Wonder (Wondrous Material)
Description:
A Memory-Giver in Any Other Shape Would Look as Strange
No two pieces of thymedoron are exactly alike—a fact which explains why the wondrous substance is also referred to by the common names of “memory sponge,” “memory stone,” and “memory-giver”—but every specimen shares a number of similarities. In appearance and composition, for example, thymedoron resembles a fragment of porous stone made of a dull grey metal that’s both oddly spongy and rough to the touch.
Other features that may be used to identify thymedoron include the fact that the Wondrous material releases an incredibly cold vapor when placed in salt water, it seems to annihilate anything with a pH less than four on contact, and the innumerable apertures of every piece play host to highly animated drops of technicolor oil that perpetually crawl through it like ants in a vivarium.
Thymedoron’s most spectacular attribute, of course, is its eponymous ability to give memories.
How the Memory-Giver Got Its Name
When a sophont touches a piece of thymedoron, the droplets’ near-Brownian motion and spasmodic color changes will turn ordered for a moment, almost rhythmic, the only outward signal that the thymedoron has been activated. It is during this short-lived decrease in entropy that the sophont will suddenly “recall” their thymedoron-induced memory in extraordinarily vivid detail. What’s more, their sensory fidelity is far greater than any personal recollection, and the intensity of those qualia never fade with time.
Quirks:
More Real Than Reality Itself (Forever)
Someone who uses a piece of thymedoron and receives the memory of a moving symphony, or an exquisite meal, or a triumphant victory, may view the ever-pristine nature of these mental souvenirs as a blessing—who would not want to perfectly recreate such an experience over and over?
There are those who do regret the appreciate the incorruptible nature of their new memories, however—they are not always pleasant, nor even comprehensible. Someone may activate a piece of thymedoron only to find themselves forever burdened by the memory of committing vile atrocities, or the gruesome suffering of a loved one in perfect fidelity, or experiences that inspire existential dread so potent it forever festers in the mind like a wound. Despite the platitude, there are some things that Time cannot heal, and thymedoron-induced memories are one of them.
I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Memories...
Despite the risks involved to one’s mental health, the possibility of a permanently pristine memory is enough of a draw to most that “mnemo-merchant” is quite a popular and lucrative profession. To further insulate themselves from risk, mnemo-merchants do not technically charge their clients for the purchase of memories (as this could imply that the merchant is responsible for the contents of said memories). Instead, clients pay a fee for the damage done to the merchant’s piece of thymedoron—unlike the experiences they induce, thymedoron is not incorruptible.
Each time a thymedoron chunk is activated by a sophont, it loses a number of the brightly colored droplets within it, a figure that increases proportionally to the total number of uses. After a critical point has been reached, the mnemo-merchant is left with what they categorize as a “useless metal sponge,” which is why the fees they charge only go towards the purchase of a new piece of thymedoron to continue their trade, as a matter of honor.
(Of course, referring to thymedoron as “useless” after it’s been wrung dry of memories is a bit deceiving. True, it’s no longer useful to the mnemo-merchant’s primary occupation, but the material’s other anomalous properties remain, including its ability to create cool vapor when immersed in salt water. This makes thymedoron chunks highly sought after by those who dwell in hot and arid climates—many of whom, funnily enough, may have never interacted with thymedoron in its original context—and these sales often make up a greater portion of most mnemo-merchants’ wealth.)
Perfection’s Price is High
The professional honor of mnemo-merchants demands that they ensure potential clients fully understand the permanent nature of the transaction they are about to partake in, even if doing so would lose the merchant business. No matter the content of a thymedoron-induced memory—even if senescence, trauma, or disease should ravage the client’s mind—no force yet found will mar its crystalline beauty nor dull its razored edges. As the saying goes, “A mnemo-merchant has two kinds of customers: fools and lucky fools.”
But those who would receive a mental experience of such clarity must pay another cost, one mnemo-merchants do not share not out of malice, but ignorance—the circumstances that permit its occurrence are so rare they are not often found outside of scholar’s experiments. In the words of Mindmapper Elech Coronadandrium (a Timekeeper researcher specializing in the subject):
“...the results of these latest experiments make it clearer than ever that any who oppose the Mechanical Mind Hypothesis* cannot claim to do so on any grounds not rooted in opposition to those who champion the theory themselves.** Once again, the overwhelming body of evidence conclusively shows that thymedoron-induced ‘recollections’ were not designed to be imparted into the retro-sensorium of any sophont unable to increase the size of their mental storage space due to the cognitive load they require by dint of the variety of qualia they induce in the receiver. Furthermore...”
[Editor’s note: To spare the reader from having to comb through the rest of Mindmapper Coronadandrium’s research notes, a brief summary of said notes’ conclusion through the use of a metaphor.] If one imagines one’s mind as an electronic hard drive and one’s memories as files stored in that hard drive, the “files” created by a Memory-Giver are not only unable to be deleted, but also much larger than normal—often by several orders of magnitude. And if there is no extra storage space to store one of these uber-files, one’s regular files will be overwritten to make room, a process that can continue to the point where one’s capacity for storing everyday memories may only be enough for a few minutes at a time. Therefore, sophonts interested in paying their local mnemo-merchant a visit, remember: Caveat Emptor.
