The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer

by Janelle Monáe

Some new dawns are dark, like a silk hood slipped over a nation’s head, then choked shut. An eclipse. It started that way. We ushered ourselves into the darkness—so many of us having grown too cool with civic officials and techpreneurs who believed we should, we could, be an all-seeing people. And with so many so long fatigued from warring in our homes and abroad, so scared of unforeseen bullet showers and continental storms of smoke, we accepted their offer that an eye in the sky might protect us from . . . ourselves, our world.

There were the things we hid. The warm spectrums we kept alive within ourselves. They were flames, maybe some magic, that we only allowed to burn when or where our light could shine solely before trusted, beloved eyes.

And what they struggled to see, they began to deem not worthy of being seen—inconsistent, off standard. Began calling it dirty—unfit to be swallowed by their eyes.

Even before the Dawn, we lived in a nation that asked us to forget in order to find wholeness, but memory of who we’ve been—of who we’ve been punished for being—was always the only map into tomorrow.

It would have been only a matter of time before we could no longer remember a way into our futures. Our memory was only a matter of time.

To save memory, it was time to stop living only within the time we’d been given. Where the notes of memory and time make a chord, do we hear the answers to the whys of this world, or do we hear the tones that tell us the world we see is not the only one—that the escapes we yearned for might not exist in this one line of time, in this single, part-seen world?

Beyond time and memory—where the computer cannot r...

She is the eye in the obelisk, the Director Librarian, the “queen” of Little Delta. But she prefers to see herself as a mother, and the city as her charge. Tonight, her charge is restless.

the quotidian beauty of a sunset bleeding behind a kudzu-choked highway barrier; your lover’s kiss when she climbs back into bed in the middle of the night (and where was she? But you never ask).

a flock of crows rise from the barrier and fling themselves west, cackling a song banned a generation ago for indecency and subversion; your lover’s teeth puncture your lower lip and as your mouth fills with blood and venom she whispers, I’m not the only one.

What used to be a dying mining town at the whip end of the Rust Belt, home to a motley assortment of drug addicts moonlighting as grafiteros and performance artists, became the model city, the first realization of the promise that New Dawn offered all people—well, citizens (well, the right kind of citizens)—in their care: beauty in order, peace in rigidity, and tranquillity in a constant, sun-dappled present.

The only person lower than a memory hoarder was a dirty computer, and that Venn diagram was very nearly a circle.

If she cannot stop these new memory hoarders, these false memory flooders, these dream doctors, these terrorists—she will not last much longer in this place she has fought so hard to secure. She doesn’t believe in everything New Dawn stands for. How could she, being who she is? But she believes she has done good. The obelisk’s gaze has been mostly benevolent in her tenure here. And whatever she believes of herself, this she knows: whoever they put in her place will be far worse.

Stomach clenched, eyes bright, as though determination is the sole topography of her soul, she turns herself away—a lifetime’s habit—from the mountain of guilt beneath that white-tipped iceberg. She won’t let them beat her, not after she’s played the game by their own rules and won.

She’s been Director for long enough to know to look the part. Even on the other side of the door, the presence of someone else summons this woman she has made herself from the more amorphous frontier of the woman she might, in fact, be.

Do parents feel this way? Do they ever want to shake that insufferable innocence from their children?

She hurries past them, shoulders back, face slightly averted, as they laugh and elbow one another. Her heart starts to race, triggered by somatic memory, ancestor-rooted and atavistic, beyond erasure, even for the cleaners at the Temple.

The obelisk’s eye, like any panopticon, gives only an illusion of omniscience—Seshet has made an art of selective gazing.

The truth is that Seshet enjoys the sensation of memory hoarding, that sweet, leftover-Halloween-candy feeling of keeping something back for herself, however temporary.

She might be the Director Librarian, but without this woman’s memories stored in her head, they are just two humans learning together in the most old-fashioned of ways. It rubs against her nerves like salt water on a dirty wound, but there is peace in this ignorance too, a thrill of discovery, a joy.

