STRANGE CREEK · A SHORT STORY SERIES
Total Recall
In which the water supply becomes inconvenient, everyone remembers everything, and Eli wishes he didn't.
It started with the Hendersons.
This was not unusual — most things in Strange Creek started with someone — but the Hendersons were notable because they were, by all accounts, a quiet couple who kept largely to themselves. Roger Henderson ran the town's water treatment facility with the methodical dedication of a man who found deep personal meaning in clean municipal water, and his wife, Priya, was a computational biologist at Prometheus Lab who had, to everyone's knowledge, never caused a single incident.
So when Roger showed up at the marshal's office at seven forty-five on a Wednesday morning and said, in a very calm voice, that he needed to confess to something he had done in 1987, Cole looked up from his coffee with the alertness of a man who had learned that calm voices in Strange Creek are more alarming than panicked ones.
"Nineteen eighty-seven," Cole said.
"The science fair. Mrs. Abramowitz's class." Roger sat down without being invited. He had the look of a man who had been awake since three a.m. and had spent the intervening hours in productive self-recrimination. "I stole Danny Pulaski's baking soda volcano. Presented it as my own. Won second place."
Cole set down his coffee. "How old were you?"
"Eleven."
"And you're here because—"
"Because I remember it perfectly." Roger pressed his fingertips to his temples. "Not just that. Everything. Every word of every conversation I've had since approximately Tuesday. I remember what I had for lunch on March 14th, 2003. I remember the exact shade of blue of my mother's kitchen curtains in the house she sold in 1994. I remember—"
"The water," Cole said.
Roger blinked. "What?"
"You run the water treatment facility. Is there something in the water?"
Roger's jaw tightened. He looked at Cole and then over Cole’s shoulder, his eyes going into a state of thought — he seemed to be calculating something, doing the math and coming up with several unpleasant conclusions.
"Possibly," he said finally.
Cole was already reaching for his phone. "I need you to stay right here."
"Marshal, I want to be clear — this is not something I authorized or—"
"I know. Stay here, Roger."
◈
Dr. Vance arrived at the water facility eight minutes after Cole called her, which told him she'd already been awake and concerned. She came through the door, reading something on her tablet, absorbing the material quickly. She moved fast and efficiently, with authority and confidence. She wore a Prometheus Lab jacket, her silver-streaked hair close-cropped. Cole waited for her to speak.
"Dr. Osei's cognition enhancement trial," she said, before Cole could speak. "Three weeks running. Controlled group, sealed lab, zero cross-contamination. That was the projection."
"And the reality?"
"The reality is that Dr. Osei may have been optimistic about the seal on Lab Seven's drainage system." She finally looked up. "The compound is water-soluble."
"So the whole town—"
"Is experiencing enhanced episodic memory retention. Yes."
"For how long?"
"Forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Short half-life."
"And the antidote?"
"There isn't one yet."
"I need a timeline, Dr. Vance. People are already in my office confessing to sixth-grade science fair fraud."
"That's—" She stopped. "That's actually a fairly benign symptom."
"It's seven fifty in the morning."
She held his gaze for a moment, then turned back to her tablet. "I'll have Osei call you within the hour."
"I'd rather you tell me now what I'm going to be managing for the next three days."
"Two days. Possibly three." She pulled up something on the screen and turned it to face him — a filtration schematic overlaid with what looked like concentration curves. "The compound is already dispersing. The peak is now. It gets better from here, it just gets better slowly."
Cole studied the diagram. He didn't pretend to follow all of it. "What's the failure mode? What happens if someone's recall triggers something they can't manage?"
"That's why Dr. Bello is on my call list after this."
"She's already booked full through the weekend."
Vance's hand stilled on the tablet. "How do you know that?"
"She called Cruz an hour ago. I read the log." He handed her his notepad with the call listed. "I've been here six weeks. I read every log."
She took the notepad and looked at it, and something in her expression recalibrated — a small, precise adjustment. She handed it back. "I'll have Osei contact additional support staff."
"Thank you." Cole picked up his jacket from the chair. "And Dr. Vance — when you brief your team, I'd appreciate a heads-up before it goes out. Not after."
"The lab's internal communications are—"
"Mine is a courtesy request, not a jurisdictional one. You can say no."
A beat. She didn't say no. "I'll copy you."
◈
By noon, Deputy Cruz had four active complaints from neighbors re-litigating arguments that had apparently been festering since 2019. The Dairy Queen manager and her assistant manager had remembered, with perfect opposing fidelity, a conversation from four years ago that had ended in a draw and was now being resurrected with each party hoping for a better outcome in their favor. Cole handled that one personally: he got them each to say what they needed the other person to have heard, wrote it down in his notebook with the gravity of a man recording sworn testimony, told them he'd look into it, and moved the conversation onto who was going to run the Blizzard machine. It worked. People mostly wanted to be heard and considered.
He was back in the car when his phone rang. Eli.