*An idea espoused by Coronadandrium and a few colleagues that suggests that the Wonder was created by machine sophonts as opposed to baseline organic beings.
**Namely, Coronadandrium.
Adventure Hooks:
Knowing That Something Works =/= Knowing How It Works
The PCs patronize a mnemo-merchant, and one of them receives an interesting memory of a bookish hermit who lived in a sea-side tower called the Searing Spire. In a bit of a meta-twist, this hermit also enjoyed using a Memory-Giver, but seemed to have done so every day for years and years without the Wonder ever getting used up. Apparently, they’d figured out a way to take the tar-like substance that accumulated in the tidepools at the base of Searing Spire and use it to brew a compound that, when slathered on a Memory-Giver and baked for a short while over an open flame, restored the Wonder’s potency completely.
The PC who experiences this memory is able to recall the hermit’s recipe for the miracle elixir in perfect clarity, a fact that would make them very wealthy if they decided to sell this secret to the right person, if not for one small wrinkle… The PC remembers that the key to the compound is the tar the hermit gathered, but not what it was made of, so if the PCs want to make their fortune, they’ll need to make a discovery of their own.
Awake, Oh Dreamers, Awake and Be Free!
Rumor has it that the Retrospectator’s Guild (one of the wealthiest guilds in the already affluent city of Abalijan) has recently gained some newfound competition. It seems that back-alley mnemo-merchants are not only giving away memories to anyone who asks, but they’re doing so for free—a flagrant violation of the profession’s code of ethics. In order to save Abalijan’s citizens from the “ministrations” of reckless charlatans, the Retrospectators are offering a reward to anyone who can provide information as to the identities of these profligates, (so long as it leads to their capture by the city’s Citrine Invigilators, of course).
The common people aren’t buying it, though. Most regular folk the PCs ask about the situation are convinced the Retrospectators are just irritated that someone decided to do in truth what the Guild only claims to offer— the chance to remember a better life than this one. The Guild says the fees they charge are to “Maintain its stock of thymedoron” and that even with the city’s trade deals, the Wondrous material is still very expensive. How then, do they explain, that these self-made mnemo-merchants who’ve recently popped up all over town, each one giving away memories for free?
Sure, the PCs learn, those memories seem to have been mostly horrifying. And true, people who visit the “unofficial” Retrospectators seem different somehow, brighter, as though a new and inner fire burns behind their eyes. And yes, there has been a lot of graffiti lately that all say something along the lines of, “Awake, Oh Dreamers, Awake and Be Free!” but that’s all fine...right?
And You May Ask Yourself, “How Did I Get Here?”
To escape a bizarre and violent storm, the PCs seek refuge in a large manor home, where they’re greeted by a tall, well-muscled neuter person with golden eyes and a bright smile, who introduces xirself as Hafsaht Wanders-No-More and invites them in. Hafsaht explains that the manor actually belongs to Shemender Bilinirk, a former mnemo-merchant-turned-caretaker who has converted his home into a sanitarium for the memory-lost. Seeing that the PCs are unfamiliar with the term, Hafsaht invites them into the parlor to make themselves more comfortable and then shares xir story.
Up until xe came to the sanitarium, Hafsaht believed xe was an “incarnated,” a digital mind implanted in a physical form in order to explore the so-called “real” world (in comparison to the dataplanes digital minds call home). But something strange happened when Hafsaht came to Shemender’s manor and partook in some thymedoron with the caretaker—Hafsaht recognized the memory. Not as something xe had experienced, either, but as a simulation xe had constructed. Before Shemender’s treatment, Hafsaht would have sworn with absolute certainty that xe knew that sophonts of the dataplanes created them as fictions, fabricated “memories” designed to evoke certain emotions, to be traded, duplicated, or deleted at will. (A much easier trick when one’s mind is digital.)
But after staying with Shemender for a while, Hafsaht began to see the holes in xir life story, gaps of knowledge that didn’t make sense. Hafsaht remembered coming from a dataplane and what life was like there, but not one moment of the trip to Shemender’s sanitarium. And if Hafsaht really were an incarnated like xe believed, one would expect to find certain kinds of cybernetic implants in xir brain, if not an entirely positronic brain. And yet, Shemender’s scans show the only thing in Hafsaht’s cranium to be completely organic and ordinary. Thus, xir diagnosis as “memory-lost,” someone who’s used thymedoron so often that their real memories have been crowded out by induced ones, and their mind has confabulated a fictional story of their past to try and make sense of what they “remember.”
The storm outside still rages after Hafsaht’s story, so the PCs will need to stay at Shemender’s manor for the night. However, when they find a note scribbled on a scrap of paper in their room, it becomes clear that all is not as it appears to be in the sanitarium. Even more bizarre, when the PCs wake up the next morning, they do not remember what they were doing before they got caught in the storm, nor where the sanitarium is located, and when they look for the strange little note, they can’t remember what they did with it...
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