Escape from Memory by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Author:Margaret Peterson Haddix [Haddix, Margaret Peterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-08T06:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Three

I FELT LIKE I’D BEEN ON ONE OF THOSE AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES THAT batter you from side to side, up and down, until you’re so dizzy, you can’t walk straight when it stops. Mom was supposed to be telling me the truth, correcting Rona Cummins’s lies—like plain old, reliable gravity after a wild roller coaster. But now it was Mom’s story that I couldn’t believe, Mom who sounded crazy.

“Right,” I said, hiding behind sarcasm. “How silly of me to forget.”

Mom didn’t answer.

“Come on, Mom,” I said. “If I knew these secrets, wouldn’t I know that I knew them?”

Finally, Mom looked away from me. She peered down at her hands and spoke so softly that I had to move close to hear.

“What your parents did was like building a system to replicate memory on a computer. But it was human memory they could copy, not digital. I—I didn’t understand it. I was just the stupid younger sister, tagging along, asking dumb questions.” Mom sounded like she was going to cry again, but she swallowed hard and got her voice under control. “Once they linked a computer system and a human mind, they could pick and choose, enhance some memories, delete others. But Toria said they would never permanently delete a memory. They would just store it on a computer and block it out of the mind.”

“So the war veterans didn’t remember the war” I said.

“Not on an everyday basis,” Mom said. “If they wanted to recall it, they’d have to go to the computer.”

Mom’s spooky voice was scaring me more than I wanted to admit. And what she was telling me was just too freaky.

“Toria and Alexei had lots of ethical concerns about their inventions. They wondered if it was right to give some people virtually unlimited capacities for memory. And they worried about people being forced to forget memories they wanted to keep,” Mom said. “They were terrified of what Rona Cummins kept calling ‘commercial applications.’”

“What does she want to do? Sell this stuff at the grocery?”

Mom shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure. But in the wrong hands … What if the British forced the Irish to forget their years of strife? What if the Israelis made the Palestinians forget that they have any claim to the Holy Land? Or, conversely, what if the Palestinians gave the Israelis the same kind of amnesia?”

“Hey, maybe everyone would stop fighting,” I said.

“It’s not that easy,” Mom said. “All those people would lose their identity. I think they’d fight more.”

I frowned, my head spinning. I didn’t want to think about all the problems my parents’ inventions could unleash on the world.

“Mom, honest,” I said, “I don’t know anything about this stuff. Remember? I barely squeaked by with a B minus in computer class last year. And that was because Lynne helped me.”

Mom was back to giving me her earnest gaze. She’d looked me straight in the eye more in the past fifteen minutes than she had in the previous thirteen years.

“Before I took you

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