Author: Mark Renney

We are encouraged to forget and, in the Aftermath, there is no denying we are hampered by grief, traumatised by the loss of our loved ones and all that we have seen and experienced. Even so, I can’t help but feel the Government campaign has become more than a little unhinged and manic in its commitment, its insistence that it is our moral duty to forget and that it is the only way in which we can survive. No-one has forgotten the event of course, after all we are here in the Aftermath and still existing amidst the wreckage. It is the others we forget: our families and friends, work colleagues and neighbours, the woman we chatted with at the bus stop every morning and the man behind counter at the corner store.

We are still recovering the bodies and given how many of us have chosen to ‘forget’, the majority are now unidentified. They are buried not as individuals but as unknown casualties.

The Government programme, or Reset as we all now refer to it, consists of an intensive regime of health checks and therapy sessions. Surely no one now truly believes that any of this is necessary. Everyone must be aware it is the particular cocktail of drugs that causes us to forget and enables the Reset.

I often ask those who have entered the Programme and ingested the drugs what it is like. They have all told me that for a few weeks they feel numbed but gradually this lessens until they are ready to begin again. Doctors and lawyers, bricklayers and road sweepers, all essential and there is no hierarchy, at least not yet. I suppose that, at first in our newly established society, everyone will be equal but I suspect eventually this will change.

Many, though, have refused to comply, choosing not to forget but to remember, and these people are already stepping aside. New communities are forming off-grid but in a world so badly broken and fractured there is no middle ground. Time is running out for me and I have to choose – do I join them or not?