“Happy Birthday, my dear Elara, Happy Birthday to you!”
Mom sings the song completely off-key, with Dad giving her the tightest hug, her face almost fully engulfed by his arms. Elara is overwhelmed with joy, smiling with her teeth in full view as Mom takes photos, Dad’s booming laughter enveloping the room, the flickering light from the candles on the cake, displaying the number 8 prominently, bathing her in a warm yellow embrace.
The living room smells of melting wax and a plethora of aromas from countless sweets, candies, and savoury treats, overwhelming the senses. Across the table, her little brother laughs uncontrollably, watching his sister in full embrace, and throws a napkin paper plane at her. Her mom now rushes in and hugs her, pulling her even tighter.
“Make a wish, my love,” her mother whispers. Elara gazes intently into her eyes, feeling her warm breath on her cheek. The rest of the family start clapping, smiling wildly, singing once more.
She blows on the candles. The flame flickers, moving rapidly back, and the world suddenly shatters into blue.
The scent of food, the warmth of the candles, the light breeze swaying the curtains slowly, and the embraces are gone. It is replaced by the sharp smell of damp soil, rotting moss, and the slight drizzle tapping gently on the body, creating puddles around Elara.
Elara gasps, convulses, inhaling the cold, brittle air, snapping from the golden light and the gentle winds in the dining room to the twilight in a mutated, lush green, untamed forest with gargantuan trees surrounding her. Elara is sitting on her knees on overgrown, deep dark green plants and shrubbery. Bioluminescent moss grows thick and voluptuously up the tree trunks, illuminating her surroundings in a subtle green-gold colour. Elara’s crystal-jagged lattice, her biological markings etched into her neck and collarbones, glows a subtle blue. She slumps to her left side on the forest wet floor, raises a hand to her face, feeling the cold, metallic implants fused to her jaw, eyes and head. She hears the clank and grind of her implants, readjusting to her position.
The biomechanical umbilical cable, thick as a forest vine, pulsing, synchronised to the rhythm of her markings. It remains securely connected to the back of her head, in her cortex.
She slowly gets up and reorients her body to her original kneeling position. She looks around the clearing, and nine others sit in the mud in a perfect, silent semi-circle, their cortices also connected to the umbilical cables. They are all slumped forward, eyes rolling in a quiet trance, drooling as they experience visions. At the centre of the connected cables stands MOTHER, a towering, black monolithic mainframe from the Old World, humming in a low, deep vibration. An ancient server, rusted, overgrown with vines engulfing it, absorbing the light with little to no reflection. In the distance, vehicles hover, parked neatly together in various shapes and sizes, some of the spacecraft still running, their Blue Shardian gravity inversion drives preparing for sub-light flight.
“Are you OK?” A rough voice breaks through the dripping monotony of the forest.
Elara looks away gently from the mainframe and sees another person standing over a dilapidated, centuries-old terminal, with features and garments similar to hers. It’s Adoman. He looks concerned, a green glow illuminating the lines of his face from the terminal.
Pale, angular jawlines define their faces, and they wear enveloping, pitch-black hydrophobic tactical garments with the same dark red insignia on their backs and the sides of their shoulders, tight matte fabrics suited for combat, fitted with magnetic holsters for their energy weapons.
Adoman’s cranial implants join to his jaw and down his neck, reflecting the sheen from the monitor, his crystal lattice red, subtle and opaque on his neck and down his right arm.
“It was my birthday. I was blowing out the candles.” Elara says with a fragile, raspy voice, giving out a synthetic wheeze from her bionic throat. Tears cut through the grime on her face. “Mom and dad held me so tight. I felt so cherished.”
Adoman looks down and puts his hand on his head, slightly shaking with concern. He is managing the countless devotees waiting for their turn to experience Old World memories. He helps an older devotee who has come to his memorial pilgrimage every cycle without fail. He is frail and elderly, with long, frizzy hair down to his hip, wearing a white robe and a waterproof red garment over his head. Adoman seats him in position and connects the cord to his cortex. He jolts immediately, swaying back and forth.
