The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 1

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Your Mind Control Is No Match for My Cloud Computing

Before I start telling you what I remember, I’d like to be clear about one thing. I don’t want you to think of me as “the real Marvin Fitzroy”, or “the original Marvin Fitzroy”, or anything like that. Your brain will want to, because I’m the one you know about – the one telling you the story. But time travel doesn’t make those distinctions. Even the Marvins that don’t exist anymore, they were just as real as I am.

And because this is my version of the story, I can only tell you the part I know. For Kayla, it started six years earlier, when the scientists first started experimenting on her. For the scientists, it started another seven years before that, when they published the paper they didn’t realize was about time travel. For Ontoh and Nochli, it started at a time that’s harder to explain – several months in the future, or thousands of years in the past, depending how you look at it.

But for me, it started when I was hired by the Whitney University Neuroscience Department.

Even then, they were obviously more than just an academic department. My office wasn’t on-campus – it was in the old Riker Hospital building, which I’d thought was abandoned when Riker moved to a new, modernized facility four years earlier. But now, my new employers owned the entire building. And my paycheck came from a company called NeuroSci Innovations, which no one had ever heard of. I should have known there was something underhanded going on. But I was in a hurry to get a new job – I’d just been laid off at a dying tech startup. I was short on cash, and my new pay was good. Suspiciously good. Even a prestigious research university like Whitney wouldn’t normally have the budget to pay competitive, market rates for a computer graphics engineer. But that’s what they were paying me. And I didn’t say no to it.

The scientists had picked the most miserable part of the city to work in.

My daily commute took me through the flood zone from the hurricane a few years back. This part of Masonburg had never really recovered. People had lived in these destroyed homes once, but after the evacuation, most of them had seen the writing on the wall. Or in this case, the writing in the state scientific commission’s report: In these low-lying zones close to the ocean, severe flooding would soon be commonplace. No one wanted to rebuild a home if it was just going to be destroyed again. Just about the only people left were the old-timers who would rather die in the homes they’d grown up in… and the few poor souls who were still in denial about climate change.

My workplace, the former hospital, had escaped the worst of the storm. But it was as dismal as the rest. In the parking lot, a power pole sported a ragged flyer from the City Council, asking residents to report any sightings of urban coyotes or coyote scat, and warning them not to leave food out in the open. The building itself towered seven stories above, square and anonymous. The brick face could’ve been anything – a hospital, an office building, a prison.

The cruel irony is, I could have just as easily done the same work from home. In fact, I would’ve preferred to – it was easier, and less risk of getting sick with COVID-19. I was vaccinated, but even so, with the pandemic, each trip to the office was an unnecessary risk. But Dr. Fuller, the man in charge, had insisted that everyone work in the physical building. It wasn’t a good decision for him. If he had just let me work from home, maybe I would never have discovered what he was up to.

The building’s interior intrigued me as soon as I walked in. The first thing I noticed was how incomplete it looked. It had only been partly re-colonized from its previous use. Shiny new surveillance cameras were retrofitted onto aging walls; new electronic locks put the upper levels tantalizingly off-limits. Our only view of all seven floors was the wide-open lobby, where we could see scattered bits of activity upstairs. Some of the upper hallways saw the bustle of doctors and grad students, doing their unknown research; other halls sat dark and unused, as abandoned as they’d ever been. On the second floor, where I worked, a respectable attempt had been made to clean up the treatment rooms and convert them into offices, but in many places, racks of unused medical equipment had simply been pushed into back corners to gather dust.

Getting set up in the makeshift office was an adventure in itself. First of all, every single computer in the office had a physical blue-green color filter glued over the monitor. My new boss told me we were working on making an animated color pattern for some kind of psychology research, and the color filters were for “ethics”. The pattern could theoretically have psychological effects on anyone who saw it, so the scientists didn’t want to expose anyone except the intended test subjects. At least, that’s what they’d told my boss. So we were doing all the prototyping using color-swapped versions of the actual pattern.

“What happens if you look at it?” I asked, curious.

“I don’t know, probably nothing. But they’re huge sticklers for ethics. I thought they had to be joking, but some of the other guys looked at it, and they were fired before I got back from my lunch break. And they put the blue things on the screens the same day, so now you can’t see it even if you put the right color codes in. Ethics…” He smiled and shook his head.

At the time, I laughed along with him. But in hindsight, it hits differently. It feels silly to have scoffed at that level of caution, given the much stricter precautions we needed later. And even though I’d thought he was charmingly cynical, neither of us had caught the actual lie: These scientists had never cared about ethics. To them, “ethics” was just a convenient excuse – an excuse that they could use whenever it meant doing what they wanted to do anyway, and put away whenever it didn’t.

