Sentiment Rich

Token_ID: 8327623785678231

Account_Creator: JudithWilliams2790

Creator_Notes: For my daughter Elise who would rather I make her one of these than come visit to get the real thing.

File: <Virtual Object>

Key_Words: heart-shaped, locket, virtual wearable

Sentiment_Score: 64.7

File_Access: Restricted, Owner-Only

Owner: GI Systems Inc

Date_Created: 17/10/2053

Location_Created: SVRS 056-091-32-4343244

Creator_Royalties: False

Transactions: {...}

Last_Block: 4032a13f9032840ajdhaa9uds9803w9jd90393hg209239dsd

Elise looked at the log of the only virtual token her mother had ever created. The token, an SFST (semi-fungible sentiment token), had been gifted to Elise seven years before, a digital reconstruction of a heart-shaped locket from one of the most precious memories Elise had shared with her mother. The original locket, along with just about everything else, had been lost when their seaside hometown of Bowville was evacuated in advance of the second wave of the 40s Climate Catastrophes. And now even the digital reconstruction was lost to Elise, a blurred out item from a long ledger, unviewable from Elise’s account.

Elise clicked to read the bio of the new owner’s account:

As our dependence on Tier 1 AI systems grows with everything from environmental reconstruction efforts to our Shared Virtual Reality Space, we need to be ever vigilant that we aren’t trading in one doomsday scenario for another. That’s why our mission at GI Systems is to train truly humane and empathetic machines. Using human-verified and authentic high sentiment data purchased from users like you, we can empower machines with heart.

Elise grimaced. Selling the token her mother had given her was an accident. She blamed the sentiment scorers, the millions of humans who would voraciously descend on every new asset that went on the SFST Chain to quickly pass judgement. Only 64.7?! If they hadn’t scored it so low, Elise wouldn’t have absentmindedly bundled it for sale with all the wedding scenes and “medium sentiment” virtual jewelry her ex-husband had bought her.

“Mommy this is taking so long!”

The voice of her daughter beside her in the car caused the views on her screen to temporarily go translucent.

I know honey. That’s what it’s like to get to unplugged places. But we should be there soon. Just keep watching your movie.”

Elise went back to viewing her screens, flipping to a call transcript with her mother. Both audio and text had been automatically recorded, but Elise opted to look at the text. She wasn’t sure she could take hearing her mother’s voice right now.

<beginning of transcript>

EliseMartin3879: Hi Mom, Hi. Sorry I know I haven't called but

JudithWilliams2790: Elise, you look awful, have you been crying? What’s going on?

EliseMartin3879: Oh. Yeah. Don’t worry, I look worse than I actually feel. I’m trying to get myself extra worked up. Been going through old images and scenes trying to make myself sadder, maximize the sentiment score I can get from some moments I’m capturing.

JudithWilliams2790: Oh for God’s sake, Elise.

EliseMartin3879: Well I feel like hell. Might as well milk this pain for all it’s worth. You have no idea the shit Dale’s lawyers have been throwing at me since the divorce.

JudithWilliams2790: Well, honey, you know the old saying when life gives you lemons?

EliseMartin3879: Yes, of course. That’s what I’m doing. Making lots and lots of

JudithWilliams2790: You give them back.

EliseMartin3879: That’s not how it goes, Mom.

JudithWilliams2790: Let it go honey. Unplug from the damn thing, bring Carly and come visit Bowville. We’ve made so much progress here and I have so much I want to show you. We just redid the dock and I set up the old make something beautiful station, and scavenged some lovely materials to make jewelry. Carly would just

EliseMartin3879: Sorry, Mom, I have to run. Can we talk about this later?

[CALL ENDED]

Predicted_sentiment_score: 47.2. Do you wish to tokenize?

<end of transcript>

Elise didn’t end up visiting, she hadn’t in years. Not until today when she was travelling with her daughter to pick up her mother’s remains.

It’s been so long, but why did Mom have to be so damn stubborn, Elise lamented. What was the point of going back to the shattered and fragile “real” Bowville, when there was already a perfectly reconstructed version of it in the Shared Virtual Reality Space (SVRS)?

During the many years huddled in densely populated Safe Zones, most people had become increasingly “plugged in”, invested in the rapidly developing SVRS. In many ways, the SVRS world had become almost indistinguishable from the world as it was before the Catastrophes. Elise actually thought it was an improvement, as she so often tried to convince her mother.

“This version is perfect, exactly as we remember it, but this time basically indestructible. Like honestly, short of something unthinkable taking out all the on and off-earth servers, this version of Bowville is forever,” Elise had told her mother the one and only day she had persuaded her to “plug in” and build a tokenized locket Elise could wear in the SVRS.

Elise couldn’t understand why even after seeing and experiencing it, her mother had still been so eager to go back and rebuild the “real” Bowville. After having lost so much over the years, why couldn’t she appreciate how reliably and completely you could now create and capture the most precious places, items and memories? In the SVRS, every little moment could be preserved, captured and, with high enough sentiment, sold. For most people, it was simply not pleasant, or quite frankly, financially worth it to waste time “unplugged”.

