Hope, Levy, Marc [good summer reads TXT] 📗

we wouldn’t make it to the end of the month.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear this . . .”

“Oh no, don’t worry. I never went through with it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be struggling for money now, would I?”

“What are we doing here?”

“I’m not talking about guns and a holdup. Violence isn’t my thing. What excited me was the idea of an old-school break-in, you know? Like the gangsters in the old movies my dad used to watch. Where the criminals break in through the sewers or the vents, and they get to a safe in the bank basement or something. Where the real money is, huge, life-changing amounts.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“For months now, we’ve been satisfied with small amounts. I think I’ve found a way for us to accomplish the heist of the century.”

“Have you been smoking again?”

“I haven’t touched a joint in a month! But look, we’re not here to shoot the breeze.”

“Good to hear . . .”

“Listen. The information we store in our distant memories isn’t accessible whenever we want. It’s kind of like a bank teller explaining that unfortunately, the safe is programmed to unlock at a specific time.”

“Can you quit with the whole bank-holdup thing?”

“Okay. But you’ll see that the teller image is actually going to be pretty relevant to us. Calling up distant memories requires a certain amount of effort. The more contextual elements in place, the easier it is to remember. Memory draws on three processes: encoding, storing, and recovering. Encoding relies on your ability to concentrate. But what’s the point in storing information if you forget it exists?” Josh glanced at his friend. “Our brain calls on lots of different strategies to make sure a memory lasts, to keep hold of some kind of trace that something has been memorized. Take you, for example. You can never remember people’s names. Tell me the name of your last girlfriend.”

“Do you seriously think I would already have forgotten Talya?”

“Dude, her name was Tyla. She only broke up with you a few weeks ago!”

“Slip of the tongue. And for the record, it was mutual. She never broke up with me.”

“Sure it was, Luke. Sure it was. Anyway, whatever. The question is, are you going to remember her name in twenty years’ time?”

“I don’t know, Josh.” Luke frowned. “You’re starting to annoy me. What’s the problem with Tyla?”

“Well, she wasn’t exactly the embodiment of intelligence, but I’ll admit she had incredible boobs. Hope and I called her Betty.”

“Betty?”

“Betty Boobs.”

“Wow.” Luke shook his head. “That’s low.”

“I guess it’s wrong to speak in the past. Her boobs probably still are incredible. In fact, I met this basketball player who said . . .”

“You want to walk?” Luke hit the brakes.

“Drive on, man. You’ll understand soon enough. By annoying you, I created a specific event and encoded a specific set of data in your brain, which will now be linked to Tyla. I linked her name to her breasts; I mentioned the basketball guy who is now her boyfriend, and I made fun of her,” Josh continued. “All it will take now is for you to one day be watching a basketball game, or for you to see a Betty Boop cartoon, or for someone to start talking about a woman’s amazing cleavage, and you’ll feel something in your memory stir. You’ll think back to our conversation, and I’m pretty sure you’ll remember her name was Tyla.”

“That’s weak.”

“Wait. I’m not done. Contextual elements are sources of information that help make sure an event remains embedded in memory, like access codes, keys we can use to open doors at some later stage. Without these prompts, it’s impossible to remember anything important. But for a memory to be formed, it needs to be a story. We need to be able to grasp some external view of it, to be able to narrate what happened. Story by story, our memory pieces together our identity.”

“Okay, seriously? Where are you going with this?”

“Even though the hippocampus works to archive stuff in our brain, that’s not where the information is actually stored. There is no single place. Our various memories are scattered around. They move around in the form of millions of small electric pulses. For a memory to come back to us, these pulses need to replicate a precise combination specific to a given moment in time. The hippocampus is nothing more than a switch. For weeks now, we’ve spent our nights at the Center recording fragments of memory, but we’ve completely missed the point.”

“Either you’re on crack, which would explain quite a lot, or I’m not getting it.” Luke looked at him.

“Neither. It’s just that I’ve always been the smart one.”

“And the modest one.”

“See!” Josh exclaimed. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You just reminded me of a memory of Hope, when we weren’t even talking about her!”

“Okay, you need to tell me what we’re doing now at the Center.”

“We’re going to mess with the switch, buddy. We’re going to bomb it with as much stimulation as it can handle and force it to let go of all its encoded information.”

“You want to achieve the mind-blowing.”

“Just about as mind-blowing as when you were feeling Tyla up. Maybe even more so,” Josh laughed, slamming the car door shut.

Luke had no choice but to follow. As they walked into the workroom, Josh explained what he had in mind.

The first step would be to put on a very different headset from the one they’d been using up until now, to capture the brain’s nerve impulses. The new version would be fitted with more than just electrodes: it would be entirely made from brain tissue.

“Instead of putting the neurons to work on silicone plates, we’ll be injecting them into a conductive liquid. Everything that happens inside the brain, we’ll replicate externally. To start with, we’ll tap into our rats’ cerebrospinal fluid.” Josh could barely contain his excitement. “Then we’ll spread the fluid between ultrafine membranes.”

“What kind of membranes?” Luke had started to understand Josh’s idea.

“Brain membranes! We’ll start culturing the brain-tissue