The Pattern itself didn’t mean much to me at first. It was just some wavy stripes, almost like a bar code but curvy and irregular, all in blue and green – although of course those weren’t the real colors. My programming work was about making the waves move around in various patterns. Sure, I sometimes got distracted watching the motion – but it was less “hypnotic spiral” and more “1990s screensaver”.

“What are the real colors?” I asked him once.

He chuckled. “Don’t forget, I’m a programmer too. I know how programmers are. If I tell you the real colors, you’ll want to look at it yourself. Call me a killjoy, but I’d rather keep my job.” His smile wavered, as he glanced at the surveillance camera watching over us. Quietly, he added, “Pro tip, this Dr. Fuller doesn’t know how to work with programmers. If he gives you something easy that he doesn’t know is easy, just say ‘I’ll work on it’ and make it take two days. Then you can use the time to work on the hard things he doesn’t know are hard. Don’t do anything too fast, he’ll just raise his standards. Just keep your head down and give him what he expects, and it’ll be a cushy job.”

But if I have one flaw, it’s this: Once I get curious about something, I can’t look away from it. Maybe if they had never installed all the locks, they could have kept their secrets. Maybe I would have treated it like any other boring job. But if there were locks, there was something to hide. What was all this security for? What was the Pattern, really? What were they researching? I couldn’t resist the mystery of the scientists secluding themselves on the locked-off upper floors. Even more intriguingly, the basement levels were secured with full steel security doors, blocking you off as soon as you got out of the elevator. What was so important to hide?

So, to look inside, I hacked the cameras.

I wasn’t a genius hacker, but in truth, very few security breaches are works of genius. The typical breach starts with a careless mistake – a company cutting corners to save a quick buck, a programmer writing a bug that usually doesn’t break anything, a sysadmin leaving a secret in a public-access folder. And it ends with someone noticing.

I started by googling the brand name of the security company. It was easy to find: Every lock and camera proudly displayed their logo, PanoptiLock. They sold expensive, high-tech security equipment, and their marketing looked pretty impressive. They had police chiefs recommending them; they had videos where people tried to break their locks with sledgehammers and hacksaws, and failed. If you were a normal person, and you suddenly had a million dollars and needed to secure a building, you would find PanoptiLock.

But I wasn’t a normal person. I was plugged into the security community. Before long, I had found the YouTube videos – reviews by people who actually knew security, amateur teardowns of PanoptiLock products. And the reviews… well, they weren’t terrible. PanoptiLock hadn’t made every mistake in the book. But they had made enough.

Every PanoptiLock camera shipped with the same default password. At work, after I’d seen the reviews, I idly tried that default password. I didn’t really expect it to work – whoever installed them should have changed the password before connecting them to the network. But they hadn’t. It worked.

With very little fanfare, I was “in”.

When you find a vulnerability like this, you have two choices. What you’re supposed to do is report it to whoever is responsible, so they can fix it. What you’re not supposed to do – what I did do – is exploit it yourself. But I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t trying to be some sort of citizen-investigator, finding what they were up to, I was just doing it because I was curious. Because I could. What Reginald would later call “a profoundly amoral decision”.

I didn’t dare look at the cameras on work time, at first. Instead, I wrote a little script to download all of the recordings and save them on a terabyte USB drive. At home, in my studio apartment, I had plenty of time to review them, on the big screen of my gaming PC. I skipped back and forth in the videos, trying to find the interesting parts, conversations that would reveal the juicy details.

But no matter how much data you have, the hard part is always “how to understand it”. And despite hours of looking, I didn’t get much closer. The upstairs cameras saw workers and offices and medical equipment, chemistry labs where I overheard technical work beyond my understanding; the basement cameras saw a huge, concrete-floored workshop, with bulky construction equipment, even a forklift parked near one wall. But what was the purpose of it all? I hadn’t seen the Pattern a single time; had anyone even mentioned it?

Little did I know that I had already seen the Pattern, already been affected by it.

I thought I just had to make my search more systematic. I made a spreadsheet, and started writing down what was happening in each room, so I could get a sense of the big picture. Over the coming days, I made it a whole little project, using motion-detection software to find the interesting parts of the videos, and image classifiers to write down what was there. If you don’t know what an image classifier is, it’s one of those AI tools that they use at places like Google – you put in an image, and it gives you a bad guess about what it’s a picture of. Nowadays, if you know a bit of programming, you can just download a “pre-trained model” and classify thousands of images overnight. And if you have a bit of money, you can pay a “cloud service” to run the same program on dozens of computers at once, in a datacenter somewhere, to get it done much faster. So that’s what I did.

Image classifiers sometimes give weird outputs, but what I learned was a different kind of weird than I expected. First of all, they caught Reggie, one of the doctors, being in two places at once. I thought the cameras must have had a glitch. Go ahead and laugh – you already know it was time travel. But at the time, my brain refused to make the connection.

