Seven

The Tunnel

 

When he stepped inside, the door closed quietly behind him.  Perfectly balanced, the massive door made no sound as it swung shut.  The reddish metal had a hammered texture, with two wide brass bands running horizontally across the face.  The bands were held on with two-inch rivets spaced four inches apart, their rounded heads dented and worn from the steel hammer that drove them into place. The weight of the slab demanded three strap hinges, fashioned in black iron with an arrowhead shape at the end of each strap.  Nothing would make it into this fortress.  The iron guardian even had a 6×8 weathered wooden beam that fit across the door into black metal mounts.  This was more decorative, but Jacques felt a door of this caliber was not complete without a medieval-style reinforcement.  The bolt inside clicked and moved into place, securely locking Jacques inside.  He placed his hand on the cold metal for a moment, admiring its strength like it was an old friend who was always there.  There was no need for this enormous iron door on a spacecraft, but it was important to Jacques that the entrance to his personal space be secured with a symbol from his former life.  It was not meant to be merely a physical barrier.  There would be no one on board attempting to get in anyway.  It was more of an imaginary barrier based on a mental tool he used on Earth.

With immortality came an abundance of time spent thinking.  For Jacques, this time filled his head with guilt and regret.  He thought about the span of his life, both before and after his “deadly” disease, and he found that although he tried to be aware of the happy memories, it was the bad memories that found their way into his consciousness.  The times he had said the wrong thing, hurt the feelings of those he cared about, acted selfishly.  Countless hours of therapy later, those dark memories still crept into his mind.  So he developed a device to keep the darkness out.  Jacques was a visual person.  Any input of words or feelings painted a picture in his mind, and it was those pictures that stayed with him forever.  So he imagined an image of himself walking through a tunnel.  Ahead he saw light, and it drew him forward.  Behind him was darkness and it was always following him.  This was his progression through life; the future ahead was bright and inviting, and the past behind was dark and menacing.  It occurred to him that since this image of the tunnel was his creation, he could edit it any way he liked.  So he created the door.  He continued to move toward the light, but any time he felt the urge to turn around toward the darkness, he saw instead a heavy iron door.  All the negativity of the past was locked behind the door, and the door was always behind him.  With this barrier installed, Jacques needed only to remind himself that the door was there, the past was gone, and he was safe.  And the safety of this personal space was made even more comfortable because he knew the iron door was there to separate him from the rest of the universe.  

This was his space only, and he had designed it to be comfortable and inviting.  It was a library and a grand hall, adorned with dark wood paneling and shelves three floors high, accessible by rolling ladders that glided along a brass rail with polished pulleys.  Stairways to the upper levels spiraled in the corners of the room, and there was another in the center of the floor, crafted of elaborate wrought iron vines.  It curled in a tight spiral up to a gilded catwalk halfway between the second and third level.  To the left, the catwalk had several steps down to access the second floor, and to the right the stairs went up to the third.  Access from the spiral stairs to the chosen floor was made by a wrought iron wheel, like a hatch on a submarine.  After climbing the stairs to the catwalk, turning the wheel to the left would pivot the stairway on its center spindle toward the second level, and toward the right for the third.  The entire metal structure of stairs and catwalks were covered in patina-green ivy threaded through the rungs and around the handrails.  Looking up from below, Jacques could see his guilded metal garden accented by the dark wood of the shelves.  High above it all in the center of the ceiling was a circular copper wheel-shaped skylight in the same green patina. Glass panes filled the spaces between the spokes so the stars were always visible above.  Chairs and couches and chaises of all designs, modern and classic, made comfortable spots, each with tables and lamps.  One of his favorite places was a large fireplace to the left with a semicircular couch upholstered in burgundy faux leather, pillowed and held with brass studs.  Many of the shelves had large monitors within, creating viewing areas around the room.  The hall stretched off into the distance, shelves upon shelves with any book Jacques could ever wish to read.  This room was completely isolated.  He could access the ship’s communication systems, but Joy was unable to communicate with him here.  He was completely alone, and he often spent days on end reading and resting.  

To his right was a wall that emitted a soft glow of green light.  It was composed of rows and rows of glowing acrylic cubes, clear drawers with soft lights behind them.  The light had a soft yellow hue, like the old incandescent bulbs from when he was young.  The light seemed to travel through every acrylic panel in this yellow hue until it reached the edges, where it emitted a green glow.  It was similar to the fiber optic lamps popular in the 1980s that seemed to bend light through wispy hairs to a glowing pinpoint of color at the end.  These little boxes continued on, covering the wall all the way to the end of the hall.  This was what Jacques called the banks.  The boxes contained information in a timeline.  They were a catalog of his life, stored memories backed up on a physical media.

