Thursday 14th July

-[This was an unexpected development.  We knew that Janek would suffer some fatigue, but five days of almost totally deep sleep were unexpected.  It is true that we did keep waking him, there were fears of him slipping into a coma, so deep and still his sleeping had become.   He simply lay on his side, curled in the foetal position and didn’t move, no rapid eye movements, extremely shallow breathing, pulse slowed right down, temperature slightly raised.  Various theories were posited, but really they were all theories.  We knew almost nothing.   The Hypercoms were as ignorant as the rest of us.  I felt that we were groping in the dark for answers to questions we hadn’t even begun to ask.  I was deeply worried.  What if Janek should never regain his mind again?  Had, what we were certain was simply a sharing of his memory banks actually robbed him of them?  Were they transferred in their entirety, had they indeed been stolen rather than unraveled and shared?  Too many questions and no real answers.

Meanwhile what we considered his shared memories were about to be pored over by a different team altogether.  Psycho-analysts and philosophy experts were starting to open them.   One after another they were mining Janek’s treasure trove of memories.  The problem was immediately apparent.  As soon as each memory was sparked into life, appearing in audiovisual on the screen like a series of old homevids, it began to fade.  We could see his memories there on the screen, for a few seconds as they opened up and glowed briefly, but we couldn’t capture them.  When we tried to re-run the images, frantically re-opening the files they became fainter and fainter, and after three or four tries all we saw was a blank screen.  The files were empty, and going back the originals were a series of empty boxes.   After twenty or so attempts the process was halted.  Also there appeared to be no discernible order to his memories.  It was as if they had all been jumbled up in the transference process.  We could see the files there; millions of them all safely stored in a specially firewalled and safe quadrant of the Hypercom’s hard data bank, but we couldn’t read them.  The very act of opening them destroyed them forever.

This was a real problem.  Not only a physical one, but now an ethical dilemma, especially as there were now fears that Janek had lost his own memories, or was at the very least experiencing a similar difficulty in retrieving them.   Should we simply wait and see how long it took for Janek to recover, or should we intervene.  What form should that intervention possibly take; there was no going back, we couldn’t undo his second conjoining.  But how to proceed? And then the broader questions; did we have any right to his memories in the first place, was the whole theory, the ‘raison d’etre’ of the whole ‘select’ programme in question.  We had a real dilemma, for the first time real doubts were creeping in, we were at an impasse.]-