Dane went over everything from his notes again and again. Remembering when they had told Jean about her results. Where had they gone wrong? Had they gone wrong?
----
"Jean, have a seat please."
"Okay, is everything alright? I mean, I'm not being fired am I?" She laughed a little nervously.
"No, no, that's not it. We just need to talk to you about some things we found that are a bit confusing."
Jean looked back and forth from Gloria to Dane wondering if this was some sort of joke, or new employee test. Maybe ask her some questions that could only be answered if you were really familiar with the employee notebook.
Gloria smiled at her, "Don't look so nervous. You aren't in any sort of trouble. We just..."
"You said you have never used a memory center. Are you sure?"
"Yes. I mean they are memorable right?" she said falling back on Dane's joke. But he didn't even crack a smile.
"Not for a donation. Not for an experience. Never? You aren't going to be in any trouble for not telling us earlier. We just need to make sure."
"Yeah, I'm sure. Why would I lie about that? I mean, I'm working here, I obviously don't have a problem with the system."
Dane pushed two printouts across the desk. "These are the memories we had you share with us to 'test' our systems." he said tapping lines of code on the top of one page. "These are the memories from another donor." he tapped the other page, "See this bit of code here?" He pointed to the end of line of code on Jean's memories.
"Yes."
"See how it's not on these?"
"Yes. But most of the code is different on them both. Which makes sense as they are different memories from different people right?" Jean was back to thinking they were testing her, maybe they wanted her to work in the lab as an assistant. That might explain why Alice had been avoiding her all day. She probably didn't want to ruin the surprise.
"That's a good observation, and you're right. The code is different. But this bit is added to a memory as it's saved. These are unsaved memories."
"You should always save your work before you go to print. " Jean covered her mouth. "Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt, that just popped out!"
"That's okay, you're right again, normally we would always save a file before printing, but we really wanted you to see this and maybe explain why it would be there."
Jean shook her head, "I'm sorry?"
"This memory, the raw memory we pulled from your head is a saved file. The only way you could have this is to have had it implanted. This one," Dane tapped the paper, "and this one as well. The three we pulled from you, that you chose to share, were all saved files."
"Well that's not possible. I mean, I've never...there is no way that..." Jean looked back and forth at the printouts and then searched Gloria's and Dane's faces for some sort of clue as to what they wanted her to say. It had to be some sort of test, right? What was she not remembering from her training? Finally she gave up. "I'm sorry. I'm not getting the right answer. Can you tell me what I'm supposed to say? I don't remember this from the training materials at all."
Gloria shook her head. "Jean, honey, this isn't a test. It's not part of your training."
Jean leaned back in her chair. "So, wait? This is real? Those are implanted memories from my head?"
Dane nodded, "Yes, this is real."
"How? How is that possible?"
"We don't know. But we'd like to run a few more tests just to make sure. If we have your permission we'd like to pull two more test memories, but this time choose specific ones."
They asked Jean to remember her first day of work from her last job then they had her remember her first day at Memory Lane. The older memory had the tag, the recent one did not.
---
Maybe this is where he had made the mistake. Maybe he shouldn't have had her do the two extra donations? Maybe he shouldn't have shared them with her? Maybe he shouldn't have let her go home alone that night while they were still trying to figure it all out? But they had done all of those things.
After seeing the printouts they had talked it through and made plans to try to work backwards from her first day at work with them to see when the implanted memories started. They thought that might give them a clue as to what happened. Or at least when. Jean seemed okay with the plan. She had actually seemed more than okay with it, she had seemed determined to see it through, almost eager. She wanted to know what happened as much as they did. He was sure of it.
Which is why it didn't make sense.
He pulled a copy of a letter from his desk.
"Our memories make us who we are. If we cannot trust our memories how can we trust anything?"
That was it. That was her entire suicide note.
It just didn't make sense.
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