IMAGINE A FLOOD, IMAGINE A WAVE, IMAGINE AN AVALANCHE, imagine a storm. Imagine any disaster you please, but note that it always begins as one before it becomes many. What in singular expression seems simple, laughable, beneath your notice, becomes, in the plural, the last thing you notice before you die. This is the bleak magic of exponential growth. It is the difference between two grasshoppers on your screen door and the eighth plague of Egypt. And if you haven’t been paying attention to an uninhabitable swath of the Arabian desert when unseasonable cyclones drape the sands in blankets of water, creating the conditions for an unprecedented breeding season for desert grasshoppers, it might surprise you when clouds of vomit-yellow locusts descend to decimate your entire country’s corn crop ten months later.

In the end, a simple happiness is better than a complex disillusion.

You have the advantage. And what of it? No one in her position has the luxury of fairness.

Alethia picks up a thick wooden pipe in the shape of a palm frond and flips open a lighter. “Please tell me you won’t report me,” she says with a laugh, but the look in her eyes is a little too desperate, a little too real. Seshet tries to lighten the mood. “Only if you share.” She’s smoked weed a handful of times in her life—all with Terry, in fact, from one of his fancy vintage vape pens while they played some ridiculous old video game of his with a lot of guns and gore—but she’s willing to try again just to take the scared edge out of Alethia’s voice.

“Alethia,” she says, forcing herself calm though she feels as if she’s falling in midair, “you know what I am.” Alethia blows out another lungful of smoke. In the hallway, someone unlocks their door and shuts it. Alethia keeps still until the hall has gone quiet again. “Yeah, I know. I just wish I could see who.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” Alethia taps out the ashes straight onto the coffee table and refills the pipe. “Who are you, Seshet-without-a-number? Who would you be if you weren’t Director Librarian? Who could we be, together?”

“Anyone going to one of Doc Young’s parties needs Counseling, Alethia!” Alethia flinches but Seshet persists. “Yes, even cleaning. It’s for the good of the whole.” Alethia snorts. “The good of the whole,” she says, mocking. “My god, you sound just like them.”

“Alethia, what’s going on? What happened today? Why are you like this?” “Maybe this is who I am, Seshet. I’m not your dream girl. I’m just a woman in way, way over her head . . .”

She knows the trick, you see. No one remembers everything. And what’s too painful to remember, you can simply choose to forget.

Here’s the trick: if the flames burn on the fuel of your own shame, not even mortal terror can make you brave the heat.

arcane

Seshet thinks she doesn’t deserve Dee’s understanding, its kindness. Even if it is an artificial intelligence fundamentally limited by New Dawn’s protocols, it understands her better than any human ever has.

Humans repress their own memories, of course. They do it all the time. Headsets wouldn’t work, otherwise. Nevermind would just be a really trippy drug. The fact that New Dawn has weaponized this effect for its own purposes doesn’t mean that people don’t forget things for their own simple survival every second of the day.

“I can breathe there, Deidre,” she says, a refrain the child recognizes. “Your memories are your own.” “But when will you let me come with you, Mom?” “When you’re older, honey. When it’s safer.” Deidre never understood what her mother meant by that. Then her mother and father fought and her mother stopped going on her trips, stopped bringing back bounty. Just a year later, her mother abandoned them both.

her mother screaming at the top of her lungs from the top of a hill, “I own my own soul!”

She can’t afford Terry’s performative casualness, and she doesn’t bother to try.

She’s never managed to keep track of all the video games he’s played in front of her, but she generally drums up enough interest in the moment to keep things pleasant. The weed helps.

You’ve proven the New Dawn ethos. ‘Order, Standards, and Merit above all.’” He hesitates theatrically. “You’re Merit, of course.”

Minneapolis. Big city, very different operation from what you have going on here, but lots of opportunity for a hungry Librarian. Of course, I know you’re already bonded to this city. We’d have to wipe you again. That’s not wonderful, but you’ve only just turned forty, your brain is still resilient enough.

