There is a clap as the professor drops his backpack against the podium. “Good morning, and welcome to MEMO-201. I will keep this introductory lecture brief, and we will dive into the proper material on Thursday. I will start off with some of the boring beurocracy about the course first, and then give you a quick overview of the course content. Does that sound good?“. There is an apathetic occasional nodding from several of the students who are paying attention in the room. He frowns and responds “Look I know this class is early. Trust me I would rather sleep in a few hours as well, but since this is a class about interaction I, and well you will prefer it and learn more if you are engaged. I will try and ensure the content is interesting, so long as I can count on you to also keep me interested in teaching it. Does this sound fair?“. The response while underwhelming has closer to 2/3’s of the class nodding in apathy as opposed to several.
The professor shakes his head and begins recounting the course outline verbatim. The new policies are much more stringent and require an explicit confirmation via a video recording to indicate that this information was presented. The professor stiffly continues to read the several page paper making sure to add a feigned seriousness while reading over the highlighted section. “Section 23 ethical concerns and student safety guidelines. Since this is a lab course that is operated using memoizer technology it is important that students are aware of the dangers. This course seeks to prepare you for these dangers however the university takes no liability for the uses of this technology and any side effects therein use.”. The professor pauses and looks up “Now this section is probably the only important one. As you know this course is meant to teach you the preparation of memoized experiences and the safety surrounding it. That does not mean however that everything we will be doing will have a bubble wrapped fence around it. You will be creating memories for others to experience, and you will be experiencing others memories”.
After taking a drink he continues much more somberly than before “This means you are open to all the negative circumstances that professional experience engineers have sought to avoid. Due to the shortened timeframe of the course and the limited budget we will not be able to give the typical 6 month vetting that goes into official memoizer experiences. Likewise none of you have gotten the psychological profiling and training that you will receive in later courses yet. This means whatever mental state you are in while recording will be transferred directly into the experience”. He looks down, swallows and continues “Since you are likely not used to people being this direct I will be blunt. Other professors are much more lenient about trusting students to make the proper judgements over whether or not they should be recording on that day. I will not. You will be expected to seek psychiatric evaluations each day before the labs. You will notice labs are 4 hours long, this is because the first hour and a half will be for the evaluation. If you are not in a good mental state you will not be allowed to participate in the labs. If you fail to complete more than %40 of the scheduled labs I have been given authorization to fail you on the spot”.
There is a pause as he looks out. Students are whispering to each other, and a few look quite grim and angry. One Student raises her hand and is called on by the professor “But what if we have some sort of event throughout the semester like a parent dying?“. The professor looks down in shame and shakes his head. He coldly responds “There is something I will make explicitly clear now, and will be very clear about going forward. You are all working towards being experience engineers. This is a weird field that is a mix of acting, engineering, writing, and to some extent athleticism. This job means you do not get the luxury of wallowing and choosing to work to forget about your problems. If you are having personal issues you DO NOT, under any circumstances EVER step in the recorder”. The students faces are a mix of surprise, fear and anger smattered among the crowd. “DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR” barks the professor. There are nods from the majority of the class. Anyone who wasn’t wide awake before is certainly awake after that.
“Again, since you all don’t have much experience this may seem glib and sharp. Let me illustrate why I do not mess around with this with a story”. The professor clears his throat and begins with the same angry vigor as before “How many of you know the completion rate of a degree specializing in experience engineering?“. “65 percent? 50 percent? 20 percent?” a torrent of nameless and faceless responses from students are given. The professor raises his hand and says firmly and calmly “You were close with the last one. %17 of people who enter will finish this degree”. There is an uncomfortable silence that fills the hall. “Now, the more important question. What is the percentage increase in suicidal ideation in those who completed their degree compared to the general public”. This time there are no responses. After a long and awkward pause the professor continues “%350 compared to the baseline population. Now how about the people who dropped out?“. One student sheepishly responded after some time in silence “The same?“. The professor curls up his lips and responds somewhat awkwardly “The rate for those who dropped out is %640 higher than the general population”.
Upon finishing his sentence there is a decadent air of discomfort in the room. Students are shuffling in their seats, and some appear to be on the verge of tears wondering if they have made the right decision. “Look at the students around you. This degree will have you finding several of the people around you in body bags within the next few years”. There is an air of dread as a few students begin looking around the room. Others are paralyzed and have barely blinked in the last few minutes. “Your choice to do this job means that you are no longer living for yourself. You are paid well because just being able to act, or behave in a certain way is a tiny aspect of experience engineering. Your entire mental state is put on display for everyone who indulges in your experiences. That means that if your sad, or lonely, or horny when that recorder comes on then so is everyone who steps into your character.” he pauses again and takes another drink. “Not only do you need to stay in shape. Not only do you need to know how to act. But you also need to be able to craft yourself into entirely different people. Namely you need to be able to craft yourself into stable people. You will assume many different personalities over the years, and with that it becomes very easy to dissociate. The same is true for people who can afford to go to experiences often” he begins eying students sternly as he finishes his sentence.
