Memory Lapse

Private Carl Seran, com operator for the 14th land occupation team of the interstellar cruiser The Dierden, was awaiting interrogation. He had been stored in a small, metal room like so much luggage. Glowing panels in the ceiling dimly illuminated the bare walls and floor. It was really more of a metal box then a room. Carl was sitting on the floor with his eyes closed, leaning back against one of the walls.

Anxiety was quietly creeping into his mind. It was creeping slowly because that's how Carl thought, slowly. He had had the misfortune to be born with what his society called a "mild cognitive deficiency" and into an age where machines did almost everything of significance for man besides thinking, and sometimes even that.

In his box Carl rubbed his forehead, assessing his situation. His thoughts shied away from the ominous unknowns of the future and settled on the past. He recalled his capture, the shouting, the rush as he clumsily drew his gun, the fear and relief he had felt when he saw the enemy surrounding them and realized it was far, far too late to fight back. He hadn't made much of a soldier, he thought, he had been taken prisoner without so much as firing his weapon.

Still, he maintained a spark of pride. He had had the courage to sign up and defend his nation. Despite his disadvantages he had been of some worth to his society. People far more gifted then him had done far less.

But what if he talked? Then he would have ruined everything. Carl grimaced and anxiously twisted his fingers together. He knew something that he shouldn't know. It had happened a few weeks ago while he was monitoring communications. The operator on the other end had accidentally, Carl knew it must have been an accident, sent some information that should never have been sent. Information that was simply too sensitive and too precious to be allowed into the head of a common foot soldier. His commander had almost shot him on the spot when Carl had told him what the transmission had contained. Carl remembered staring straight down the barrel of a gun in shock, struggling to wrap his mind around the fact that at any moment his life could just, end. It had been even more terrifying than his more recent capture. Yet in the end the officer had spared Carl in an uncharacteristic fit of mercy.

It was a decision he was now most undoubtedly regretting. The information was stewing inside Carl's brain, just waiting to be released and end the federation's hopes for victory. And worse his captors knew it, that had been made clear to him before they shut him in here. Torture and execution were against the interstellar laws of conduct for a legal war, but rumor had it there were other ways to extract information from prisoners reluctant to talk. Ways to trick and confuse them into revealing what they knew without resorting to such a base stratagem as physical pain. Whatever they were Carl was going to have to face them alone.

Carl let himself slump down a few more inches. He must not talk. The things in his head were operating level codes, they could be used to break any of the Federation's encrypted messages. Why oh why couldn’t he forget them? The more he tried the clearer they became. He had to do something, the fate of the war was in his unprepared hands.

Carl closed his eyes and swore to himself that those codes would never leave his head. Somewhere inside he knew there was no way defeating the most sophisticated interrogation tactics ever created could be beaten that easily, not by him, but what else could he do? Carl knew he wasn't the smartest person to ever join the service. He couldn’t trust himself to perceive deceptions, or to do anything clever. No, he would just have to never, never, ever say those codes out loud, not matter what happened, no matter what he thought he saw. That was the only way to be absolutely sure he didn‘t screw up everything. The only way to make sure his commander's mercy did not prove to be the destruction of them all. And, one thing about Carl, he kept his promises.

Carl had a strange sense of deja vu, as if he had this experience before.

Unable to understand it Carl brushed the odd feeling aside. He stretched his arms over his head and stood up. His body seemed slow and weak, each movement laborious and effortful. Drugs, the thought occurred to him, they had laced the water with drugs to slow him down and make him easier to break. He paced up and down the room while shaking his head to clear it, trying to keep his focus and stay alert so as to be better prepared for whatever it was they were going to do to make him talk.

Time dragged by, an eternity of it. Nothing happened. Despite his best intentions Carl found himself sitting once more. The fog of sleep was just surrounding his thoughts when a section of one wall swung outwards and a pair of uniformed guards barged in. Half dazed, Carl was roughly hauled to his feet and marched out of his cell. The men hustled him through a hall that Carl didn't have the wits to notice and dumped him in a chair in a small room.

Carl looked around him, trying to catch up with what had happened. What he saw was puzzling. In front of him was a polished desk with a professionally dressed woman sitting across it. The room itself was, of all things, quite pleasant. It was white, clean and had a window with blue curtains pulled aside to reveal blue sky outside. The color was startling to his eyes after so much time staring at grey wall. It smelled mildly of something nice that Carl couldn't recognize. Carl turned his attention back to the woman, she was middle aged, wore glasses, and had brown hair tied neatly behind her head. She smiled at him. Carl frowned at her, something about her seemed off, though he couldn't quite put his finger on why.

She said, formally, “Carl, I want to talk you about your rights as a prisoner of war.”

Carl sat still for a bit, struggling to make some kind of sense of this abrupt change of environment. The woman's smile became slightly stiff. Eventually he said, “I won't tell you anything."

The lady pursed her lips and said with a trace of poorly concealed impatience, "I am not here to interrogate you, I am your duly appointed RL and I am here to talk you about you rights as a prisoner of-”

Carl interrupted her, “you're trying to trick me. I am not going to talk."

The woman paused for a second and took a breath. “Look, I have been assigned to help. You see the new laws of-”

Carl obstinately spoke over her again, he was sure now. “It doesn’t matter what you say, I made a promise and I won't talk.”