Alethia looks ragged, haunted, like the day has weighed her down with cement blocks.

And then he says something like, ‘With New Dawn, there is a place for everyone as long as everyone stays in place.’ And I can’t help it, I start to laugh. Well, I snort and then try to pretend it was a sneeze. Now, imagine how scared I get when I realize you’re looking at me. Staring at me. And you smile, Seshet. It maybe lasted half a second, but that smile said everything.” “Said what, Alethia?” “‘You’re not the only one.’”

It hits her, again, that though she has more power in this city than anyone, with the people she cares about most she feels as vulnerable as a child. She should know why Jordan has his scars. She should know why Alethia risked meeting her. She shouldn’t be here, sleepless and ragged with pain like some regular citizen slated for Counseling! How much more power will she need before she can feel safe from everyone moving in ways she doesn’t expect and cannot control, even as she loves them?

DOC YOUNG HAS HAD A TRAVELING PARTY FOR AS LONG AS SESHET has been alive. Longer, if you believe the legends. They say he used to be a kid leading the protests against New Dawn’s glorious revolution, before the original Alpha America Party established the Standards and memory surveillance regime, which stamped out all “antisocial deviance.” They also say Doc Young’s taken his party on the road around the world, to countries that still haven’t adopted New Dawn’s freely available surveillance technology. The countries, Seshet now remembers, where her mother loved to travel, before she disappeared. Doc Young is bigger than Little Delta, but it’s a part of him; it’s where he’s from, and where he learned to love drugs and music and that crazy, classic life. He’s returned to it again and again over the decades, like a comet around the sun. And like a comet, he disrupts the tides and obscures the stars, he dazzles and he terrifies—and he’s gone before anyone can ask him to clean up the mess.

They are hunting for the next place Doc Young has convened the world’s longest-running experiment in bacchanalian civil disobedience.

A short climb up a ladder, and they emerge into an abandoned high school gymnasium, softly lit with innumerable tiny lights above them, like stars. The arched windows are black, painted or boarded up. The wooden floor is crusty and rat-chewed, the symbol of a prancing bull still barely legible at its center. A few dozen people lounge on fallen bleachers. A circle of five, visors down, pass around an inhaler while their fingers twitch in unfathomable creation. A band is playing a hypnotic rhythmic drone on an elevated platform by one of the rusted hoops. Seshet doesn’t understand the music at all, thinks it might be a deviant cousin of the New Dawn–approved jazz, which is the only kind she has ever heard. A curtain made of lights and smoke and fluttering strips of cloth obscures the other hoop from view. Seshet looks around doubtfully. “There’s not a lot of people here.” Alethia raises her eyebrows. “What, you were expecting a go-go?” “What’s a go-go?”

It’s not his physical mass that impresses so much as his gaze, which seems to pick you up like so much fluff and weigh you against a counterweight only he knows.

“Welcome to the upside-down kingdom,” he says, spreading his arms. “And I see you’ve brought someone to guarantee your safe passage. Welcome back, dear.”

“Has Seshet?” he asks, looking between them in slowly dawning comprehension. He snorts. “I see you haven’t changed at all, Lethe. Never met a risk you didn’t want to take.”

She shrugs. “Times change.” “New Dawn doesn’t.” “No collective is static; you of all people ought to know that.”

But she hasn’t felt such professional rage for years; she doesn’t know when it all left her. There’d been too many memories to take on, too many people to care for, too much city to watch over for her to nurse a grudge with an old man who trafficked forbidden magic to forgotten souls in Old Town. Does that mean she’s changed? Does it matter? Like any good Jungian, she knows she is carried along by something greater than herself.

“A dream, Seshet, queen of the white city. You steal our memories, but down here we deal in dreams. So give me one of yours, let me suck it from you like the yolk from an egg, and I’ll let you know what I find out.”