  After exceeding the normal life expectancy of a human, Jacques discovered that the brain has certain limitations; even his superhuman brain.  One would think that memory capacity would be an issue in a brain that never died, as if it was a hard drive that reached its maximum storage space.  This was not the case.  Rather, it was the emotional responses to his memories that filled up the available space.  It was the engineer he worked with to create Ad Infinitum that helped identify and solve the problem with emotional memory. Simply put, memories are stored in two parts: sensory memory and emotional memory.  Sensory memory is just as it sounds- touch, taste, smell, sound and sight.  All of these can be experienced in memory and triggered with the same sense, like how the smell of ginger cookies reminded Jacques of being a child in his grandmother’s kitchen.  Likewise, emotional memory is the emotion attached to a memory, and for Jacques, it was what gave him stomach pains and it was the reason he created the iron door.  Jacques knew he’d be trapped in his own brain for, perhaps, forever, and he needed a way to separate the emotions of memories from the sensory parts.  He knew he’d go insane if he had to relive emotional trauma every time a memory came into his mind.  The engineer of Ad Infinitum offered an experimental method that would allow Jacques to delete memories permanently.  But Jacques didn’t want to cut out all the unpleasant things from his brain.  These were valuable learning experiences that were necessary to move forward in his life.  In his younger life, he had met a woman who had undergone several shock therapy treatments for depression.  It was quite common at the time to induce a small seizure with electrical currents in order to ‘reset’ the brain, as doctors put it.  A sane and logical diagnosis being treated with an insane and cruel procedure, Jacques thought.  It did, indeed, reset her to a functional emotional state, but it came with a costly side effect: loss of memories.  They were small events in her life, but they were gone forever.  She downplayed this side effect; a person with a normal lifespan might be willing to permanently forget one particular birthday in exchange for temporary happiness.  But Jacques saw these omissions as small bites out of his humanity.  We need to remember all of our lives, good and bad, to learn, grow and become better humans.  If it were as easy as pushing a button, most humans would be wandering through life with fragments of a long story, unable to connect timelines and understand the lessons their deleted memories were meant to teach.  Jacques told the engineer no, not interested.  The engineer understood.  After a year of development, he came back to Jacques with another plan.  He created a device that would allow Jacques to remember every detail of the memories he carried.  He would experience every sense as if he were living the moment again, and if he wished, he could display each memory on an external monitor, as if he was watching a movie.  He would also have the option of disabling the emotions he initially felt at the time of the event.  It was as simple as checking a box to either allow or disable emotion.  Jacques was amazed but confused.  How was this possible? The engineer explained that the device must be implanted inside Jacques’ brain.  It would be connected to the limbic system of the brain, as well as the optic nerves.  When complete, Jacques would have a visual of a file structure and the ability to activate switches within the hippocampus and hypothalamus.  He could then go through his complete file of memories and choose to archive them to a hard media to play externally while disabling emotional response if he wanted.  It was his iron door inside his head.  In addition, included in the device was complete control of Ad Infinitum’s systems: drive, navigation, communication, maintenance and life support systems.  He merely had to think a command and it was made so.  Jacques was skeptical but he agreed, knowing that in the event of a mishap, his immortal body would recover.  The surgical procedure would coincide with the launch of the ship so when he awoke he would be on board and underway for his final adventure.  When Ad Infinitum was complete and ready to launch, Jacques was still skeptical, but, as promised, when he woke up after the surgery, he was on the ship and it was just pulling away from Earth’s orbit.  He watched the blue marble slowly shrink.  Too late to chicken out, you’re in it now. 

Jacques stepped to the drawers and pulled one out.  The small box extended out without a sound, exposing a row of clear acrylic cards inside.  Most were blank, just clear sheets.  Others had images, like an old polaroid picture.  He lifted one of the pictures out and it instantly came to life, a miniature movie in his hand.   He loved this one.  With a simple command in his mind, the movie displayed itself on the monitor behind him, and he turned and sat down in a green wing chair to watch.  This was one of the pictures he watched the most.  It was from when he was six years old, right after he started elementary school.  The video showed his point of view, as if a six-year old was given a video camera to record the day’s events.  In the center of the frame was his grandmother, a taller than average woman in her sixties with white hair and kind blue eyes.  She had a soft smile that he missed, a smile of sincerity and love.  She leaned forward, as if she was looking into the camera’s lens and spoke.  “Son, come with me into the garden.  I have something to show you.”  She reached out her hand to take his.  She always called Jacques Son.  She never used his first name, which was Billy at the time.  He was always Son to her.  Jacques had no siblings, but he had many cousins, and his grandmother called them all by name.  He was the only one she referred to as Son.  In the movie, he saw his hand grasp hers and they walked out the back door of her tiny house to a lush garden patio.  Climbing flowering plants created a wall of green, enclosing the patio and filtering the sunlight.  Jacques could smell jasmine.  It was early morning and the air was still and cool.  There were two chairs on pink flagstone pavers facing each other, and he and his grandmother sat down.  She leaned in to him, taking his hands in hers.  “Son, you are not like other children.  You’re very different; you’re special.  I have to show you something that I have never shared before, but you must promise to keep it secret.  You cannot tell anyone.  Not your friends, not even your family.  This is between you and me.  Do you understand?”  Jacques nodded.  The imaginary camera seemed to bob slightly, indicating a nod.  Jacques felt the excitement now just as he did when he was six.  He was feeling the cool air, smelling the jasmine and feeling the emotions of the conversation with his grandmother, just as he did when he was a child.   She took a deep breath and continued, “I want to tell you about something very special.  It’s a gift that I am giving to you because I feel that you are ready to understand.  But I can’t tell you enough how important it is that you do not tell anyone.”

“What is it, Grandma?” Jacques heard himself as a boy.

“It’s something I’m going to teach you to use and it’s called the Tether.”