knowthatyouareyou (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
knowthatyouareyou) wrote2012-05-03 09:54 pm
knowthatyouareyou) wrote2012-05-03 09:54 pm
Chapter 1 intro
So Mnemonicide? The Dolor? What is this strange girl talking about? Let's have Blackiris explain.
"The world shall groan with tears untold / Tomorrow's wings shall ne're unfold."
You know how they say that the songs of an age suppossedly embody the spirit of its inhabitants? Well, such were the songs of *our* age.
And for good reason: we'd seen no end to earthly tragedy. Even people in the prime of their youth were offing themselves in despair. "Suicide" had become by far the leading cause of all-ages mortality worldwide.
As the phenomenon swept the glove, people began to call it by a name. The medical community scoffed at first, hemmed and hawed, complained about clinical depression and diagnosis criteria and something useless called the DSM-V, and then finally gave in. That was years ago.
By the present day, the term "The Dolor" was firmly established in the medical lexicon, just as the term "The Plague" had been in ages past.
Our government, of course, mobilized every resource in could in order to study and hopefully counteract The Dolor. They established this town, for instance. And because they established this town, I was able to make a living here, serving as a ... Guide ... of sorts for newcomers.
Specifically, I made sure they got settled in, and as I did so I helped them forget--one by one--the horrors their eyes had seen.
Yes, the town's--and *my* only duty...
...was to sever the ties of heartbreak and isolation that bound our Guests, stained their souls, filled them with Dolor.
This was, after all, the so-called city where memories come to die. And I was, after all, a so-called Mnemonicide.
Mnemonicide. That word bears a little explaining.
As millions perished in the throes of The Dolor, the medical community took its sweet time to pronounce a consensus that even a five-year-old would have found obvious.
Namely, that the etiology of The Dolor was this crushing feeling of sadness and helplessness that left people with no other option but self-slaughter.
A special conference of the top psychiatrists in the world was convened; after days of deliberation, they decided to make up some fancy names that meant nothing. They reasoned that The Dolor ate away at the afflicted's mind the way that rust ate away at metal. "Psyche Corrosion", they called it.
Talk about fiddling away while Rome burns. Oh, there's one problem with that analogy. See, Nero didn't fiddle at all. He opened his palaces to the displaced, and wrote far stricter fire codes posthaste. Whereas these psychiatrists--that's all they ever did. Fiddle away. While we all died.
Anyway, patients who had failed all other methods of therapy were assigned to what was known as the Mnemonicide Protocal--they were brought to this town, and it was here that we Mnemonicides cut away the ties binding our Guests to the memories that had so corroded their psyches.
The thing was--not just anyone could become a Mnemonicide. One had to have certain qualities and inborn talents before one could even embark on the path.
To this day, I will never know whether I was blessed or cursed when it turned out that I had just those qualities, just those talents.
People often pulled us aside, told us how sweet and seemly it was for us to do our duty for our country, how much they envied us, idiotic patriotic drivel like that. None of it particularly impressed me.
How do you explain? How *can* you explain to someone who will *never* understand that your every working day is a long fall into rapture and damnation?
--Chapter 1
"The world shall groan with tears untold / Tomorrow's wings shall ne're unfold."
You know how they say that the songs of an age suppossedly embody the spirit of its inhabitants? Well, such were the songs of *our* age.
And for good reason: we'd seen no end to earthly tragedy. Even people in the prime of their youth were offing themselves in despair. "Suicide" had become by far the leading cause of all-ages mortality worldwide.
As the phenomenon swept the glove, people began to call it by a name. The medical community scoffed at first, hemmed and hawed, complained about clinical depression and diagnosis criteria and something useless called the DSM-V, and then finally gave in. That was years ago.
By the present day, the term "The Dolor" was firmly established in the medical lexicon, just as the term "The Plague" had been in ages past.
Our government, of course, mobilized every resource in could in order to study and hopefully counteract The Dolor. They established this town, for instance. And because they established this town, I was able to make a living here, serving as a ... Guide ... of sorts for newcomers.
Specifically, I made sure they got settled in, and as I did so I helped them forget--one by one--the horrors their eyes had seen.
Yes, the town's--and *my* only duty...
...was to sever the ties of heartbreak and isolation that bound our Guests, stained their souls, filled them with Dolor.
This was, after all, the so-called city where memories come to die. And I was, after all, a so-called Mnemonicide.
Mnemonicide. That word bears a little explaining.
As millions perished in the throes of The Dolor, the medical community took its sweet time to pronounce a consensus that even a five-year-old would have found obvious.
Namely, that the etiology of The Dolor was this crushing feeling of sadness and helplessness that left people with no other option but self-slaughter.
A special conference of the top psychiatrists in the world was convened; after days of deliberation, they decided to make up some fancy names that meant nothing. They reasoned that The Dolor ate away at the afflicted's mind the way that rust ate away at metal. "Psyche Corrosion", they called it.
Talk about fiddling away while Rome burns. Oh, there's one problem with that analogy. See, Nero didn't fiddle at all. He opened his palaces to the displaced, and wrote far stricter fire codes posthaste. Whereas these psychiatrists--that's all they ever did. Fiddle away. While we all died.
Anyway, patients who had failed all other methods of therapy were assigned to what was known as the Mnemonicide Protocal--they were brought to this town, and it was here that we Mnemonicides cut away the ties binding our Guests to the memories that had so corroded their psyches.
The thing was--not just anyone could become a Mnemonicide. One had to have certain qualities and inborn talents before one could even embark on the path.
To this day, I will never know whether I was blessed or cursed when it turned out that I had just those qualities, just those talents.
People often pulled us aside, told us how sweet and seemly it was for us to do our duty for our country, how much they envied us, idiotic patriotic drivel like that. None of it particularly impressed me.
How do you explain? How *can* you explain to someone who will *never* understand that your every working day is a long fall into rapture and damnation?
--Chapter 1