The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-three: Just Because You're Paranoid And They're Out to Get You, Doesn't Mean You're Right About Who Is Out to Get You

[“What experiment?”

“The ?????phorin experiment? The one that’s going to happen at 11 AM today?” ????? “Your [expression/silence] tells me the experiment never happened! Fascinating! Then how did you come to know that you could change your own past?” [Not right here, but maybe part of the reason is that the overstim protocol is better with the animations]

“We’re asking the questions here!” [“I just threatened to kill you, why aren’t you bothered?”]

[“You killed me, but then you chose to come back to when I was alive, that means you’re not done with me. I’m sure we can work things out now that we’re having a proper conversation. Just to make sure, you are Kayla, yes? I assume you want to stop Dr. Fuller?”] [" Of course I’m going to stop Dr. Fuller!"

“Perfect, then we’re on the same side.”

“How can we trust you?” Kayla demanded. “[You say you want to stop Fuller, but you’ve been doing this for six years! Why would you suddenly be on our side now?]”

[As if it was the most natural, casual thing in the world] “Because there’s three of us now.”

“‘Us’?”

“Time travellers,” said Reggie/Aster, with a cheeky little smile. “Time travellers who hate Fuller, time travellers who know that you can change your own past. When I was alone, it would have been risky to go against him, yes? I may [hang out and joke] with him, but I [know full well that] he would [not forebear to kill me, if he thought I was a threat to his ambitions]. [But with multiple time travellers, you can back each other up]

[Marvin: waaaaiiiit, you can back yourself up! You can check your messages, then go back in time and send yourself a message saying “I failed”, then go try to stop Fuller, then delete the message after you succeed]

“That’s a wonderful idea!” said Reggie/Aster [giving no sign that they recognized it as an accusation or something to regret]. “I’m glad I have you on my team now!”

“Uh… who says I’m on ‘your team’?” [I replied. But I didn’t have conviction. I had always had a weakness to people who act buddy-buddy with you. Aster’s style was incredibly friendly and disarming]

[“Next question!” said Kayla. “You’re Aster, aren’t you?”]

“Ah, so you know about us. That’ll save time.”

M: “…what do we know exactly?”

[“Oh. Do you have time for a long story? I imagine you do!” They leaned way back in the chair, causing it to creak(?) loudly. [Aster’s story: “Reggie was the original inhabitant of this body” “what, so we have bodysnatchers now too??” "haha, I can see how you would’ve thought that! But no, this is a well understood psychological thing. When Reggie was a child, he was attacked by some of those coyotes – you’ve seen the coyotes, yes? And of course his brain wasn’t able to comprehend what was happening. But then I was there. I was, what you could call a dissociative state, one that this brain [taps head] produced to protect ourselves, to fight back when Reggie wasn’t able to. Since then, I have developed into my own person, a headmate who coexists with him… But since I exist primarily when we are engaging with the censored stuff, Reggie isn’t able to perceive me… Every time I’m conscious, it’s “lost time” from his perspective. I talk to him using notes, but I hope to one day be able to] [Somewhere in there, the narrator notes about pronouns: Reggie is still “him”, Reggie and Aster together are “they” because there’s 2 of them, and Aster individually is singular-“they” for gender reasons that we didn’t actually discuss until much later] [Actually that backstory was horrifying, how many news stories of missing children were actually eaten by coyotes? They could’ve carried them off in broad daylight, and they’d be reported as mysteriously disappeared] ["And since we’ve been doing hard-core research on the censored stuff lately, Reggie has barely been conscious at all; I miss him deeply, but]

????? “What was the experiment supposed to do, anyway?]

????? Big explanation

[… It’s perfectly safe, we already tested ?????phorin on several other human subjects. We wouldn’t put you at risk, you’re our most valuable test subject –"]

“I’m not your test subject.”

“– you were our most valuable test subject,” Aster conceded, [with a little dip of the head in acknowledgment?].

“And what makes me so special, anyway?”

“Ahhhh, [you see, we have been looking for more people like me(?)] [People who can resist.] [we tried to find other naturally resistant people / like paranoid people? / you’d think so, but clinical paranoia only makes them more vulnerable, because they can more easily make up alternative explanations for what they see. The people who are least affected – and only by a little – are children, probably because they haven’t developed as much self-censorship yet. So we made a game on Roblox (that’s the web gaming platform used by children), with the Pattern as the game icon. We paid to promote it, I think by the time we shut it down 1.6 million people saw it. ] [Somewhere in there: we searched online for people reporting purple striped coyotes, but couldn’t find anything]

“You found a cognitohazard, and the first thing you did was posted it on the Internet?!”

“No, it was maybe the fifth or sixth thing we did,” said Aster with a little shrug. / Aster laughed. “When you put it that way, it does sound irresponsible! But, can you guess what happened?]

“No one could see it,” I said. [Realization dawning? Or just used to this by now? Maybe unconsciously validated that there’s someone else who understands the experience?]

“Exactly. [We had the lowest click-through rate of any ad on the platform (normally a few people out of every thousand will click on a sponsored listing, but for us it was less than one per hundred thousand), and even the people who did click the ad mostly clicked it by accident, and didn’t actually play the game. But guess who did play it? Kayla.]”