"Hey, Eli."
"Dad." Eli paused, hesitating. "This memory thing is messing with me."
"What's happening?"
"I'm sitting in class and I keep— stuff keeps surfacing. Like, stuff I didn't ask to think about."
Cole glanced at the clock on the dash. Eleven forty. "What kind of stuff?"
"I remembered the hospital. The day Mom told us." His voice was steady, but Cole heard the strained effort as he spoke. "I remembered exactly what the waiting room smelled like. The color of the chairs. The way you held her hand and didn't say anything."
Cole pulled the sedan to the shoulder. Outside, Strange Creek looked perfectly ordinary: houses, October trees, the distant radio tower of Prometheus Lab catching the pale midday light.
"Yeah," he said.
"Is that going to keep happening? Like, randomly, all day?"
"Probably. It'll ease off."
"That's not super comforting, Dad."
"I know." Cole watched a crow land on a fence post and look at nothing in particular. "You want to come home?"
"No." Quick, certain. "I don't want to just sit there with it."
"Then stay at school. Keep moving."
"Is that what you're doing?"
Cole didn't answer immediately. The crow took off. "It's what I'm trying to do."
Eli was quiet for a moment. "I remembered the way she laughed when you said the data didn't support getting a second car."
"Tuesday argument. About the Subaru."
"You were so serious about it."
"The numbers genuinely didn't support it."
"Dad." A short sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "She thought you were so funny."
"She thought I was ridiculous."
"Yeah." The quiet stretched for a moment, easier now, the sharp edge off it. "Madison said something about that. About how memory is basically the brain deciding what mattered."
"Smart."
"She's— yeah." Eli said this in the careful, studied-neutral tone of a thirteen-year-old boy who thinks he’s being subtle. "She said she doesn't mind remembering the hard stuff as much as she thought she would. She said it means it was real."
Cole was quiet for a beat. "I think I agree with her."
"Me too."
"Six o'clock for dinner."
"Can I—"
"Eli."
"Six, fine." A pause. "Dad, do you— do you think about her a lot? Like, on a normal day?"
The question landed hard. Cole looked at the empty road ahead.
"Every day," he said at length. "Yeah."
"Okay." Something settled in the word. "Okay. Six o'clock."
"Six o'clock."
◈
Cole's own memory kept running at unusual fidelity for the rest of the afternoon. The weight of his pack on a specific morning in Kandahar. The smell of the hospital waiting room — antiseptic and recycled air and bad coffee from a machine down the hall. His wife's exact laugh. These things surfaced and receded like tide, neither welcome nor unwelcome.
He did not find this comfortable. He did not find it entirely bad.
At four fifteen, Dr. Vance sent him a three-line message: Osei had brought in two additional clinicians to support Bello. The concentration curves were tracking toward the lower end of the projection. He should expect baseline within forty hours rather than seventy-two.
He wrote back: Thank you for the update.
She wrote back, eleven minutes later: The Roger Henderson situation is not Osei's fault. The drainage seal was installed incorrectly in 2019 by a contractor the lab no longer uses.
Cole read this twice. It wasn't information he'd asked for. He wrote back: Noted. Not planning to go after Osei.
Her reply came in under a minute: I wasn't sure. Now I am.
Cole set down the phone and looked at the ceiling of the marshal's office for a moment. Then he went back to the incident log.
◈
Eli was home at five fifty-eight, which Cole counted as six o'clock by any reasonable standard. He came in, dropped his bag, opened the refrigerator, closed it, opened it again, and took out leftover pasta without apparent purpose.
"How was the rest of it?" Cole asked.
"Weird." Eli got a fork and ate the pasta cold, standing at the counter. "Mr. Dietrich remembered he owed a kid from his 1998 homeroom class five dollars and spent twenty minutes figuring out how to track him down. Mrs. Park cried in the middle of third period because she remembered something from her wedding. She said they were good tears ,but it was still—"
"A lot."
"A lot," Eli agreed. He was quiet for a moment, moving pasta around the container. "Madison remembered every conversation we've ever had."
Cole, who was chopping onions and was therefore looking at the cutting board, said nothing.
"Like, the exact words. From the first time we talked." Eli's voice was working very hard at normal. "She quoted me back to myself at lunch and I didn't remember saying it, but she said I had and— yeah."
"Was that good or bad?"
"I don't know yet." He put the pasta back in the refrigerator. "She remembered that I said she explained things without making me feel dumb. I didn't remember saying it, but she said I did."
"You did," Cole said. "You told me."
Eli went still for a moment. "You remembered that?"
"You said it in the parking lot after the Kowalski truck thing. Day two."
"That was— that was six weeks ago."
"I remember things that matter," Cole said simply, and went back to the onions.
Eli stood there for a moment longer. Then he got plates down from the cabinet and set the table without being asked, which, in the Briggs household, was its own kind of answer.
— End of Episode —
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