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I received this message from Cheryl this morning (all personal information has been redacted):

Dear Troy,

I know you don’t believe me. I barely believe myself. I have been crosschecking the information in the account against the few historical documents we have (archival information from the New York Times, government records, you know what I mean). And, (1) there is information in the account that is not found in the historical records (2) the information fills in some of the gaps and holes that have stumped historian for years. We haven’t yet gone for handwriting analysis or anything like that because we don’t want it to become a media circus just yet. I have heard that you are pretty much a self-taught expert on the Memory Project so I would really appreciate if you could come take a look. Just give me a call at this number…and I will tell you our address.

Best,

Cher

I might contact them but I haven’t yet made up my mind.

Recently, one of the commentator’s on J. Stevens’ (better known by her online handle Pandora) blog contacted me. We had never interacted before, so I cannot imagine how she chose me to contact, but she claims that a friend of hers has discovered what appears to be a genuine Memory Project fragment. I am, as always, highly skeptical.

A friend of mine asked me recently what would happen if the Memory Project were actually discovered. Surprisingly, even after all the years that I have spent looking for it, the question stumped me for quite a long time. When I first began to search for the Memory Project, it was a personal quest and anything I discovered was a personal victory; if I had somehow managed to find the Memory Project at twelve years old (the plot of several young adult novels), I would have jealously hoarded it for as long as possible.

I think, at their core, all those who pursue the Memory Project do so out of deeply personal reasons. There are those who see spiritual salvation in the Memory Project. There are those who are searching for the elusive past. There are those who are driven by a desire to simply know. The reasons are too many and too varied to list, and the potential effects of a discovery for each individual are too difficult to quantify. Don’t even get me started on the effects for our culture as a whole.

My friend, when she saw how puzzled I was by her question, asked me an even more alarming question: what happens if we don’t find what we were looking for in the Memory Project?

I first heard about the Memory Project when I was twelve. Well, probably I had heard of it before, but at age twelve it blossomed into a lifelong interest. My parents had been alive during the Fall, but they had very little to say about it. The years of political and economic instability, the calamitous lack of food and other necessary resources, followed by years of authoritarian military rule, had stripped them of any desire to share their stories. They were happy to live in a world that almost resembled the world of the past. They were happy if I grew up with no knowledge of the lost years, if I lived always looking towards the future and the boundless years of progress that were sure to come. The Fall was an aberration, a quirk in the fabric of history, and better forgotten. The Memory Project, then, was an unnecessary disruption, a remnant of the past like a thorn in their side.

So I developed my interest in secret. When I was young, the secrecy was half the fun. Every time I watched a television special or read an academic article, sifting through the information for new details, I felt as if though I was on a covert mission of great importance. I was searching, like all the others, for the Holy Grail – the location of some or all of the Memory Project records. Looking back on those years, it is surprising how little I learned. Well, not quite as surprising when you consider how little we known about something that has become one of the most long-lasting cultural phenomena of the post-Fall years, more so than the aggressively future-oriented rhetoric and policies of our current government.

To recount what we know:

The Memory Project began in the months following the event that triggered the Fall, after it became increasingly clear that the repercussions of the event would be long lasting and terrible. Researchers have placed the date of that event in late October 2012, and the origins of the Memory Project sometime between December 2012 and February 2013. It was started by a group of individuals (identities unknown, though the popular mythos identifies the creators as ordinary people who did extraordinary things under extraordinary pressures) in New York, possibly Manhattan (though that may have more to do with Manhattan’s historical importance as a cultural and artistic center, and less to do with actual factual information). The Memory Project gathered first-hand accounts of the events preceding the Fall and immediately following the Fall. There was no selection process as to which stories were gathered; anyone who wanted to write and anyone who had something to share could do so. Everything was stored in hardcopy. Digital was still too volatile a format. This is the main problem with recovering and identifying documents that belonged to the Memory Project; very few physical artifacts survived the destruction of the Fall.

I hope to use this blog to record my current research about the Project and as a place to compile useful information for fellow researchers.

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