It hadn’t seemed like she’d been working there for such a long time.
She hadn’t, in some ways. Against the backdrop of her entire lifetime, her time at the company she worked at would have barely registered as a blip. But that also would’ve had to have been looked at in the context of what a lifetime could mean for someone like her in the first place.
Still, the mind liked to settle places.
In her prime, she’d had the chance to get used to much grander settings than these, before she’d been forced out of them time and time again. This was an unglamorous occupation, to be sure, sitting in a cubicle day after day in an office building like many others, in sharp contrast with the temples, palaces and libraries of her youth. No one there had any idea of who she really was, but then, very few people ever could. The risks would’ve been just as bad for them as they would’ve been for her, when it all came down to it. In her world the power that came with knowledge was always a two-way street.
The job was a good way for her to draw as little attention as possible, which was exactly what she’d been looking for when she’d first applied for it. It was a good place to hide and consolidate what was left of her power, biding her time for as long as she’d need to. She was in no special hurry. It was an unglamorous job, but glamor was overrated. Most people would’ve found data entry mind-numbing, working at a computer terminal that in no way distinguished her from any of billions of other white-collar employees. Compared with some of what she’d endured, she found its monotony calming. In some small way, she was helping the world remember things, and that mattered.
For the time being, her mind had settled there and, for lack of a better alternative, it was almost home.
How long would they let it last this time? At first the question had been on her mind all the time but, after a time, it’d slowly receded to the back of her mind, waiting for a work shortage to idly resurface now and then before fading back into its dormant state. It was important for her to be alert to the extent to which she’d always be as ready as she could possibly be to respond when she’d need to, but beyond that, how crazy did she have to drive herself?
If her nerves grew more frayed with time, they could simply let her fester in her apprehension, even after they’d have found her, waiting for the stress to start their work for them so they’d only have to swoop in to finish the job. Better to stock up on trying to calm down while she had the chance, since she didn’t know how long it might be before she could find another hole in the wall to hide in, she reasoned.
As long as she didn’t take it too far, she also admonished herself. It was a catch-22, in a way: the more she became attached to her current situation, the more difficult it would become when she’d be forced back out of it, and would have no say in the matter. And yet, sitting in a cubicle like so many other workers, walking by the other workers on her way in and out of her cubicle every day, walking among the other passengers on transit to and from her job, it was only natural for anyone’s mind to begin to wander, to construct random scenarios, to wonder what all their lives might be like, what it might be like to be the way they were. How could she not?
She felt haggard most of the time at best, and truly didn’t know if she would have found herself attractive, if she’d been someone else looking at herself. It seemed so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, in the context of her day to day rat race for survival, yet there was the rub, paradoxically. She sometimes wished she could have been living the kind of life in which everything around her was scaled down a notch, just far enough that small matters such as these didn’t seem insignificant by comparison. The irony of knowing that people who thought of themselves as ordinary may have fantasized about existing the way she did but that all that she wished for herself was a simpler, smaller life was not lost on her, for all the good it did.
There was this mouse girl who worked in her building.
It wasn’t as though she had some sort of thing where she could only look at other rodents or something, mind you. If she’d been living the kind of life she wished for, she’d have probably looked at members of most other species as equal opportunity subjects. She may not have even been wary of cats! If she’d been a normal rat, in the kind of world she lived in, it wouldn’t have really mattered. It wasn’t like all cats were the same, or like the rules of primal nature still applied, at least not on the surface. She’d tried to look past the cat thing once before, but that had ended up serving as a cold reminder that she’d never have the kind of simple life she wished. She didn’t like to think about it, but of course it wasn’t like she could forget.
She couldn’t forget anything.
She didn’t even know whether the mouse would’ve been the kind of person who’d have been able to reciprocate her idle imaginings or not, if she’d said anything about them out loud. Far be it for her to assume others shared her predilections, and it seemed uncouth to use her powers to determine whether or not the mouse was likely to show attraction to other... rodents, as it were. At first she strove to banish those thoughts from her mind, chastising herself – business before pleasure – but the thoughts kept patiently, persistently coming back. The mouse seemed so clean-cut in comparison to how ‘ratty’ she felt, to how ratty she was. The mouse seemed to belong in her environment every bit as much as every other computer mouse in their workplace did.
