Factory Reset

When His Brain Runs out of Space, a Popular Senator Has an Existential Crisis

Dear Senator Tooley,

This is a letter to inform you that your annual diagnostic test indicates that your brain is almost full. To protect against future performance loss, we urge you to free up storage space immediately at one of our six convenient locations.

Sincerely,

WaveTech Technology

Senator David Tooley had read the letter a dozen times. He still didn’t understand it. I mean, he wasn’t entirely surprised that his brain was running out of space. He was, after all, a U.S. Senator and many people regularly told him how intelligent he was.

“MELINDA!”

Melinda was David’s favorite aide, a curvy Puerto Rican he had plucked from obscurity at last year’s Girls Nation Conference.

“Find out if WaveTech is real and if my brain is really running out of space, and if it is really running out of space, find out how they could possibly know that.”

He handed her the letter and off she went.

One might think this was the strangest assignment he’d given Melinda in his first term as the junior senator from the commonwealth of Virginia. Far from it. After a recent meeting with an animal rights group, he asked her if she could track down “the sword part” of a swordfish so he could feel the tip and see if it was truly as sharp as an actual sword or if the seafood industry was using deceptive naming practices to boost sales.

(It turned out they are that sharp and the senator’s curiosity ended with a trip to the Capitol Urgent Care.)

Melinda returned before lunch with an answer to his questions.

“WaveTech is a real company. Your father was an A-round investor in the late 90s. As a thank you, WaveTech has been monitoring your brain with a small chip they implanted in your ear canal when you were eleven. And yes, according to their latest scan, your brain is critically low on storage.”

David stared back blankly. He wasn’t sure what he should do with this information. And the fact he didn’t know what to do only worried him more. Perhaps that indecision in itself was a sign of just how fragile he was.

“Make me an appointment,” he blurted out, his heart starting to flutter with his far too familiar anxiety. “And don’t tell Rochelle. Or Erica.”

Rochelle was the senator’s loyal wife and mother to his two middle schoolers. Erica was the senator’s twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend. The senator had been promising Erica for eight months that she was the true love of his life and that Rochelle’s days were numbered. But now he worried that it was he whose days were numbered. And if Erica knew he was unlikely to live long enough to become an entrenched DC incumbent with the financial means to bankroll her own aqua yoga studio, he might find out just how seriously she takes that “FAFO” tattoo on her right ankle.

David skipped his morning Budget Committee meeting and drove himself to WaveTech’s Maryland office for a 10am appointment. An armed security guard ushered him through an empty lobby lined with paintings of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton and Marie Curie and into a warmly lit consultation room furnished with a pair of black, square, leather chairs and a perfect white orchid on a marble side table. “It’s a Beautiful Day” played from an unseen speaker.

“How nice to see you again.”

Senator Tooley turned to find a gentle woman in her 60s, sporting a lab coat and holding an iPad. “I’m Dr. Simons.”

David rose and shook her hand. She had just applied vanilla hand lotion and for a moment their right palms were congealed together in slippery symbiosis. “Have we… met before?” he asked.

“1998,” she said. “You thought you were getting your tonsils out. Instead… we were putting something in.”

David should have been disturbed to hear this but he wasn’t. Dr. Simons was so comforting, so maternal, and deep in that jam-packed brain of his he remembered her voice. “So I… still have my tonsils?” he wondered.

Dr. Simons laughed. “Indeed. But we gave you ice cream anyway.”

She sat knee to knee with David and looked deep into his soul. “Your father took no pleasure in lying to you. But you don’t get to be one of the richest men in America without taking risks. At the time of his investment, our technology was largely unproven. Now using microchips to tap into brain activity and maximize one’s potential is almost banal, as they say.”

“True,” David said.

In all honesty, David couldn’t remember what “banal” meant. And Dr. Simons’ implication that “they” were all saying it made him feel even more insecure about the state of his intellect.

“So how bad is it?” he asked. “My brain, that is.”

Dr. Simons pulled up a live shot of David’s gray matter on her iPad. It looked like a radar report over a thunderstorm. Oranges and reds and yellows pulsing with activity.

“This is you,” she said. “As you can see, there is a lot going on. In fact, you have the most active hippocampus I’ve ever recorded.”

“Oh no,” he said.

“That’s not a bad thing,” she said. “The hippocampus regulates emotions and stores memories, it helps with spatial awareness, problem solving... The issue is that, as you can probably tell from this scan, things in there are a little… tight.”

David couldn’t tell anything. What he could feel was the first twinges of a migraine. Or maybe it was something worse. Was this another sign? Was this meeting pushing his brain beyond its natural capacity? Would his skull split open right then and there and his hippocampus ooze onto Dr. Simons’ fancy leather chairs?

“But we can fix it,” she explained. “It’s simply a matter of offloading unnecessary data.”

She flipped away from the brain scan to a pie chart with dozens of colors to it. “There are a lot of unimportant things we can lose here,” she said. “See that small blue sliver?”

David looked closer at the pie chart.

