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We have myths that stay with us from childhood bedtime stories: tales of gentle kings and queens, docile servants and swords stuck in rocks that only the formidable and brave can pull from their sheaths. And we have those that sneak into our common consciousness much later, the dropped words that exist as a whisper without origin when we walk through a busy street and that could have come from every person we have just brushed past.
Phillip George Bastion keeps his ears open whenever he sits slurping his coffee or a few glasses of wine with friends or watches films that play with messages and the stories we all know and yet aren't aware of knowing. He and Anne Marie in the American Union and Paulus who is more of a loner than any of them, they are a few of the small 100 by 100 pixel avatars contributing to the Dynamic Interactional Memorybase, DIM.
They are the web 67.0.
'I think I freaked him out when I stopped him', Phillip types into a chat window. 'He tried to make a grab for my notebook.'
He gets up from his sofa for a glass of water, then settles down again and, between flashing chat windows of conversation, inputs his knowledge. Modern techcommunication classes call them the 30th-plus century Wikipedia but they don't record facts, they record opinion and memory and stories.
'I convinced him to talk to me,' Phillip adds.
'Nutjob', Paulus replies, one of the purists, who believes that they should only record the whispers.
'I wouldn't go there if it didn't keep showing up here. It's only here.'
'Nothing is only in one place,' Anne Marie interjects. 'Our stories are global, possibly universal.' She's working on the theory that the contacts with non-human colonies will show similar stories, similar myths and tragedies and disprove human uniqueness in the universe.
Phillip doesn't quite believe in even the global hypothesis. There are too many mutterings on his streets that aren't recorded for any other place or any other population in the database. It's the one lead he has, he thinks as he's sipping his water and watching information pop up on DIM as it's inputted around the globe.
He leaves his work station running as he goes to sleep, the faint glow of new records appearing around the world lulling him into dreams.
Phillip is spending a lot of time in this part of the town, lingering on house corners, listening to the squabble of old people's tales of their childhood, tales they'd been told by their parents and those by their parents. He's one of the few DIMmers who carries a notebook and a pencil, screenname Sherlock, and he doesn't mind that. It feels good in his hand, like it's alive, as he follows the bends of the alleys into the nooks and crannies of the town of old.
The address he's been given is indicated by a number on a door, and he knocks.
The armchair is stuffy and the flat smells damp, but the home system is the latest version, and Phillip can't resist glancing at it, surprised to see the DIM interface up. Yet old music is playing on the system.
"Wonderwall, 1990s. Oasis," the man leaning in the doorway says like it means anything to Phillip, wearing an old coat and out of fashion clothes. "You've been persistent."
He is stroking Phillip's notebook. It makes Phillip a little twitchy and he scoots to the front of his seat.
"It's a pattern," Phillip says after he clears his throat. "The story exists only here. It's only here that anyone even knows the word. The other day I heard a few boys toss it about on a playground. It's not anywh-"
"Torchwood," the man says.
Phillip stops midword then nods slowly and continues in a lowered voice. "No one knows what it is or where it comes from, or even if it's real or another tale of war of roses or whatever rubbish that-"
The man laughs and tosses Phillip his notebook, picks up a cup instead. He looks at him for a while. "I didn't think anyone would care to dig."
"It's what..." Phillip gestures at the DIM interface.
"I've been hoping no one would," the man clarifies, not letting Phillip interrupt. "It's so far in the past."
"It's real?" Phillip squeaks and tries to stay professional, reminds himself that he has been doing DIM for long enough that things like these, they do happen, that there are always people at the origin of stories.
"It was." The man shrugs and sips his coffee (no one drinks coffee anymore). "No one remembers."
"Collective memory," Phillip murmurs even if that only regurgitates theories from school.
"Should have dropped retcon in the atmosphere," the man says and waves Phillip's questioning noise away. "It's gone. Has been for a millennium and a bit. Funny how this," the man nods at DIM, "is all that remains of it. People remembering a word."
"And you," Phillip says once he's wet his lips and swallowed the lump of excitement. "You remember something. How is that- do you- a record? Anything? Do you-" He looks around the flat for a scrap of paper, they used to have a lot of paper a millennium ago, or a disk maybe.
The man looks at him, hands deep in the pockets of his coat. He pulls out a scrap of paper and hands it to Phillip. It's been sealed to keep it from falling apart.
Underneath the printed letterhead
Torchwood Institute
Cardiff
it reads in hasty handwriting:
Call Gwen! Weevils! - I.
Phillip glances at DIM and wants to rush over and input this as a new entry. "This means... wow... this is big." His mind is burning to process.
"Not really." The man taps to his heart, eyes twinkling. "What you remember here is important," he says. He pushes his hands into his pockets, nods at DIM. "Everything else is only unconnected pieces."