The woman’s jaw clenched . She glared at Carl and Carl was taken aback by the flash of loathing he saw in her face. Then she looked away and tapped out a brief sequence on the desk. She said curtly, no longer addressing him, “this isn't working. Mark trial C 3.13 as a failure and prepare for reset.”

Carl blinked. "Uh, whats going on?" He hastily added, "not that it matters, I won't tell you any-”

Something snapped. The lady slapped both hands on the desk and sharp anger flashed across her face. "Shut the hell up. I don't want to hear it. You say the same damn thing every time."

Carl looked at her, perplexed. “I- uh." He blinked again. His mind picked out something odd from the string of words the person in front of him had just uttered. "Every time?” He asked timidly.

The woman released a breath and glared at him. She had dropped the prim tone of voice. “You are, without a doubt, the stupidest person in existence. Damn it, can't you think of anything new to say? You have no idea how many times...." She caught sight of Carl's hopelessly confused expression and said, "Tell you what, I'll just show you."

She began tapping on her desk. In response to her touches a visual display leaped into the space between them. Carl flinched slightly, and then stared.

There were videos, dozens of them floating in the air side by side, all taken from some vantage point on the ceiling. He was in all them. He saw himself talking to a smartly dressed man, or with another prisoner in a metal cell, or with a man in uniform, or through a radio. In several of the scenes he thought he recognized the individual talking to him as the woman sitting across from him.

She begin speaking again while Carl's eyes moved from scene to scene, taking in his many imprisoned selves. She said, pronouncing each word slowly, carefully, and with feeling, “now, let me explain, you imbecile. We recorded your memory when you arrived and have been resetting your mind every time an interrogation tactic failed. This allows us to try again and to keep doing so until we hit upon a sequence of events that makes you talk. Which, by the way, we always do. The only reason I am telling you now is because in a few hours you won't remember it because we are going to do it again.”

Carl stared at the scenes before him in shock, the person in them certainly looked like him. "No..." He shook his head dully and mumbled, "I just got here. That can't be me, I would remember."

The lady snorted.

Carl watched the records, fixated. Suddenly he frowned. “And I never told you the codes?”

The woman stood up, her eyes flashed with anger above the images that were projected between them. She jabbed a finger at him. “You haven’t told us a thing. We perfected acts for the other prisoners weeks ago. We got to even the most paranoid of them, its just a matter of finding exactly what buttons to push. How do you think we knew that you had the codes? But you, you are just too stupid to know when to open your god damn mouth."

She tapped on her desk again and the images disappeared leaving the air between them unobstructed. She leaned forward. “We tried everything, every possible approach. We created dozens of variations of the most elaborate role plays you have ever seen. I convinced you that I was a lawyer, an inmate, a member of the 'rebellion', a spy, as if anyone still uses human spies. And still you wouldn' t believe it was real. Even when I told you the whole fucking federal armada was flying into an ambush and without the codes we couldn't warn them, still you wouldn't talk. At first we thought you were catching on to us, but honestly I think you are just too fucking stupid to accept the evidence we placed before your eyes."

She leaned forward spitting the words in his face. "Can you understand how incredibly stupid that is? You keep that promise of yours beyond all reason, beyond any common sense. If you had actually been rescued and your whole fucking planet needed those codes to survive then there would be nothing they could do or say to convince you tell them. All you would do is say 'I am sorry, but I promised,' and then they would all die. Believe me, I would know."

She sat back down still staring at him. "What the fuck is your problem?”

Carl, unable to face his captor's wrath, dropped his gaze and looked down at his hands. It occurred to him that they were thinner and weaker then he remembered them being. As if he really had been confined for weeks. Or months. He blinked, frowning. “How long have you been doing this?”

The woman said nothing. Something clicked in his head. “We are winning the war aren't we? You need those codes soon or the Federation will come and rescue me.”

He looked back to see his captor was still eyeing him with a mixture of disgust and contempt. Then she leaned back against her seat and sighed. The anger seemed to slip away from her face. "It's getting harder you know," she said without really looking at him. "Every time you are more mistrustful, the same routines no longer run the same course. Some of our people theorize that after so many repetitions you are building up certain procedural memories about your situation that we can't erase." She shook her head. "How could we have foreseen that?"

Carl did nothing because he couldn't think of anything else to do. The lady grimaced and tapped on her desk again before saying, “Wipe him. Try a longer still period and get Morson to try R 2.1, we made some headway with that last time.”

The door opened and Carl heard several people enter the room. Strangely he was okay with that, he hadn't really liked any of these memories anyway. Things would work out. He wouldn't talk, for some reason he was sure of that, and soon he would be rescued and then he would be a hero and his people would have won. He wouldn't even remember his torture. The lady watched him go, frowning.

Five hours passed. Carl was brought in by a pair of uniformed guards into the same room, but now slightly dimmer and with shutters on the window rather then curtains. This time an old man in a military uniform sat across from him. He sat straight but looked at Carl with weary eyes. The man spoke up, "Carl, I -"

"I," Carl said, cutting in clumsily before the man could even finish, "won't tell you anything."

In a room two stories above a small of team of experts dropped their assorted listening devices and swore in frustration.