In any case, while she tried not to talk to her too much so as not to arouse suspicion, they did always get along. Whenever she felt too anxious she would just retreat to rethink her approach when she’d feel more confident later. If the mouse had known everything about her, she might have found it amusing to think that such a being as she was could be plagued by such insecurities but, if she made a move on her and things went south, it may have become awkward for them to continue to work together after the fact.
Or it may have been what they were waiting for to intervene, out of their sheer cruelty. That thought wreaked havoc with her quiet fantasies whenever it popped into her head, and she developed a special hatred for these intrusions. In any case, for now, the mouse was friendly, unassuming and outwardly at peace with her life in just the exact right way that appealed to her. As long as she did nothing, she could keep what they had as it was, in a secret corner of her heart, and, well, maybe it could be enough, couldn’t it?
Her heart leapt – there she was! The mouse had approached her cubicle surreptitiously, the same way she did everything. Every time it happened, for a split second, before she had a chance of reminding herself that she shouldn’t think such things, the possibility that she was approaching her to ask her out flashed into her mind.
“Hi!”
Must shake off thoughts, initiate friendly facial expression in response. “Hey,” she waved, almost seeming too noncommittal in her determination to appear innocuous. “Can you help me?” Shake off! She’ll notice. “Sure!” She already sounded warmer. She loved how sometimes, when she spoke to mouse girl, this pleased lilt would creep into her own voice uninvited, just because she was happy to be talking to her. It seemed like such a small thing, but she’d always sounded so ragged. She wished she’d known more people who’d brought that out.
“There seems to be something wrong with our database.” The mouse sounded concerned. How serious was it? “Could I ask you to take a look at something, please?” “Of course!” She wasn’t sure what the problem was, or what she could do about it, but she loved to help, and knew enough there was a chance she could after all. “Thanks! Come with me.” The lights flickered as she got up to follow the mouse, and her whiskers twitched in a way she didn’t like as they did.
Every computer in the building went dark.
(Shit. Shit. No. Not again. Not here. Not this time. No)
People got up, yelping in dismay as their work was lost. For once, the mouse seemed panicked, out of place in this setting that was changing around her to become the kind of setting that she was not adapted to – the kind of setting that was meant for rats, not mice. While the rat was in some ways grateful that she at least knew what was happening, that she could in some sense do more about it in the immediate sense than the other workers could, even though she couldn’t in the long term, in other ways she envied their ignorance. Please, my mouse, you’re so confident all the time, you shouldn’t be reduced to this, it’s not right, you shouldn’t be my damsel in distress. You should be my queen...
“Get out!” The amplitude with which she’d projected her voice was unearthly, she realized when the mouse looked at her agape, but the time for stealth was past. “All of you, get out, now!” In that moment, the mouse looked at her, and yes, there was some fear, some confusion, and yet... there seemed to be concern, not only for herself, but for the rat who had worked by her side so innocuously for perhaps too long. Would she... would she have been kind enough to understand, if she’d known everything? She shouldn’t ask herself such things. “Will you...?” (Will you be all right?) All she wanted to do was tell her everything, her impossible life, her feelings for her, everything. “You too,” she almost cried, “Get out.”
He was there.
“Now!” the rat snapped, now downright afraid for the mouse’s life.
So the mouse ran, as fast as she could through the cubicle maze, out of the building, out of her life, evacuating with the other workers like there was no tomorrow. He walked between the cubicles around him as casually as if he’d only been out for another midnight stroll. “There you are,” he chirped, punctuating his overture with that fanged, cruel grin of his. She growled. “I’ve been looking for you,” he went on, as all staplers in her workplace now hovered menacingly around them over the cubicles of their former occupants.
Her expression said it all. “Why didn’t they send the big guns?” For all his power compared to mortal men, Manek was low in their hierarchy, and she never missed an occasion to belittle him by reminding him of this. “Who’s to say they didn’t?” He tried to mask his irritation at her barb, but she could see through him this time. Never again. “Did you forget last time already?” She egged him on. “I guess you don’t put much stock in remembering things.” Realistically, though, there’s no way they would’ve sent him alone. She could’ve handled two, maybe three men like him easily, and the Cat’s Eye knew it all too well. So who was his backup? She was taunting him, but also hoping to trick him into spilling the beans so she’d have a better idea of what to expect from whichever one it was.