“Those are stored Nintendo cheat codes from your childhood,” she explained.

“Oh sure,” David said. “Up up down down left right left right B A select.”

Dr. Simons smiled. “And see that medium green slice?”

David nodded.

“That is a detailed business plan for an oven-baked sandwich shop.”

“When I was younger I dreamed of opening one. I was going to call it--”

Dr. Simons already knew the answer: “Tooley’s Toasties.”

“Exactly.” David shook his head in amazement. “Okay, what’s that giant red wedge?”

“Pornographic images.”

“Oh.”

“The good news is we can delete them. In fact, I estimate when we’re done with our sweep we can easily free up forty-six percent more space in your brain.”

David was speechless.

“David, do you know all the knowledge you could absorb with forty-six percent more brain space?”

David shook his big full head.

“You could become the smartest man in the United States Congress.”

Senator David Tooley smiled as he stared past Dr. Simons. The smartest man in Congress…

He pondered what he could do with such an advantage. He’d never lose another argument. Which would open up committee chair positions. Which would allow him to push through any legislation he wanted. Which meant he could funnel millions of dollars from Washington D.C. to his home state. Which meant he could eventually funnel millions of dollars into his own pocket. Which meant Erica could finally have her aqua yoga studio.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

Dr. Simons pushed a green button on the wall and a blonde nurse entered with a glass of mint-infused water. She pulled a lever and David’s black leather chair flattened into a recliner.

“Oh. We’re doing this now?”

“Offloading only takes thirty minutes. And it’s painless. I just need a credit card and a release form.”

“Right. Um. How much money are we talking here?”

Dr. Simons, now standing, looked down at him in the recliner. “Normally we charge eight-five thousand dollars. But because your father was an early investor, I’ve been given permission to offer you a fourteen percent discount.”

David tried to figure out the math. He couldn’t. But so what, he thought. Once this was done, he could become great at math. He could become great at everything. Any money spent today would be made back tenfold on the other side of the offloading. You don’t get rich without taking risks, Dr. Simons had said.

“I’ll put it on my work card,” he said, handing her his Visa. If upgrading your noggin wasn’t a legitimate senatorial business expense, David didn’t know what was.

The nurse turned his head to the side, filled a small bulb syringe with mint water, and squeezed it into his ear.

“The water helps make an electric connection to the chip,” Dr. Simons explained.

David nodded. This all felt right. He couldn’t wait to tell Erica. She would be so proud of him. She always said how smart he was. She said he was the smartest man she’d ever done aqua yoga with, which was really saying something since Erica’s client list included two Supreme Court Justices. And if Erica thought he was that smart before the offloading, he could barely imagine what would she think of him after the--

“Oh darn.”

Dr. Simons said it quietly. But loud enough that David could hear it through his ear that wasn’t filled with mint water.

“Everything okay?”

“Darn darn.”

“Dr. Simons?”

She didn’t respond. David’s head was tilted so he could only see her Gucci sneakers shuffling nervously as she told the blonde nurse to run and find a charging cord.

Seconds later, the nurse was yelling from the next room. “USB-C or lightning?!”

“I DON’T KNOW!”

That was the last thing Senator Tooley remembered.

He woke up two hours later to see Dr. Simons looking down at him with a nervous smile. “How we feeling?”

David smiled back. “I feel… rad.”

Dr. Simons’ face fell. Not the answer she was hoping for. She pulled David’s chair back into the upright position and knelt down in front of him.

“Here’s the deal…” she began. “We had a bit of a power issue when we were doing your offloading.”

“Okay.”

“My iPad died.”

“Okay.”

“And when it rebooted, there was some data loss.”

“Okay.”

“In your brain.”

“Well like… how much?”

“It was a full factory reset.”

David didn’t know what that meant. And Dr. Simons struggled to find the proper words to explain it. But, in short, Senator David Tooley’s brain had been rebooted to its original 1998 settings.

“I reversed the charge on your Visa,” Dr. Simons added.

David sat in stunned silence.

“Would you like some ice cream?”

David took his two scoops to go and walked down the hall toward the exit. You might assume he felt angry. Or panicky. But David felt… surprisingly calm.

But really it wasn’t a surprise. Because David was never anxious as a child. He never worried about anything. That only came when his older brother got sick and his dad went to prison for the largest insider trading scandal in American history and people he had never met before put their hands on David’s shoulder and told him that only he could salvage the Tooley family name.

The expectation to be his own family’s savior was a heavy burden and gave birth to a variety of fears. Fear of failure. Fear of being exposed as “the dumb son” who only graduated college because Dad made a phone call. Fear of disappointing his mom and his wife and his kids. And from the fear flowed resentment and various addictions and, in time, the most dangerous side effect of all: success.

But all that baggage was lost in the factory reset. Like a boat that had been scraped clean of its barnacles, David Tooley sped home unencumbered, in possession of his memories but freed from a lifetime of dysfunction and deceptions. He was, in the most important of ways, a new man.

His wife Rochelle met him in the kitchen. “Who the bleep is Erica?”

