[ WP ] Poor people are able to pawn off their memories .

Pensivus looked out of the limousine window. His technology had worked and had come at the right time for the world. Skyrocketing poverty and the misery that came with it was a fertile breeding ground for many anarchic groups, but none more so than terrorism. 
 
 It was a long standing market problem that needed solving and Pensivus had almost single-handedly solved it. His research team consisted of not more than 10 scientists, a number he had fixated upon a long time ago. Anything more than that and he knew that constructive debate would break down and it would only lead to noise. 
 
 His judgment had been sound. The deputies he selected had worked according to his wishes, coming up with deft solutions to a number of sub-problems that would have otherwise tripped up the entire endeavor. 
 
 And now, a few months later with the technology protected not by patent law, but by virtue of being clandestine ( somethings the courts liked to dub as'trade secrets' ), Pensivus was sitting back and watching the product of his labor come to fruition. 
 
 He had designed the system keeping the poor in mind, but as he looked out it was not just the poor who were using his device, now popularly called the Neural Hard Disk or the NHD for short. 
 
 Most surprising at first were the politicians who lined up to use the service. They lined up early, they lined up fast and they lined up long. Pensivus was shocked at this, believing good politicians to be no more than people who never forgot a thing. As he looked at the way in which politicians used his device, the initial shock faded away. He understood that the politicians who had come to use his service were in fact just the semi-successful ones. They were the ones experienced enough to know the secrets of politics, but unskilled enough to unlock their true potential. For the secret of success at politics is to remember ones successes and truly forget ones failures. It was only then that one could muster the passion to truly sway a crowd, while secretly ferreting away tax dollars. It was only with this skill that you could place a hit on threats to your reputation and still sleep soundly in your bed at night. It was only with this skill that you could forget the years of miserable subservience, and recall that your time now was not built on your own sacrifices. 
 
 Pensivus learnt from the politicians, that the secret to power was not what you remembered but what you forgot. The'short memory of the public' meme took on a new meaning for him, one that he had never had before, not even while reading Shakespeare. 
 
 The second wave of customers that found themselves using the NHD also surprised Pensivus. This time though he understood much more readily. Once the politicians were done exploiting the system, the next wave of customers that came along were the soldiers. It was to be expected, Pensivus thought even though in hindsight. The politicians needed goodwill and the soldiers needed this solution. 
 
 On a quiet summer evening over a bottle of ginger ale, Pensivus ran into an old friend. Ajit Singh Parihar, a childhood friend of Pensivus had opted for a life of hardship and discipline. The reward he had proclaimed as a fifteen year old would be the activity itself. An unparalleled sense of adventure and being the recipient of deep feelings of gratitude from a nation of over a billion people. Pensivus admired Ajit, even though Ajit did not know it. The two of them had bonded over a queer sense of humor that no one else understood or admitted to. Pensivus was an expert at telling what was otherwise considered the most terrible jokes, and Ajit was the kind of person who could reply in kind. He had always been far braver than Pensivus, even though Pensivus had proclaimed often and loudly that his motivations were nothing but the misguided notions of a 15 year old. As it turned out, Pensivus had been accurate in his proclamations. As the chance encounter turned into a long conversation ( Ajit was sipping undiluted brandy on the rocks to contrast Pensivus' ginger ale ), Pensivus gained a deep insight into the life of a soldier. While the politicians were using the NHD to get rid of memories as a stepping stone for another purpose, the soldiers craving the use of his device had much simpler and much purer motives. They simply wanted to unsee all that they had seen. And within half an hour of that fateful conversation, Pensivus realised that they had seen too much. 
 
 Ajit described the horrors that began, not in the battlefield, but in training camp initially seeming as if they came out of a Stanley Kubrick movie, but soon transcended the worst horror movie that Pensivus had ever read. Inexplicably, Pensivus felt a twinge of guilt for all the days he had taken to relax, all the days he had felt lazy and for not pursuing funding more aggresively till he had a solid blueprint ready. He knew it was silly, but listening to Ajit, he could n't help but feel that he would have saved a lot of suffering if he had succeeded a few years earlier than he did. 
 
 Nonetheless, he took comfort in the knowledge that thousands of the country's most courageous men and women would no longer be haunted by demons. They would be able to sleep comfortably at night and they would be able to lead normal lives. He had granted people the ability to laugh at silly jokes and tom and jerry cartoons again, as a reward for nearly having their heads blown off. 
 
 There was a curious side effect that became obvious to many, and a beneficial one at that. A few years after the arrival of NHD, Pensivus lost the opportunity to cash out when the method for treating phantom limbs using NHD technology was granted a process patent. By this time, he was well beyond caring. He knew that he could have used the money to further some other altruistic cause, but the impact of what he had done had unstablized Pensivus. He began to see himself as a hero and a villain and was beginning to descend into a state of paranoia. 
 
 The urban and rural poor, whom he had initially targeted were little better off. It was the perfect win-win situation for them, he had reasoned so many years ago. He had helped others no doubt, his device had done some good, but it had also done a certain amount of evil. Which one outweighed the other, he was not sure. On some days it seemed he was a benefactor of humanity and on others an enabler of the worst class of criminals. 
 
 The main reason, his counsellors advised him, was that he had not fully understood the market implications of his product. Oddly enough he reflected somewhat bitterly, they had never really raised these concerns when NHD was launched. It was all hype about what a market he had tapped into and what a problem he had solved - a problem just waiting to be solved as they had described it back then. 
 
 What they did not understand, or at least did not point out at the time was that pawning a memory was not a sustainable business model. In the past when people pawned ornaments of gold, the pawnbroker could be assured of a profit since there was always a demand for gold. The same logic could be applied to almost any material good. When it came to memories, a different set of rules applied. 
 
 Pensivus discovered that above all else humans tended to cling on to memories much harder than what he had expected. He should n't have been surprised, it was what defined people after all. It did seem like the people who had good long term memories led more fulfilling lives, at least in their old age. 
 
 The memories that people were willing to let go tended to be, quite uniformly bad ones. The market in memories that Pensivus had expected to launch itself simply failed. There was no memory market, no one trading memories like stocks or even for that matter, Pokemon cards. The value of a memory did not shoot exponentially, even the happiest ones. People with money could simply afford to go out and create happier experiences rather than invest in the good times of others. 
 
 The poor in particular tended to have mostly bad memories. Long hard days, spent on cold unforgiving pavements that turned colder at night. Losing their dignity at the same pace that they were losing weight. The women feeling envious as they see wealthier women spend a fortune on bags and shoes. The men growing angry as their desperate efforts to stay afloat are met with unsuccessful frustration. 
 
 No one, not even the artists and filmmakers were willing to invest in such memories. Nobody wanted to open a bottomless pit of suffering. 
 
 Now with graying hair and a slightly bent posture, Pensivus found himself wandering the street late at night. He came across a homeless person, whether it was by chance or his sub-conscious mind directing him, he would never know. 
 
 `` Can I have some spare change brother?'' asked a stranger, no older than Pensivus in reality, but at least twenty years in appearance. Pensivus was sure that he was on the cusp of starvation. 
 
 TO BE CONTINUED... 