“I remember some things quite well,” he smirked as she ‘pulled’ on the ink in the pens on every desk to lift them up in the air along with the staplers that he’d taken control of. “Do you?” He winked at her creepily, and as a shiver went down her spine she understood that one of the reasons they’d sent him had to have been psychological warfare. “Ah yes,” she answered coldly, “one of the few experiences I’ve had that have been more unpleasant that being repeatedly burned alive.” She had a history with Manek. Manek wasn’t just magnetic, she bore in mind, he was magnetism. “How could I forget?”
Under normal circumstances she’d have never let a cat, let alone a male cat, get as close to her as she’d allowed him to get. She wasn’t in the habit of doing such things. It was his power, his existence as universal attraction that had made her lower her guard around him, that had made her trust that maybe, just maybe, he was just some random white cat who found her cute, and wanted to see if things could work out between them. It wasn’t as though every cat was out to get her, was it? Intellectually she knew there were millions of cats on the planet who were perfectly harmless, who had never heard of the Cat’s Eye and who never would – couldn’t he simply have been one of them? He’d seemed amiable enough, and it wasn’t as though she’s signed a contract saying she could only pursue women, had she?
She gritted her teeth. How foolish she’d been. By the time she’d figured out what he’d really been up to, he’d managed to get her in a situation that became more difficult for her to get out of than she’d anticipated by far. In time he became one of the reasons for which she felt that she couldn’t afford to let her guard down around anyone at all, and she grew to resent him for it. “Nonsense,” he slurred, “you remember me like a fine piece of cheese, you do.” She stuck her tongue out at him defiantly, as though she were trying to chase a bad taste out of her mouth. “Get lost, Manek,” she spat at him, gingerly drawing the ink pens closer to her as she did. “You rodents are the ones who get lost,” he grinned, “and we,” he went on as all the floating staplers turned to face her and opened wide like so many metallic maws at the same time, “we cats are the ones who find you.”
Before she could think of another comeback, as the beckoning cat pointed his clawed finger at her, and all of the staplers started firing their staples at her, much faster than they’d had any right to by any means. Without missing a beat, she made all of the ink pens that she’d been gathering from around the workplace start whirling around her like so many satellites orbiting around a planet faster than the eye could follow, frustrating him by somehow always being in the exact right place to repel the staples even at their machine gun pace of firing, coming at her from every direction. When they’d finally run out of staples, while he realized that he could’ve simply lifted them from the ground to attack her with them again, she’d already humiliated him about having tried to attack her with them enough. He’d have to do better than that.
“You can find me, but you still wouldn’t know what to do with me if your life depended on it,” she retorted as oversized pigeon wings tore through her shirt sprouting from her back, “so why don’t you find some kind of dimensional cat flap to run away through while you still can?” He brought the staplers nearer to him while she picked feathers from her wings as though she’d been picking flowers in a field to hold eight of them between her fingers like kunai, any of which would have made a fine quill in a bygone age. People had always called pigeons ‘rats with wings,’ as though that were a bad thing.
“Don’t get-” Not letting him finish, she threw all eight of her pigeons feathers at him in rapid succession, each becoming sharper and pointier than any throwing knife as it flew toward him. Just as surely, the staplers circled around him as well, utterly destroyed by her piercing feathers certainly, but still stopping her projectiles in their tracks and protecting him from being reached by them. “Don’t get snippy,” he finished lecturing her as she retracted her pigeon wings back into her back through her now ruined shirt. “We already struck the first blow, you know.” She hated how well he played into that prissy, arrogant cat stereotype, as though she’d have been foolish to expect anything else.
“What do you mean by that?” Gathering eight staplers that hadn’t been destroyed by her pigeon feathers, Manek decided to up the ante by throwing all of them at her like so many projectiles themselves, making them open and close as though they were chomping at her and were going to eat her alive when they’d reach her. Unfazed, she split her rat tail into eight different rat tails, all of which snatched one of the staplers mercilessly from the air on their way to her in its coils like a hunting snake. She stuffed all eight of them into a large, terrifying, fang-filled maw that opened up across her abdomen, emitting a large belch from it before her abdomen and tail both returned to their earlier, ordinary state.
