hey dogman, im a huge fan of dialtown and i’ve been thinking about callum and the whole answering machine head wipe thing. since his memory is presumably mechanical then is it possible its using magnetic tape like real life old telephones, and that frequently accessed/rewound memories get imprinted deeper over time, wouldn’t a single accidental button press probably not fully erase everything? and even with the technology of that era (presumably late 60s-70s if my memory is right) you could theoretically recover residual magnetic signals by running the tape back at really high amplification so is there any chance his oldest/most important memories are still in there, faint and recoverable as more than pseudo-dementia?
You're thinking along the right lines. The problem is Crown's situation isn't quite like Norm's wording would have you believe. The only person in-universe who could summarize the exact issue is Mingus - or anyone who's aware of what the experts she hired in a bid to fix his memory realized.
Basically, Norm got the gist of it, but like everything else he said, he's missing tons of vital information.
Crown was fascinated with cryptography. He loved mechanical puzzles, language and was predisposed to 'us against the whole world' paranoia, so naturally, ciphers appealed massively to him. While he worked with Milt, he often wrote memos in code to him. They became increasingly elaborate and Crown began to depend on them more as a way to feel safe... To the point where he began having important conversations with Milt entirely through ciphered text.
But, he was always concerned about having vital information tortured out of him by his enemies, especially since he was keenly aware of project MK-Ultra. Even if he resisted torture, scopolamine might've done the trick. I could go into a whole tangent about that drug and what it's used for today, but the long and short of it was - Crown was terrified of losing his mind or becoming delirious and cracking under pressure.
A common problem with designing an impenetrable lock that one (and only one person) can easily open is that inevitably - if someone wants to open it badly enough, they can simply pull a gun on the person who knows how to open it.
Crown couldn't stand the thought of his wife being targeted and possibly tortured - so he told her gradually less and less about his overall plans with time, which naturally degraded their relationship and made her feel as though Milt was supplanting her role in Crown's life. Deep down, he feared that he couldn't stand up to torture, given that he was not tested by war - unlike Milt. Milt, he thought, was the strongest and most trustworthy person he knew.
So, instead, he built a complex, incomprehensible memory storage mechanism within his own head, one that involved complex spinning belts spinning in different directions.
To summarize it briefly, data is stored in a basically unreadable format. You could imagine it like each 'memory belt' is encrypted with multiple complex overlapping ciphers, which can only be decrypted on the fly by the belts hitting different sensors in a specific order. Data is fragmented. When Crown's memory erasure button is pressed, the belts begin spinning quickly in the wrong order - this prevents memory from being read correctly.
The memory on the belts wasn't erased at all. The mechanism that reads the data was simply miscalibrated. Of course, the challenge to 'fixing' Crown's memory is basically that you'd have to deconstruct his head to figure out how he built it - which Crown would not survive. With Milt (secretly) being the only person to have the code, the idea was that if Crown felt threatened, he could press the button and Milt could use the recovery code to restore his memory - assuming Crown was still alive.
So, it's not that his memory was wiped per se, it's that he locked himself inside a safe and the only person he gave the key to is now gone.
Fun fact: this mechanism also explains why Crown occasionally becomes lucid. It's why he spends most of the day catatonic, have fleeting access to long term/important memories and then very occasionally becomes semi lucid/aware. This represents when the spinning belts become briefly aligned enough that a memory is read - but it doesn't stick, of course, as it gets recycled back into the spinning system.
There is one notable detail about the system that I've been sitting on for about 6 years. But, that's a story for another day.
I wrote a short story years ago about one of Mingus' attempts to get the mechanism fixed, this time using God. It's old and somewhat clunkily worded, but if you're curious to see some in-universe discussion of the system, this may do the trick.
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