It isn’t like the world stopped working. Planes didn’t fall out of the sky. People found a way to fudge through; to make it work. One day you had a tight grip on the rope, and the next day your hands turned to jelly and you were falling through the air.
Barlow had buried a lot of his family. They said that The Vague, in it’s late stages, basically boiled the brain in the skull. This was one of the early theories – it didn’t hold water though. Some victims went gentle into that good night, and some went out screaming and kicking. So the theory was that it was something of a gateway disease that allowed entry to a lot of opportunistic secondary infections. The Vague was an enabler, rather than the killer it first seemed to be.
He read around the subject – all the research he could find, but in some sense he didn’t need that. You live with something and through something, and you get a feel for it. His wife unravelled around a singular obsession; OCD handwashing, screaming dreams, and the idea that she had done something bad to the daughter who was grown up and gone away; the daughter she didn’t remember. His elderly grandfather had gotten super forgetful in most ways, so they hadn’t expected him to remember how to undo the catch on the shotgun cabinet.
Barlow didn’t know anything about who he was – he was good at solving problems, and he was good at keeping paperwork, but none of that helped him when the best facial recognition software on the planet couldn’t draw a bead on him. They’d put him to work when they realised his talents, but he’d been found wandering in an area where it wasn’t immediate;y obvious where he might have come from.
Build a picture they said, and we’ll help put together a team of people that might be able to use that data and find some kind of cure. A cure? Well, for the memory maybe, but who the hell was going to be healed by being able to remember what it was that they had lost.
Some people he helped reunite with their families -it was a side project he engaged in, but he held out little hope for the world being fixed by a memory reboot. Might it have been better if they had tipped over the edge and into the abyss, rather than emptying everything out that made them who they were, and waiting for the sound of it hitting the bottom. It never did: they were still falling.
vaguecarrier 