“When we first came in,” he strove to hide how unsettling he found it when she did that, “didn’t you notice?” This time she was the one who had to hide when her heart sank. Oh no. All the data that she’d been entering into those computers for all that time... The data entered by her co-workers! It was gone. All of it was gone. That was why they’d sent Manek. With his power, he’d been able to become like a powerful magnet that had wiped all of the computers’ memories clean. Every time data was lost – any of it – part of her died along with it, because it belonged to her, just as she belonged to it, just as the more was remembered, the better she’d be doing. It was just the way things were. That was why the Cat’s Eye wanted people to forget.
Everything.
“You said ‘we,’” she called out, “I knew they’d sent someone with you.” She was trying to hide her discouragement by picking on something she knew he wouldn’t like realizing he’d inadvertently revealed to her, but wasn’t sure of how well it’d been going to work. “It’s not like them to let you out to play without adult supervision.” He shrugged. “Spoiler alert.” Before she could reply, she saw multiple pebble-shaped objects swarm into the room out of the air vents, too blurry because of how fast they were coming in for her to have been able to tell what they consisted of at first.
“Peekaboo!”
A shiver went down her spine when she recognized who the voice belonged to. After their rapid swarming into the workplace, the floating objects paused, becoming perfectly still to let the menace sink in of what their presence there represented for her. There were too many of them for her to count, far scarier than any swarm of poisonous insects could’ve proven. They were eyes.
“I see you!”
Clearly, the situation had become serious enough that it was now time for her to join her co-workers who had, in their wisdom, vacated the premises forthwith. “It took you this many eyes to track me down?” It was always a good strategy to come across as more flippant than you really were. “The Cat’s Eye must need glasses in its old age.” The black cat cackled at the rat’s jest. “Haven’t you always been one of my favorite cat toys,” she purred, adjusting her pointed hat as she made her entrance. “So they sent the black and white to pick me up after all,” the rat observed flatly. The feline witch shrugged, refusing to be insulted by being compared to a police officer. “We make a good team.” Her black and orange striped shirt always looked too big on her.
“Well then, Candy,” the rat intoned as the innumerable myriad of floating eyes edged toward her menacingly, “since you brought so many of your eyes with you...” As the eyes finally started making a beeline for her, all the sheets of paper that had been written or printed on in her workplace flew up off their desks, the rat’s power over them as vectors of memory still as uncontested as they would’ve been before any magnetic memory wipe had affected anything, and began swirling around her at top speed like a perfectly controlled storm. “... I’ll just have to give them something to read!”
With the sheets’ trajectories all intersecting wildly in random patterns through the air all over the place, even Candy’s optical cornucopia had a hard time seeing anything in the room with any amount of reliability, much to the witch’s chagrin. When all the sheets but one fell back down to the ground limply, Manek and Candy were most displeased to notice that the rat who they were hunting had made the most of their confusion to leave the room without their notice. The final sheet folded itself into a paper airplane in midair, knocking Candy’s pointed hat off her head to add insult to injury.
Before Manek could follow her, Candy had already dashed out of the room to follow the rat out of it, then out of the building itself, without wasting a single second. Barely making a turn around a street corner in her hurried escape, the rat spied a sewer grating in the gutter next to her. She quickly transformed her arms, legs, chest and head into six different rats, all of which scurried through the grating into the sewers, hoping to lose the witch for good before reuniting back into a single shape later on when it would be safe to do so.
Coming upon the last place she’d seen the rat run off into before losing sight of her, Candy figured out what the rat must’ve done to make her lose track of her. She growled, realizing that she couldn’t follow, and braced herself for the only solution she could think of to that problem. After a third eye opened on her forehead, she reached up with her clawed hand to rip it out of its socket, bringing it to her mouth to chew on it like a piece of gum. Having imbued it with magic with her saliva, she threw it down the sewer, knowing it would continue to follow the rat through the sewers with the ability to see her and report to the Cat’s Eye about her whereabouts until it would no longer be possible for it to do so.
The rat wasn’t sure of what would happen if they ever killed her. Would everyone forget everything? Or would it take everyone forgetting everything for her to die? The only thing that she could do was everything she could to make sure that she’d never have to find out. She had lived for as long as there had been time itself and, even if she went on living for as long as she’d already lived as it was, she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to shake them off for good, to make a life for herself that was no longer about resisting them. Until then, she would always be on the run.
Her name was Mnemos.