But second… they told me about the children.

If it wasn’t for the image classifiers, I would never have noticed. I would have just glanced past those rooms and assumed there wasn’t anything there. Even after they said “child on bed”, I still just assumed the classifiers were wrong, like they often are. But the spreadsheet made the difference. I had planned to write a few words of summary for every camera; only those dozen rooms were still blank. I told myself it should be easy to finish. I sat at home staring at the images, wondering what made them get classified as children, when there obviously weren’t any children in the pictures. Or, as I eventually began to wonder – why my brain couldn’t explain what they were instead.

In desperation, I sent one of the photos to a friend – a gaming buddy who always answered my messages right away – to ask him what he thought it was. But he never replied. He couldn’t see it either. I was on my own.

My project became an obsession. What was this place? Belatedly, I began to do my due diligence about my new employer. I searched for news on “NeuroSci Innovations”; there was almost nothing. I searched the address of the building, but all the results were from when it was still Riker Hospital. I searched the name of Dr. Fuller, but I didn’t find much besides a profile of him winning some accolade at the University, sixteen years ago. Whatever this place was, I sure couldn’t find any innocent reason why they might have a dozen “children in beds” upstairs, children you never saw leaving the building. And indeed, I was getting more and more suspicious that those were actually children up there. Was this some kind of secret, evil mental hospital? Was it human trafficking?

But still, I hesitated. I didn’t want to believe that could be happening – not here, right in the city where I’d grown up. And what could I do, anyway, if I was right? Report them to the police? How could I explain it?

I don’t know what I would have done, if things had gone on this way – if Kayla hadn’t made her move first. I wish I could say that I was a hero, that I would have kept trying until I figured out a way to do something. It hurts to admit what was more likely: I would have kept agonizing about what to do, putting off the decision, until the sense of mystery wore off and I found a way to rationalize inaction to myself. I would have gone on with my life, telling myself there was nothing I could have done.

If that was one of my moral failings, I’m grateful that I was never tested on it. For better or for worse, I became a hero the other way: by being in the right place at the right time.

When I came in for work that Saturday, I didn’t know how important that day was going to be – how it was the day we would later call Day One, the day that would change the course of human history. I was still just there to do my job. There was a bug in my code that I couldn’t stop thinking about, and I’d come in for overtime to work on fixing it. Maybe it wasn’t good for my work-life balance, but it was too stuck in my brain for me to have a nice weekend otherwise. Plus, it was nice to be alone in the office. No one would notice if I took some time to check how far I could hack the security equipment – which I’d been getting bolder and bolder about.

But coming in on a quieter day changed something else, too. Normally, the lobby was bustling in the morning. Employees from all floors of the building would pour in, many of them clustering around Dr. Fuller, who made a point of greeting them – the important ones, anyway – before they took the elevators up. But today, there were only a trickle, no crowd for me to disappear into. Dr. Fuller noticed me.

“Ah there, enjoying your work?” He greeted me with his authoritative smile – a smile that put you at ease, but made it clear he was in charge. With a close-trimmed beard and crisp button-down shirt, he was the epitome of “business casual”. Before I could think of how to respond, he went on, “Of course you are, of course you are. You’re contributing to very important research, you know.”

His tone made me feel appreciated; I didn’t notice, until I rewatched the conversation, that the only person he had congratulated was himself. But I did see an opportunity. I worked up my courage. Trying to sound innocently curious, I said, “Remind me, what are we researching right now?”

“Don’t let me bore you with the technical details,” he said with a smile. “It’s very cutting-edge.”

“Try me. I’m a tech guy, I can understand a lot of things.”

“Well then…” He begin to explain, but almost immediately, I found it going right over my head. It’s not that it was difficult – the English was plain enough – but somehow, I just couldn’t help getting distracted. I only snapped back just as he was finishing. “…and that’s what you’re supporting,” he said, his eyes crinkling around the corners. He clapped me on the shoulder. “Keep up the good work.”

But as I got up to my office, I had the presence of mind to check the camera recordings. I had genuinely wanted to hear his answer – how could I have gotten distracted at that exact moment? So I downloaded the recording from the closest camera, for a second chance to listen. In hindsight, I know that I rewatched it more than 5 times, never noticing what was happening. But I did start to pick up on one thing: not Dr. Fuller’s words, but the look on his face. As he talked, his smile widened, twisting into a look of grotesque smugness. He knew. He knew full well that his words would be deleted from my memory. He had told me the truth, practically laughing in my face, knowing I still wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

My heart pounded, gripped by a terrible certainty. I could no longer hope that this was just some innocent anomaly. It was something he actually knew about, something he was using against me. I had to find out more. Frantically, I scanned through the other cameras near the lobby, seeing if any of them had a closer view.

And that’s how I saw Kayla for the first time.