But with the exception of calls with her daughter and granddaughter, Elise’s mother had never come close to plugging in again and never made another token. It had just been the one, the one that Elise no longer owned and couldn’t even view.

The damn locket, Elise thought as she switched off her headgear to look down at her daughter beside her. If Mom had just spent even a few more days in the SVRS we could have created and captured so many things, higher sentiment even than that locket. Perfectly captured memories that could go to Carly’s account when I’m gone. A high-sentiment portfolio was one of the most valuable kinds of inheritances people could receive from grandparents these days, and Elise was embarrassed to think how empty Carly’s account was of them.

I can fix this, Elise decided as she felt the car rolling to a halt. They would take a short detour to experience and capture a meaningful, high-sentiment moment out of today’s trip. Elise had planned it out. They would head to the reconstructed dock and find the spot where her mom had set up her “Make Something Beautiful” sign and jewelry station. They would sit there looking out to sea, counting seagulls - or perhaps clouds now that seagulls were more scarce. And Elise would gift her daughter Carly with her very own locket, a non-digital one, containing old photos of Elise and her mother just as the original had. The two would be smiling, laughing, maybe looking up and to the right at something in the sky. An important mother-daughter moment, this time captured forever. Doing it outside of the UVRS, with only an old handheld image-capturing device was far from ideal, but it was the closest that Elise felt she could get to including her mother in the moment.

****

It was a disaster.

As her daughter played with the contents of bins full of threads, shells and beads below her mother’s “Make Something Beautiful” sign, Elise reviewed the end of what she had just recorded.

She started it from the moment she had placed the open locket in her daughter's hands:

“Who’s that?”

“Honey, that’s your grandma. Don’t you remember her? We talked to her not too long ago.”

Carly gave a little shake of the head before pointing to the bins behind them. “Can I play now?”

“Carly, honey, this is not a time to be silly. Surely you remember. We saw her on the video call, it wasn’t that long ago”

The locket was hanging precariously from Carly’s fingers as she fidgeted from one foot to another, her eyes shifting to the bins.

“Did you even look at it closely? Maybe take another look at it, Carly.”

Carly said nothing and continued to look around at everything except the locket, now hanging by a single finger.

“It’s really important you remember her,” Elise said sharply, raising her voice. “She’s gone now, you know. Dead. You will never see her again.”

Carly bit her bottom lip, her eyes beginning to tear.

“Do you remember? Answer me, Carly!” Elise was yelling now. “Aren’t you sad? You should be very very sad. It would be really bad for you not to feel something right now.”

Carly started sobbing, but as Elise reached out to hold her asked:

“Can I please play with the shells?”

Elise opened her mouth, looking ready to scream but controlled herself.

She sighed. “Fine”

Carly dropped the locket and turned around.

Elise continued to move slowly through the stills of what she had captured. It was a series of joyless expressions, with the exception of one smile that creeped on Elise’s face the moment her daughter had started to tear. I was just happy to see her feel something, Elise told herself. But a sinking feeling had begun to set in Elise’s chest and she started to move through all the captured video more quickly, desperately looking for something - she wasn’t sure what - only that she needed to find it. She felt that if she failed to capture whatever it was today, in this place and this time, that she would never be able to.

But the faster she flipped back and forth through the video, the more her eyes became less focused, instead imagining the fuzzy picture of the locket token and the tiny photo of her mother that her daughter couldn’t recognize.

Elise sobbed.

She tried to control herself but her daughter heard and turned around.

“Mommy?”

Elise struggled, “I’m ok. Just give me a minute.”

Seeing tears streaming down her mother’s face, Carly dropped the shells she was holding and placed her little arms around her mother’s now heaving shoulders.

“It’s too late,” Elise made out. “And it’s my fault. It’s lost forever and it’s my fault."

Carly, not quite understanding but wanting to make her mother feel better, mimicked the actions Elise had done so many times for her. She patted Elise’s head and cooed “it will be ok.”

Elise laughed between sobs, even for a few seconds forgetting why they were there. Abruptly, she remembered. Maybe this was it! The perfect moment?

Slowly raising her image-capturing device, Elise looked into the reflected image. Her face was a puffy, tear-stricken mess. Looking beyond her own swollen eyes, she focused on her daughter’s face who was hugging her from behind. Carly’s eyes were closed, her little cheek pressed against Elise’s. At last. Not the moment Elise had originally imagined, but still a valuable one, sentiment-rich. A moment to recapture even a small part from the time lost with her own mother. Looking at Carly, who was oblivious to her intentions, Elise felt both relief and sadness. Taking slow careful breaths, her thumb hovering just above the recording button, Elise wondered at the delicateness of such a moment, and if any hesitation on her part to capture it would result in the sweetness within it evaporating forever.

Elise let a few unrecorded seconds pass before finally lowering the image-capturing device to the ground where it would stay for the rest of the evening. She turned to face Carly, pulling in closer to wrap her with both arms.

Resting her chin on her daughter’s shoulder, Elise came face-to-face with her mother’s sign above the bins. Now, she could more easily read the smaller writing below the sign header:

For my daughter Elise, and my love for her that threads through all the moments, together and apart, remembered and forgotten, captured and uncaptured.