A story of one soul during two lives

She produces a small vial of amber liquid. “Laced with DMSO for fast action.” I stick out my tongue. “How deep do you want to go?” I hold up three fingers. She administers three hundred micrograms, more or less, first to me, then herself. The alcohol solvent mildly burns my tongue. I momentarily see stars. My belly tumbles in anticipation. My skin tingles.

We had determined, by cross-referencing my recovered memories, that my most recent life had be that of Norman Hartweg, a no-name playwright from California, who was best known as Tom Wolfe’s snitch for
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This act of questionable loyalty turned out to be a massive break in my past-life recollection efforts, as it documented an otherwise mediocre, unmemorable turn at the Wheel. I like to think my soul knew it would be so.

“Norman” is the only of the six files marked by a proper name; the others are labeled, “Asian Field Officer (Mongol?) c. 800-1200”, “Eskimo Fisherman (undated)”, “Flutist, (Middle East?)”, “Rabbi, c.14?? (Europe,
poss. Spain), “Anasazi Corn Grinder (Female) c. 100-1300,” and “Miscellaneous”, which naturally contains random scattered impressions that could not be otherwise cataloged.

The problem is that, at least using Llewellyn’s technique, memories emerge much like stray recollections from a distant past during the current life-sudden moods, flashing images, fragments of conversation. Unlike recall within the present incarnation, however, there is no context. It’s a bit like trying to place a familiar stranger-but without the knowledge of which hangouts you’d frequented, jobs held, or schools attended.

Perhaps a computer analogy is in order. After all, man has created the machines in his own image. Every so often, it becomes necessary to completely replace the hardware. Naturally, you want keep all the information from your old hard drive, but to accumulate files from several generations of upgrades will quickly monopolize the memory availability on the new computer.

So a compromise is reached: compressed archiving, which preserves the essence of the data while making it inaccessible without a special application. You never use most of that stuff, anyway.

Unfortunately, the file names were converted to an unintelligible dialect of Sumerian by a malicious virus. The only way to see what’s there is to randomly decompress and hope for the best.