and palmettos, trailer parks, mosquitoes, orange groves, condos, alligators, roadkill, and artesian springs. Everything, in short, that all of us together, the surviving Floridians, could pull out of ourselves, through a combination of large and small group sessions, hypnotherapy, “trivia” contests (the chief statistician of Project Memory has repeatedly assured us that no “corpuscle of recall” is small enough to classify as trivial), and in some special cases, even sodium pentathol and direct brain stimulation.
In late March, we were informed by the Director himself of a working hypothesis among the world’s top physicists that it might be possible to restore the state of Florida to “approximate actuality,” using the still-nascent technology of quantum computing and massive amounts of digital information provided not only by Project Memory but all available archives on the state of Florida, which would then be translated from digital to subatomic information, “the DNA of reality itself.” The process, he emphasized, was theoretical and, for the foreseeable future, beyond the capacity of modern science to realize. But it was vitally important to “excavate the data” while we were still living, so that it could be stored for use at some future date.
The consequences of failure, he told us, in his baffling, if at times stirring, speech, were colossal. Should our numbers be inadequate to amass, as he put it, “sufficient density of detail to achieve the minimum probabilistic threshold of mnemonic modeling necessary to reconstitute the missing land mass,” we would have the deaths (a willful inaccuracy; their fates are unknown) of millions of our fellow Americans on our consciences.
The speech had its intended effect. Political, religious and philosophical differences were submerged — at least temporarily — by the magnitude of our civic, and in many cases, personal duty, and even those bearing active grievances against the government united as one fiercely obsessed unit of human memory, our goal to put back where it belonged, if only in approximate and infinitely simpler form, the state we all loved.
Of course, not even the loftiest human mind can fully comprehend how a sizeable chunk of the earth’s crust could vanish in the first place, or how the resulting vacuum could have been contained in something the size of a thermos bottle, or even stranger, how the digital information being collected by the billions of terabytes in the most massive hard drives ever built, could somehow be transmuted back into that limestone pudendum of the North American continent known as Florida, the twenty-seventh state to join the Union.
That it might be feasible at all was probably as baffling — not to say frightening — to the physicists in charge of the project as it was to me. But doubts and skepticism aside, we have done the best we could, blundering along from day to day through a series of highly specialized group sessions, random and assigned one-on-one encounters, and private rumination, immersing ourselves as never before in the near and distant past, trying to recall in the greatest possible detail, for example, the roar and heat of that great fire on my seven-year-old face as the annual Christmas tree, formed of all the discarded trees in the city of Bartow, Polk County, burned on the school field on a cold night in January, 1959.
What time was it when the Tree was set afire? How many people were in the crowd, and how many of them did you know? How high did the flames reach? What was the temperature that night? Is there anyone currently at the facility who might have been there with you? The data we collect will be cross-referenced, you’ll be informed of any overlap, and assigned a memory partner.
Or the dusty smell of rain in the still air of a summer evening in 1961, as my skin itched from wrestling in the grass of our tiny yard, cicadas called in every tree, and squadrons of Green and Regal Darners plied the air just out of reach of my butterfly net, feeding on the clouds of mosquitoes feeding on us.
What color was the handle of the net? Where did I buy it? Did I ever catch a Regal Darner? Put it into a killing bottle? What happened to that bottle? The balsa wood pinning board? My love of collecting?
The shouts and laughter of the old crowd as we ran through (no doubt) toxic clouds of insecticide belching from the back of the city mosquito truck making its rounds through the neighborhood.
Name each one of them, and as much detail of those years as you can, until you lost touch with them. Take your time; it’s all we have here.
Never again so free, their faces fading with the light, with the years, barking dogs and the smells of rotten oranges, the dead pigeon that I turned over with a stick, making me gag at the sight of so many maggots, freshly cut grass. The sound of phosphate-loaded freight trains in the distance, the hovering hawk moths drawn to the heavy sweetness of gardenia blossoms, the little brown bats, voices of parents calling their young to dinner, the swoop of passing nighthawks, and all the mysteries of dusk...
These “corpuscles” are personally cherished and essential, even to we who must recall them as a matter of duty rather than pleasure. But without the benefit, or curse, of a photographic memory, specifics for the innumerable qualia of past time are almost impossible to come by. And specifics are what is most needed, in order to construct a sufficiently dense mnemonic model.
Yet it is only through the structurally flawed lens of memory that our loved ones — and besides my lost mother, brother, friends, girlfriends and lusted-after never-hads, I include every acquaintance, enemy, animal, insect, ligustrum hedge, tannin-stained, spring-fed river and cypress knee that I’ve ever seen, spoken to, petted, collected, crawled through, swum in, canoed on, or contemplated — can have even the remotest chance of being recovered.
The entire project is classified, mainly because the science behind it is so new and because a small percentage of what the government hopes to recover involves Cape Canaveral and the state’s several military bases. Those of us who have no connection to anything military are allowed to move about freely, at least on the rather barren grounds of the facility and only during our rest and recreation periods.
Those carrying in their heads information deemed Secret or Top Secret are much more closely monitored, imparting sensitive information in secure locations. Under these conditions of official urgency, enforced crowding, and limited personal freedom, relationships inevitably form and dissolve among the “mnemonauts,” the media’s facile term for the medium-sized town’s-worth of us here at what has jokingly come to be called the Hippo Campus.
The authorities, aware of the pressures we are under, don’t discourage these relationships, since we aren’t allowed visitation from the outside, although we may make and receive calls during specific periods of the week. Most of us suffer over the long separation from our loved ones, the close quarters, the public bathing and sanitary arrangements, the minimal green space, and the constant pressure of other lives impinging on one’s own. Assignations are difficult, privacy hard to come by, but somehow we manage. Hastily organized concerts, dances, and other social events only slightly offset a growing feeling of oppression and confinement, however noble the cause of this necessary interruption in the course of our lives.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