[Fuller had social-engineered Kayla to learn her real-life identity. Narration about how being unique had made Kayla a target] [But even I’m [Aster] not immune to it. There’s something even I can’t see, something in the sky/when I look in the sky, I get that distinctive feeling/“but how do you know there’s something you can’t see?”“I showed it to other people” in fact, I showed you a photo of what’s in the sky, earlier in this conversation, but you couldn’t see it. Marvin: No way, you’re messing with us! THere’s no way I forgot what we just talked about. And in the sky? What the hell is it, aliens? Get outta here [but retrospectively, it was that I had hit the limit of how much I could believe, because what was in the sky was stronger than the coyotes and stuff]] [The phrenochondria show evidence of incredibly advanced genetic engineering, but who could possibly have the technology to do that?]

“Time travellers, right?” I said.

Both of them looked at me [like that was a ridiculous thing to say]

“What? Isn’t that the obvious guess? You’ve just discovered time travel, and suddenly someone shows up with [impossibly advanced technology]. They’re obviously time travellers! The [brain censorship] is even specifically about time travel!”

Aster leaned way back in their chair [making it creak], a thoughtful expression on their face. “[None of our time machines go back more than a day]”

But my brain was already rushing ahead ?????. “But you don’t know why they only go back by a day! Maybe we’re going to discover how to remove that limitation – heck, maybe the time travellers are us from the future! Think about it – maybe we [did lots more time travel but then discovered that time travel was actually really bad, and so we went back in time and used the phrenochondria to prevent anyone from discovering time travel in the first place]”

[Aster argued back, but they were clearly enjoying my theory and meant to encourage me to find workarounds to their point:] "[fundamentally the way these time machines work is that they only go back to when they were built, but the coyotes have been invisible since decades before we built any time machines] These mysterious ’time travellers’ were active at least decades earlier [and possibly much longer than that – for all we know, the phrenochondria have existed for as long as Homo sapiens. Not longer, the great apes don’t have them – we tested. [Maybe here or somewhere else: every time a dog was barking at nothing, it was barking at one of the coyotes] But maybe that long] "

“[Maybe someone else invented time machines first]”

“They’re not us,” said Kayla [decisively – dour tone]. “Whoever did this, they weren’t good people.”

Aster’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m eager to hear why you say that!”

“You mean, besides the fact that they nonconsensually mind controlled every human being on the planet?”

“Yes, besides that,” said Aster, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

????? Maybe cut the two lines above? they are cool but let’s make sure they don’t detract from the transition into:

“They had the technology to mind control every human being on the planet, and they only used it to stop us from time travelling. They didn’t stop us from abusing each other. They didn’t stop us from destroying the planet we live on. They didn’t use their genetic engineering to ????? or cure diseases. With that kind of technology, they should have been able to solve all the problems in the world. But it’s like they just didn’t care.”

“But if they’re evil, why didn’t they, you know… take over the world? Even if they’re not time travellers, if they’re, like, aliens or something. Shouldn’t we all be walking around hypnotized, doing the bidding of our alien overlords? They must have had some other reason

[Maybe: an idea came sneaking into my head] “But what if they did [solve all the problems in the world]?” I said. “We think the phrenochondria cause personality changes, right? If they go back as far as Homo sapiens, we wouldn’t have any way of knowing what humans would be like without them. What if people used to be even worse than they are now? And then the time travellers went back and tried to fix them, but they came from a timeline that was so horrible that even after you fixed all of their biggest problems, our problems are the ones that were left?”

?????

?????

[But where the time travellers now?

“I guess I was thinking they deleted themselves? Like to, uh, preserve human history as if their timeline never happened?”

[Aster skeptical; Kayla starting to be sold on the idea of because “save humanity and kill yourself” is poignant for her. Kayla: "I can see it. They went back to the beginning of humanity to try to give us another chance, then killed themselves because their own lives sucked "] [Marvin: But that would mean we SHOULDN’T try to undo the mind control, because then we would discover what they were trying to protect us from!] [Aster gets a bit of an intense expression and tries to nip THAT thought in the bud – mind control cannot possibly be justified, people are always making excuses to try to control others, we shouldn’t jump to make excuses for them when there’s not even any evidence.] [How dare you say that when you have been helping with the mind control experiments!] [Fuller is the one who’s obsessed with mind control. I’m doing this to try to FREE us all from the phrenochondria!]

?????

[But why? It doesn’t matter whether they’re good or evil, wouldn’t they stick around to see their project work? So where are they now? Shouldn’t they have conquered the world or something?]

“I mean… they can mind control people to not see what’s right in front of them. So they could be anywhere. They could be right here in the room with us.”

[I didn’t realize how horrifying that was before I said it]

?????

[Message from ourselves, “watch this and also show it to Aster”]

“Wait a minute, why would they message us now? I thought we agreed that if something went wrong, we’d message ourselves before we talked to Aster!”

“[Don’t waste time, we need to watch it]”

?????

[Low audio quality coming through the speakerphone + second call(?), but you could still hear the sneering sound of his voice] “Reggie, Reggie, Reggie. For yet a third time, one of your ‘clever ideas’ has cost the life of one of our valuable test subjects.” [Aster smiling broadly, impossibly casual tone of voice] “You know full well [Billy] didn’t die from [cyanosol], considering how much of it is [running in your veins (infiltrated in your brain? all of our brains?)] right now. But tell me, what is this? Could we possibly be speaking of subject 2, Kayla ??????, dying from the ?????phorin experiment?”]

“I’m sure it amuses you to play ignorant. [Yes, subject 2 is dead and you’d better take care of it]”

“Fascinating,” said Aster.

[Chapter break –]