Worldwide Memory Loss (free audio book chapter)
A common storytelling technique is to have a chapter written from a character’s point of view and allow the story to unfold through that character’s thoughts and conversations… it’s effective. Unfortunately we can’t do that right now because everyone on earth just lost their memory. There isn’t anyone on the planet who can remember anything. This isn’t some kind of quirky romcom amnesia where they lose their memories but conveniently remember how to speak, read, interact with people, drive a car… everyone has lost everything. Factory reset. Instincts only.
We now have an entire planet of one day old infant minds in various aged bodies. If there were anyone around who remembered anything about research, this situation would’ve been a gold mine. Does someone with a 40 year brain learn to speak English faster than a toddler? If there’s no one around to show you what to do, will people potty train themselves naturally? Are toilets and toilet paper intuitive?
You might be thinking, “well, people have forgotten everything, but libraries still exist, there are books, YouTube has tutorials for almost every task around…” but what good is that when you have a nonverbal, illiterate population? No one can read, so books don’t help. No one speaks or understands any languages, so videos and podcasts don’t help. For the first few hours, everyone has the fine motor skills of a newborn baby and just flailed their arms around not realizing that those flailing arms were controlled by them.
Initially, this seems like a funny situation. Imagine all the adults wandering around, infant-like, with child-like wonder for the simplest things. Imagine businessmen in suits giggling as they chase butterflies and dig for worms, while grown women learn to walk and splash in puddles.
Now imagine the opposite of that, because none of that was happening. Complete terror gripped the entire world. Everyone just became a clean slate. It was like billions of babies all being abandoned at the same time with no one around to take care of anyone.
Basic instinct kicked in and everyone was screaming. People were screaming because they were hungry, thirsty, scared, cold, hot, uncomfortable, or had just soiled themselves. They instinctively cried out for their moms or dads or any adult, but the majority of them were adults, they had just forgotten. Mainly, everyone cried because everyone everywhere was crying.
They had the memories and knowledge of newborns, but the bodies of their current age. A kid can cry for a while and will eventually tire out and fall asleep. A full grown adult has a lot more energy and fuel to draw on than a baby. A full grown adult with an infant’s instincts can cry significantly louder and longer than an infant.
Many people were screaming because they were about to die. That is an ageless fear. As this memory reset suddenly hit the entire world, everyone operating a vehicle of any kind, lost control of their vehicle.
Freeways everywhere basically burst into flames as millions of cars crashed into each other at full speed, semi trucks plowed through those collisions or jackknifed and spilled their contents on the flaming wreckage of every motor vehicle everywhere suddenly being driven by an hour one baby mind. Pillars of black smoke poured into the air from the burning chemicals, oil, and gasoline spilled all over the waking world’s roads.
Thousands of planes began falling out of the sky. Autopilot will take the controls only as long as the pilots don’t override it and every commercial flight now had two full sized adults slamming their hands down on all the shiny buttons and switches with toddler-like repetition. It was like two babies playing with a button laden battery operated toy, except instead of a cacophony of barnyard animal noises being played through tiny speakers, it was blaring emergency sounds and wailing sirens as hundreds of people in each plane plummeted towards the ground. One 747 did a full loop-d-loop as the one of the pilots got his Leg tangled up in the steering wheel… very few things are engineered to reach escape velocity, so every airborne vehicle of any kind eventually hit the ground or water at terminal speed.
At sea, most boats and ships were fine, but near the ports and canals, it was nautical bedlam.
It wasn’t just vehicles, think of anyone who happened to be swimming, rock climbing, at the gun range, holding a lit acetylene torch, cooking, using a chainsaw, performing surgery, rebuilding a transmission, or lifting weights at the gym… when suddenly, mid-activity, their brains slipped back to moments after they were born.
Many people were instantly killed in countless horrific ways. The remaining people lay helplessly and screamed in a collective worldwide tantrum hoping that someone somewhere will stop those other kids from crying and help make these hunger pains go away.
How long will things like electricity, water and the internet continue without people going to work doing all the routine maintenance and tasks that keep them going?
Some people learned to sit, crawl, stand, walk, and gained other basic mobility functions a little faster than others. Most people were instinctively drawn to cupboards and pantries by the smell and bright colors. Many people sat eating large bites of butter and handfuls of sugar. No one was very good at sharing yet and the childish fights over bags of cereal were brutally carried out at adult strength with a childish lack of restraint.
In short, when time broke down enough that humanity lost its ability to remember the past, the world began to end. It was a cacophony of yelling and violence. Bible scholars might point to prophecies about, “weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” but scholars need memory and so no one made that connection.
Besides, people had bigger problems to deal with than squabble over the meaning of ancient texts. The homes and streets of the world were being destroyed by terrified, infant-mined, people of all ages. There was no sanitation, cleaning, cooking, rules, laws, social norms, history, tradition, communication, or memory of any kind. There was only pure human instinct. And that instinct was terrified and screaming… for two days.
And then, just as suddenly as they had lost it, it came back. The past returned to people’s minds like a railroad spike shot through their skull. Every memory, skill, fact, habit and behavior came back so furiously that the sudden returning of the past killed 22.6% of the world’s remaining population as their firing synapses overloaded and they dropped where they stood.
Everyone else remembered everything and had the absolute worst migraine.