Quick note: This is a horror short
Excerpt from October 2028 software update.
Keynote speaker— [Name redacted]
——–run-code ##*#y\\
Edited 2030-08-15
“My wife died a few years ago…but now with the cloud she’s always with me, just over my shoulder, never sad, never lonely.”
Here we sit among the ides of comfort, we are surrounded by our friends and blanketed by the warmth of memory. It’s not as though sadness has stopped existing, but do we even remember what it was like to be sad?
The feeling of anguish, that nagging doubt, the phantom pain of something left behind, a feeling that can only be described as absence.
I want to be sad; I really do. I want to be able remember that looming presence and then use it to describe just how better we are today with the clouds in our life.
I mean, it is frankly beautiful how the clouds add to these moments. They bring us together, in a simple gesture they can make us family, and how special is that? Friends that I have never known, forever bonded by memories of candle-lit laughter, brought together by new experiences, better experiences.
The clouds are here for you, they create the best you.
In what was a momentous achievement for humanity, the telecommunications group, founded under the Haraway RI banner, had released their first edition of a revolutionary technology simply known as the clouds. This digitally interlinked neural network made it possible to effectually ‘save’ all a person’s memories and store them securely on a server, by extension allowing people upload every minute detail of their entire existence into a centralised protocol.
The clouds made it possible for everyone to be able instantly recall any moment in their life, to have the collective experience of history available at their fingertips.
‘When did we first meet? What was the weather like last year?’ Even something as simple as finding a lost set of keys could be called up with a quick search of the clouds.
During the initial launch, Haraway RI announced that because of technology currently in development it will be possible to live-edit these memories in real-time and adapt them as if they were being experienced live and asynchronously.
The moderating of edited memories had introduced a small amount of concern within small sections of the community, and, due to the costs involved, entire uploads of memory banks was limited. So, after three years of operation the clouds received their first major update.
Now holistically focused to cover a wider spectrum of memory types, the clouds were programmed to limit the amount of any negative memories that a user could experience. This ‘live restacking protocol’ took every fragment of memory and reshaped set moments, the inflections, the people, to become a ‘collage of certainty’ and is why they are now so important to so many people today.
In effect, every unpleasant memory, all our failures, all of our mistakes, became erased.
“I’ve never loved her more since she left, she must have had the happiest smile…”
We here at the Haraway Institute think of people first. We think ‘what is it that makes us people?’ Memories.
It is our memories that shape us, and it is our memories that make us human. I remember being young, the deep orange of the setting sun, a summer morning that would last an entire lifetime and, in many ways, now does, and that is thanks to the clouds.
I have in my palm the essence of all that has ever been, isn’t that amazing! The united sum of so many lives uploaded and synchronised with unlimited accuracy, something to be held so carefully.
With the clouds in our lives, we have become more human than evolution could have ever made possible.
It has been estimated that sales records of the clouds have now achieved an equal quantity to the median population of Earth, and many hospitals include the price of a new unit within the associated birthing tax.
From the moment of delivery your child will have the perfect life. They will look to the clouds and will know kindness, they will grow, and they will understand that they are within the clouds, and without this, memory will lose its meaning.
“Thanks to you my lost darling-
-as your now name disappears, so too…’
***…ERROR [run|reboot]
“All I hear before my broken daze is the slow rumble of passing time.
Some still call it sleep. We wake and nothing has passed, chat-logs continue as if undisturbed, and the media exhale their last breath.
We wake; we work; we regret; we forget; we go home and then as one we stare into the false life of ourselves, through a digital screen.
There is never a blue sky.
We enjoy this.”
I was alone in the red brick apartment of my dwelling. An empty bowl sat in front of me as I held my head in hands that did not seem to be my own and attempted to collect the stirring thoughts that rambled and rolled through something of which I had no control: suffering.
Very rarely in my life had I ever been left without a back-up running and faint fragments of what I could remember where faded as if an incomplete vision. Thrill seekers sometimes turned off their back-up, blue-sky trips or whatever they were called, but why would you choose this?
Things were wrong, I began to wonder if I was even awake. Did I need to ask when my account was going to be repaired? Had I just checked? A wave of paranoia became another chattering voice as I became buried by my subconscious. One thousand voices all calling my name, what is this horror? What is this life?
This sky, this beautiful blue sky, had become vast before me, and within this unfathomable depth, the cold of space loomed vacant above.
J. McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 