“Oh.” As a trained politician, David would have typically met the accusation with a creative lie and then a counterattack, but the reset had erased all such skills. “Erica is my girlfriend,” he answered.

“Get out,” she said.

That was fair. He drove to his office on Capitol Hill where he tossed and turned on his couch until morning.

Melinda arrived at 8am to shuttle him to his Budget Committee meeting. She was armed with coffee and egg whites. David pushed them away. He requested Froot Loops.

For the next hour, David sat with the committee’s twenty-one other members, slowly stirring his technicolor milk, thoroughly bored as lawyers and staffers “buttoned up” a 2,000 page omnibus bill. He couldn’t track most of what was happening, and most of the other senators didn’t even try. Some scrolled their phones or played Wordle. One elderly senator stared at the floor as an aide stood at the ready, wiping his chin when needed.

Eventually, David nodded off, his hand tipping his Froot Loops bowl, sending a surge of blue and red and yellow milk onto the desk in front of him. He snapped to attention, using pages from the bill to mop up the mess before it reached his pants. Crisis averted, he found himself staring at page 743:

83.c.IV - Allocates a sum of $5,000,000,000 (five billion) to the Amazonian Freedom Fund for immediate use.

Could that be right. Five BILLION dollars? His purified brain knew that was a big number.

“What is this?” David asked.

The room quieted.

“83 dot… c dot… roman numeral 4?”

A lawyer piped in. “Yes, Senator, that line item funds an embedded group of freedom fighters in South America committed to… destabilizing hostile governments.”

“Isn’t that, like, a lot of money?”

“This is a vetted group, sir--”

“I’m just saying in Contra it only takes two guys to do that exactly same thing. And all they need are big guns and an unlimited supply of ammo.”

The group stared back, more or less matching the look of the drooling senator in the corner.

“You guys don’t remember Contra? From the original NES system? What was that cheat code…” He couldn’t remember it. He pressed on. “I’m just saying five billion dollars could be better spent somewhere else. Or… like… not at all?

David’s phone buzzed in his lap, breaking the silence. He looked down as a string of texts rolled in from Erica.

He escaped to the hall and started reading.

Oh God, David realized… My girlfriend is a crazy person.

He felt a sensation creep up from his heart and into his head.

David was too naive to know it was fear.

Which is when Ron Billums, the senior senator from Colorado, emerged from the committee room. His eyes were locked on David.

“Hi Ron…”

“We need your vote to get this thing out of committee,” he said bluntly.

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“David, this bill is vital to the well-being of millions of hardworking Americans.”

“But a lot of what’s in it just seems… stupid.”

“The only thing stupid right now is you.”

David’s chest tightened. “I don’t know…”

Senator Billums sighed. “David, what if I could promise you a fifty million dollar grant to the Tooley Center for Democracy.”

“The Tooley Center for Democracy? Is that a thing?”

“It can be.”

“What would the Tooley Center for Democracy do?”

“Whatever your board of directors wants it to do.”

“It sounds kinda sketchy.”

“It’s perfectly legal and it’s a wonderful way to honor your father.”

“He was kinda shady too.”

Senator Billums stepped closer and placed his hand on David’s shoulder. “Don’t act like a child, David. This is the kind of opportunity that not many people get -- the chance to restore your family to their former glory.”

David couldn’t ignore the pressure in his head now. He could feel his eyelids twitching. His throat was dry.

“Just say yes and all your problems go away,” the senior senator whispered.

But David knew that wasn’t true. He had said yes to all sorts of things he shouldn’t have said yes to. And because of it, his brain had been reset, his wife hated him, and his girlfriend was ready to out him as an adulterer on Instagram.

“I’m a definite no, Ron.”

David drove home that night. The front door was locked so he rang the bell.

Rochelle answered but said nothing.

“I screwed up. In a lot of ways. More than I probably even know. You’re right to be hurt. And mad. You can be mad for a year if you want. I’ll take it. But I’m not gonna leave. I’m gonna be different. I kinda hope I already am.”

He took a blanket and slept in the living room. The next day, David resigned from the Senate. By the time Erica tried to cancel him, he was already irrelevant.

---

The following January, a new oven-baked sandwich shop opened in Virginia Beach. Tooley’s Toasties. There was no grand opening. On most days David worked the kitchen while Rochelle manned the register. After school their kids would do homework at the counter and drink soda till Rochelle cut them off.

Two months in and they still hadn’t turned a profit. It was hard. Business was slow, especially in the winter. The mail came in the late afternoon. David waved to the postal worker and leafed through a stack of bills he wasn’t sure he could pay. At the bottom of the pile was a letter with a familiar letterhead.

Dear David,

During a recent audit, our team discovered an offshore server containing timed backups of various clients’ brains. We are happy to inform you that your brain backup was among those found.

Please contact us at your earliest convenience and we will be happy to restore you to your pre-reset status at no charge.

Sincerely,

Dr. Simons

David considered the offer. Then he looked around the shop. At his wife. And his kids. Then David Tooley threw the letter into the sandwich oven and watched it burn.

---