“You will be stepping into completely new skins, and helping forge those same experiences for others. This means that every positive and negative emotion you had will be felt by the person in the experience. So if you are depressed about someone dying I WILL NOT have you passing on that depression to others in the class”. The silence in the classroom has become deafening. The professor can practically hear the blood pumping through his bright red ears as he pauses. “Other people are allowed to step into fantasy. They are allowed to escape reality and enjoy experiences, enjoy moments with people they care about and enjoy the time they get to be in their own head for. You no longer have this luxury. If you choose this job it means you will forever be living in the moment, and in the reality you have made for yourself. If you are playing a hero pirate that is getting ready to go out to sea, then you do not have the luxury of worrying about if your son made it to school or not. If you are portraying someone for their autobiography you do not get to be excited for your birthday party later in the day. When the recording comes on you exist exclusively in the moment, and for the experience you are crafting.” there is a short pause “nothing else matters”.
“You all know what happened here last year right?” the professor says with his back turned to the students, leaning against the podium. He doesn’t bother turning around to confirm, and instead continues “Last year I did not give this speech. Last year I did exactly what every experience engineering firm did several years ago, and assumed that people would be able to govern themselves.” As he turns around he notices many of the students have stopped looking directly at him, and are instead looking down. The room looks like a grade school class that has just been reprimanded by the teacher, and sits in a petrified state of shock and shame. “Forget what you’ve heard about the situation, this is the truth. Last year Alex Collins sat in that desk.” he points to a desk currently occupied by a girl who looks like she just found out she is sitting on a bomb. The professor continues “Over the course of several labs we allowed students to govern themselves and told them to report any issues they were finding when going through others experiences. We assumed that if people were encountering problems then when someone else ran through the experience they would let us know and we could deal with whatever was going on.” The professor swallows and wipes the now beading sweat from his forehead and looks down. “This ultimately was a terrible idea” he says while looking back up at the crowd.
“It turns out Alex Collins was a deeply troubled man, with a very particular pathology. He believed he was an emissary from the God of Death, who had be brought to earth to spread ‘deaths teachings’ through experiences to as many people as possible”. The professor chokes on the dryness of his mouth. He once again takes a drink and tries to wash away his cottonmouth. Returning to the center of the room he begins again “These practices included more harmless things, like writing sad poetry, and drawings. To more extreme beliefs, such as that self harm and ultimately death is what will liberate people from the monotony of life”. One of the students pipes up almost reflexively “Hold on, that’s the plot of the Reapers Coast series”. The professor who now looks almost in tears nods and responds “That’s because it is. You see when he was younger his parents decided to take him to try out the reapers coast series. This was when they allowed you to buy your own memoizer and when they allowed horror experiences” he pauses and places his index finger horizontally on the edge of his mouth to try to choke back tears. “This was before more research was done into how extreme dissociation can get. He actually believed he was the cult leader in that experience, and believed in all of their teachings” the professor looks down again.
“You all know how this ends, but let me tell you how it starts. He was in a group of 8 and during the experiences while he was ‘acting’ he spent the whole time thinking his arguments about his view of death out loud. This meant that when the groups went in they were bombarded by his ideas inside their own minds for the better part of 2 hours. At the end of the first session he had managed to convince all 8 of them that he was right.” The professor wipes the side of his eyes and blinks a few times before continuing. “We don’t know if it was Alex or another one who came up with the idea. Ultimately they decided that just harming themselves wasn’t enough. If death was divine then everyone deserved a piece of it” he gulps again and again tries his best to choke back more tears. “10 months ago the group of 8 walked into the university and killed 63 people and injured 94. This included me who was stabbed in the arm, and my daughter who was there because there was an unexpected snow day” he indignantly chokes back more tears and continues. “I ended up with a loss of the use of most of my right arm… my daughter…” he stops completely and wipes his face back with his hands and brushes his hair back while he’s at it. “My daughter was stabbed in the throat and bled out in my arms. While Alex told me that we were both going to our ascension” The professor stops and stands motionless in the room.
