I got lucky; all four men’s memories are in the Collective Consciousness, at least in part—surprising, given their ages, and downright miraculous in my father’s case. He died in 2006, ten years before Mandala’s Own Your Unconscious was released. So how could my father have used it? Well, remember: Bix Bouton’s genius lay in refining, compressing, and mass-producing, as a luscious, irresistible product, technology that already existed in crude form. Memory externalization had been whispered about in psychology departments since the early 2000s, with faculty speculating about its potential to revolutionize trauma therapy. What really happened? Wouldn’t it help you to know what you’ve repressed? Why does my mind （for example） wander persistently to a family party my parents took me to in San Francisco around the time this story takes place? I remember scrambling with a bunch of kids around the roots of an old tree; then being alone in someone’s attic beside a white wicker chair. Again and again: scrambling with those children, then alone in an unfamiliar attic. Or not alone, because who brought me there, and why? What was happening while I looked at that chair? I’ve wondered many times whether knowing those answers would have allowed me to live my life with less pain and more joy. But by the time one of my father’s caregivers told us about a psychology professor at Pomona College who was uploading people’s consciousnesses for an experimental project, I was too wary to participate. A gain is a loss when it comes to technology—my father’s imploding business had taught me that much. But my father had little else to lose; he’d had five strokes and was expiring before our eyes. He wanted in.
Lana and Melora were consumed with trying to save our father’s recording empire, Roxy had moved to San Francisco, and Kiki lived in Connecticut. Rolph had been dead for many years. So it fell to me to greet the young Pomona professor, who wore red high-top sneakers, along with his two graduate students and a U-Haul full of equipment, early one morning at my father’s house, in 2006. I parted the sparse remnants of my father’s surfer shag and fastened twelve electrodes to his head. Then he had to lie still—asleep, awake, it didn’t matter and there wasn’t much of a difference at that point—for eleven hours. I’d moved his hospital bed to the pool so he could hear his artificial waterfall. I sat beside him for most of the time; it seemed too intimate a process to let him undergo with strangers. I held his floppy hand while a wardrobe-size machine rumbled beside us. After eleven hours, the wardrobe contained a copy of my father’s consciousness in its entirety: every perception and sensation he had experienced, starting at the moment of his birth.
“It’s a lot bigger than a skull,” I remarked as one of the graduate students wheeled over a hand truck to take away the wardrobe. My father still wore the electrodes.
“The brain is a miracle of compression,” the professor said.
I have no memory of that exchange, by the way. I saw and heard it only when I reviewed that day from my father’s point of view. Looking out through his eyes, I noticed—or, rather, he noticed—my short, uninteresting haircut, the middle-aged gut I was already starting to amass, and I heard him muse （but “hear” isn’t the right word; we don’t hear our thoughts aloud, exactly）， How did that pretty little girl end up looking so ordinary?
When Own Your Unconscious came out, in 2016, I was able to have the wardrobe’s contents copied into a luminous one-foot-square yellow Mandala Consciousness Cube. I chose yellow because it made me think of the sun, of my father swimming. Once his memories were inside the Cube, I was finally able to view them. At first, the possibility of sharing them never crossed my mind; I didn’t know it was possible. The Collective Consciousness wasn’t a focus of Mandala’s early marketing, whose slogans were “Recover Your Memories” and “Know Your Knowledge.” My father’s consciousness seemed like more than enough—overwhelming, in fact—which is maybe why, over time, I began to crave other points of view. Sharing his was the price. As the legal custodian of my father’s consciousness, I authorized its anonymous release, in full, to the collective. In exchange, I’m able to use date and time, latitude and longitude, to search the anonymous memories of others present on that day, in those woods, in 1965, without having to invent a thing.