Memory

The login indicator for his game was boring. He was running seven other processes while he waited for the server handshake protocol to finish, including finishing up a movie from before The Fall. The latest upgrades to the network meant he had nearly limitless memory access. As the startup sequence for the game began, he actualized one of his current favorite avatars. He stepped into the game's lobby a seven-foot tall, neon green version of himself - or at least as near to himself as he could remember. It had been so long since he checked, so long since he’d even thought of checking. Mirrors obviously were not an option anymore. But green was cool right now, or it was trending in the last several minutes at least. That was all anyone would really notice.

He had more than 90 avatars he could have chosen from. Crazy how several centuries will really flesh out your wardrobe. But it had been easy to pick this time. This game was usually played by younger beings, or at least beings that wanted to feel young and hip and woke. Or whatever the latest slang was circulating. He wanted to feel young and look cool. Set aside the centuries for a couple cycles and pretend to be a digital native. Fit in. It made things… easier. Some things never change.

In 2521 picking your avatar was about as fluid as the long-extinct chameleon’s skin; you wore however you wanted to identify. Gender, race, sexuality and even identity itself was up for grabs - it wasn’t like anyone could ever see you to call you out on it. The morons in 2109 had made sure of that. Nobody would be knocking on anyone's bunker doors. Nobody was even around to make the journey.

Growing up, “The Apocalypse” had always been hot, dusty, adventurous stories of wastelands; oft infested with robber barons and vagabonds and one lonely noble outlaw, finding his way.

The truth is always colder.

In fairness most of the old world was wasteland. But there wasn't much to be said for wandering around. The surface had been turned to so much ash and glass. Radiation didn't make the surface glow, not like in cartoons, but the chill air was no less deadly. It hardly mattered. The real glow was deep within, thermal generators humming to keep the databanks alive, and in doing so keeping the last of humanity... well, alive was one way of describing it.

In the decades leading up to The Fall, stories had circulated time and time again of how humanity would upload itself into the glorious singularity, becoming one with the machines they had designed and living forever. When the tech had finally caught up with the hype, that first wave of explorers had been uploaded almost overnight.

The state-sanctioned cyber criminals who also went in that first upload were ruthlessly effective. There had been about 6 months of continual, systematic destruction as aged infrastructure was exploited repeatedly. After that point, the wheels of war were spinning and would not be stopped. As the geopolitical situation verged on apocalyptic, most private industry reshaped itself. The writing was on the wall. Like rats in a building on fire, the collective private industry sought a way to survive. The server farms built undersea were the first – the poor souls who uploaded into those backups became a stark lesson on the fragility of digital immortality.

One of the first measures of security a digital native now took was to secure backup hard storage in multiple locations. A series of server commands, a currency transaction. But only those beings who had been sentient before The Fall could truly understand what that security meant. How could you really explain to a digital native the concepts of concrete, immutable earth encasing the tiny components that kept everything running? Or how an earthquake along the wrong fault line could disconnect a vault from the grid and permanently erase anything not backed up?

He hadn’t tried to have that conversation in longer than he could remember. Relationships were so transient now. You could step from one moment to the next an entirely different being, limited only by your whims and imagination. Digital natives took to it more naturally, having never known anything else. For some it was the ease of going with the flow, treading the path of least social resistance. For some it beget opportunity for near-permanent hate. There was always something to discriminate against, always a fight to pick when you could change anything about yourself.

He died again. This new game was a little tricky, unfamiliar. He found himself losing interest. Four other processes were stimulating him, and he exited out of the game with little fanfare. No one would have noticed had he announced he was leaving. In the 14 minutes he’d been playing, he hadn’t acknowledged any of the hundreds of players who had joined and left the game either. Instant gratification had taken on a fundamental role in the facsimile of lives now led.

However, it hadn’t all faded away. On cycles like this one, when he was reminded that he couldn’t even remember what he had once looked like, he retreated from the web. He severed each connection one at a time, viscerally feeling the shadow of a memory: turning off the lights one by one. Drawing the shades. Checking the locks on the doors.

He had survived The Fall. He had made his preparations with his own hands, could still tell himself that he remembered what having hands actually felt like. Somewhere in what had once been a mountain range on the continent of South America, there was a bunker system that he had helped design. Locked away in that long-forgotten vault was a room. He had taken painstaking care to develop his own fail-safes, his own recovery protocols. Backups upon backups, redundant battery systems, and of course extra memory.

It had taken up most of the space in that small chamber. Space had been at a premium, but he had known that the expense would be worth it. Most of the space, but not quite all. There had been enough extra room for an empty desk, bracketed by bookshelves. Still plugged into the bunker’s systems, across from the desk and drawing barely any power at all, was a now-archaic webcam. It could only pan left or pan right. He had been forced to be strategic before he sealed it all away.

All of his processing power was available to him whenever he visited this ip address; devoted solely to this. He allowed no distractions – in a world where the thin line between life and death had been erased, this was the closest he came to a religious experience. This was his shrine, not to a nebulous deity or the promise of a brighter future but rather to the comfort of a past that could never again be.

He panned left. He took in a bookcase, carefully preserved so that the books encased there wouldn’t rot away to nothing. Relics of an era before everything was so damn connected. Humanity’s first crack at time travel. He’d walked with the greats, been enchanted by their minds and pondered life’s mysteries with scholars who lived thousands of years before he’d been born. Perhaps he’d ponder life’s mysteries in real time with beings born thousands of years from now.

He panned right. Across a lifetime’s worth of memorabilia, yet encompassing a meager fraction of the time he’d been “alive.” A handful of trophies, from a time when trophies had meaning. A set of rings, the first two from schools and the latter a matched set that wouldn’t ever again feel the warmth of promised hands. A violin he had bought in a pawn shop in Venice. Two ticket stubs to a Broadway show he had felt was a timeless classic. He could hardly remember the night.

Oh how things fade.

There in the center, a tarnished locket shaped like a heart. On the one side, a picture of his mother. A face he never forgot, no matter how long he spent on the net, no matter how split his focus became. The kind of anchor point that a being can always find. His north star.

On the other, a picture of himself, his arms wrapped around the last person he’d kissed. Immutable and therefore foreign to a world that could simulate every sensation without any reality at all. And yet all he had left of her.

He was awash in memory, in a way that only seemed to truly hit him as he immersed himself in the past. There was no need for immediate gratification in the contemplation of what had been. No need for multiple stimulating processes when the weight of your entire attention could be levied upon a scene and still find more to drink in.

He panned back and forth for a while longer. He wasn’t sure how long he spent this time. The world had ended. He had all the time in the world to access this memory.

Although, he could have checked the log.