The students are all completely still. Several students have broken out in tears, a few have left, and the rest are paralyzed. “So let me be clear about my intentions. I still have my job because after last year I have devoted myself to ensuring this never happens again. So I will not be lenient, and I will not be flexible about the guidelines posted. They exist for your safety, and for the safety of your classmates”. The room fills with voices. The stillness however has not broken. A few students awkwardly open the doors and peer in, then back out when seeing students still in their seats. “That concludes the first lecture. I will finish off the outline, and details about what the course will contain next class. For those of you wondering the day to drop this class without penalty is next Friday. Reflect on what I have told you, and decide what path you want to take. For now you can go”. The students robotically begin exiting their seats, and leaving the room.
Several months later the university fired the professor under the charge that he had traumatized several students. After that there was a new professor who took over the class. He ended up being much more lax, and allowing the students significantly more freedoms. None of the students disobeyed the guidelines however, even though they were allowed to. The culture for the whole program had shifted. Choosing not to obey the rules set out was now considered endangering your classmates by many of the students who were still shaken by the first few weeks of the course. For a while everything seemed to be going well with the program. On convocation the professor returned and fired into the crowd of graduates before ultimately being fatally shot by law enforcement.
Shortly after his termination and while packing away his things there was an evaluation copy of Alex’s experience from the original group. He had decided to keep it instead of turning it in. Based on journal entries it seems like he one day wanted to analyze it and try to make sense of it. Unfortunately based on journals it seems like on his daughters birthday he got incredibly drunk and got into an argument with his wife. She left, and while gone he ran the experience on bootlegged hardware he had laying around. During the experience there is apparently mention of a cache of black-market weapons Alex had been building over the years. He assumed he would be able to do more than just one shooting, and it unfortunately seems he was right. At some point prior to the graduation shooting the professor seems to have attempted to force his wife to do the same experience (assumedly to join him). Upon coronary examination he had scratches down his arms from a signs of a struggle a day before the shooting and had carved “Mṛtyu Sattva Ca” (the name of the cult which roughly means ‘death and chaos’) into his chest shortly before entering the graduation. Additionally he left a note on his wife’s body It read “We will be one with him. We will be free in him. We will be together in him. We will cast aside the shackles of life, and be made pure in him. He comes graciously for us all”.
Curators notes
This short story was chosen for many reasons, not the least of which being that it demonstrates just how far we have come. This version of the story is based on the unedited manuscript that was submitted as part of an official investigation into the shooting perpetrated by Dr. Mark Seaborne (known here as “the professor” due to legal statutes put in place to reduce aggrandizing mass shooters by making their names public). Unfortunately 45 people (26 fatalities, 19 injured) were struck before he was killed with a shot landing at the bottom of his neck after several officers shot. If for some reason you have never used it before, memoization is the technology that allows experience engineers to do their job. Essentially it allows them to create a world for anyone who uses memoization headsets to experience. The advantage over typical, older mediums is that it is directly “inside” someone. Memoizers hook directly into the nervous system, and simulate real experiences 1:1. At least, they did when this was written.
I do not know if this is your first time learning about memoization history, but if it is then this story is the most visceral way of discerning the sort of sentiment they try to pass on to you for a degree in experience engineering. The way Seaborne talked has essentially been distilled, sanitized, and made easier to digest. Ultimately though the sentiment is the same. What you do may change someone’s life forever in your job as an experience engineer, so you take it seriously. While there has been immense progress since, and improvements that keep situations like these from happening it is nonetheless important to understand many things including the movements to have the technology banned. When the technology initially released it was designed in a very rigid way. Essentially the only way it was able to work would be to map 1:1 the experiences of the experience engineer to the person “living” the experience. We were unsure of the consequences of pushing so much stimulation through a brain that didn’t have all the background context, and it was the fastest way to get commercial products developed. As you are aware we have found much more finesse in our current iterations of the technology. Instead, simply inducing a dream-like state, and providing limited stimulation while still allowing for generally speaking the same experience.
Additionally, while the dangers have been drastically mitigated, dissociation is not an entirely uncommon phenomenon. It is all too easy for people to want an escape from reality. We managed to build the perfect one, where you can forget everything about your life one fantasy at a time. It’s not all too dissimilar to more primitive technologies, but there is one distinct difference. Whether it was television or virtual reality the one thing that aided in avoiding dissociation was that none of these technologies were inescapable. Memoization is designed to make your body feel like you are there, and you cannot simply “escape” by saying it’s not real (disconnecting early could kill you in those days). For the duration, as far as you are concerned it is real. As a curator you will need to be aware of where positions people have come from. This record is often cited by many groups. From those who are against all forms of human neurological manipulation, all the way to people who use this to argue that since we can’t physically tell the difference between an experience and therefore likely that nothing really exists. This report gives you the broad details of the case, but I would advise you read the more detailed reports published later that were used to instantiate the Shekland Proposal that put in the protections I mentioned earlier.