Perpetual Memory
It was never silent on the stations.
It's not completely silent here, either. He can hear the crunch of his boots as he walks across the dry soil; the rustling of branches as they catch the wind; the quiet hum of the generator in the background. But they're soft noises, small and insignificant when compared with the overwhelming silence of this world.
He'd hoped never to hear silence again. He never thought he'd come to crave it.
It's not silent inside his mind. The name repeats itself in time with his steps. Brayden Croix, Brayden Croix, Brayden Croix. He'd said he didn't remember too many of the details yet. It was a polite fiction. He remembered everything. He just wasn't ready to face all of it yet. He still isn't, and wonders if he ever will be.
When he banishes the name from its march through his consciousness, other memories emerge in its stead. He'd had a wife, two children. His son would have been eight when he was arrested; his daughter, twelve. He'd left a wife without her husband, children without their father, all for the sake of his conscience.
He wonders what part of his conscience would have led him to risk tearing his own family asunder.
His children are lost to him, of course; thanks to the ten-year cold sleep between his conviction and assignment and then the twenty-two-year cold sleep to reach G889, they're biologically older than he is now. The physical distance is secondary, irrelevant; his family is gone forever.
He understands, now, why he's so drawn to Devon and Ulysses Adair. Their family, too, has been ripped apart. Devon was so young when her mother died. Uly doesn't even know who his father is. Now they're both light-years away from their extended family, not that there was much to begin with.
She's released him from servitude, but he stays: it's atonement for the destruction of his own family.
Memories of his wife, his children, coil around themselves in his mind until he fears he might go mad from the sound of them. It's a valid fear, he thinks. He came within a hair's breadth of going mad when the memories returned the first time. As much as he wishes not to forget, sometimes he wishes he could stop remembering.
When he tries to pull away, to focus on the here-and-now, the memories hide in the shadows of his mind, ever ready to return at the moment his thoughts fall silent.
His thoughts had been silent in the first years after his mind wash and retraining. There was little inside except facts and information. His only true knowledge, at first, was that he was a distinct individual. His programmers hadn't given him any understanding about the nature of that unique person. A mind wash was supposed to remove personality as well as memories.
He knows now that that's why the all of the mind wash programs — the Yales, the ZEDs — ultimately failed. Personalities can't be safely removed. Suppressed, yes. Adjusted, yes. But removed, no.
At the time, though, the silence inside his mind was deafening. Maddening. He'd wholeheartedly thrown himself into his role as Devon Adair's tutor simply because it filled the black, aching void within his mind. It worked and saved him from the fate of many of his comrades. He survived, and while he knows now who he was, he also knows he will never be that person again.
The name and memories march through his mind, repeat themselves until he'd beg if it would render them silent once more. But they're no longer his. Thirty-two years of cold sleep and twenty-four years of servitude have created an impenetrable wall of silence between the person he was and the person he is.
He needed to have remembered, to have learned he isn't a criminal. But now he often finds himself wishing the memories would retreat back behind that wall and leave him in peace on this new world.