Today is a relatively quiet day, with just two hundred people waiting by the side with their tickets in hand. Adoman travels far from his enclave to work on MOTHER. It was discovered a few decades ago by accident, during a drone survey of land owned by a mining company seeking new Shardian crystal deposits. Instead, they found only an overgrown forest in this region, with a mysterious server and no other indications of civilisation. It is just this server and nothing else. A landing party was sent to study the mystery of this mainframe and transport it back to the city. It was immovable. With all the might and power of their tools, it would not budge. It was to be abandoned until one of the research members found a way to connect to it through the terminal and discovered ancient, long-forgotten data about sentient beings from a faraway world. Within a few years, implants were invented to connect the memories directly to the cortex. Imprints of long-lost lives that can be relived from any perspective. Intricately detailed, well-catalogued events of sentient lives, some exciting, some unusual, and some mundane. It became a fascinating study for the scholars of the remote outpost city of Lumiya, with such elaborate records of experiences that were fundamentally obscure compared to their ways of life. Many people from the city came to find out more and eventually made it a regular pilgrimage to worship the lives of others. The word spread through the sector, and many more would arrive to experience it; thus, the city retrofitted its soldiers to manage the influx into this remote region.
Adoman, a retired elite assassin of the Obsidian Order, works the terminal. He’s the Overseer. He smuggled Elara in and registered her as a devotee from his enclave so she could experience it and give him company while he works for many months at a time at the pilgrimage zone.
Now there are hundreds of desperate devotees from throughout the sector, from ground soldiers to high-ranking dignitaries, who come to experience lives they never knew existed. There are many prospective devotees on the ground shaking their heads back and forth in anticipation, waiting for their turn to plug in.
Occasionally, the memories can imprint on the cerebral pathways too rapidly, blurring the perception of reality and distorting their real lives. Adoman realises this in Elara; her withdrawal arrives where she sits, and she immediately removes the heavy cable from her cortex.
“They are not real, El,” says Adoman with his hand on her shoulder, showing signs of concern and sorrow. “It’s all just data. Remnants of a world that no longer exists. All dead. Gone.”
Adoman lifts Elara as she looks visibly shaken with brutal withdrawal, her eyes darting to and fro.
“Why do you like these false imprints so much? And always this one. The same one. Over and over again.” Adoman asks her, looking her directly in the eyes, holding her with both his hands on her shoulders.
“BECAUSE… because I got to see a life where I was loved. Not grown in a lab!” Elara replies.
Adoman patches and realigns her neural port. “It’s someone else’s memory. Look around you. It’s not perfect. It’s desolate and hard, but it’s still beautiful. It’s real. We are real.”
“We are not real. We are artificial. We are designed. We never chose our own purpose.” Responds Elara.
“You cannot keep doing this; it will permanently fry your memory conduits.”
“Then I will die with something beautiful, instead of being tormented with the visions of what we did for the mission.”
“Let’s head back to the enclave. My session has ended for the day. When you get back, run a deep cycle, and remove all of this. You will end up with a cascading bionic rupture. It’s not worth it.” Adoman holds her steady so she does not collapse and heads back together.
Later at the devotee enclave, the devotees sit together and share their false experiences as if it’s their own. One shouts proudly that they rose in the ranks of the military, decorated for winning in battle. They don’t know of the enemies they fought, merely that they defeated them. Another whispers about their connection to weird and wonderful creatures that roamed the land. They describe it as 4-legged with deep, long furry hair that protruded along the ridges of their backs, so majestic that people rode them in the wind. They came in so many sizes and shapes. Such freedom and joy.
Adoman gets meals for himself and Elara and feeds her. She is not able to eat on her own, still shifting and recovering from the overload of data. She is in pain but speaks of love and belonging.
Mom. Dad. The words are sweet nectar, concepts so foreign and ancient they feel like pure magic. In this cosy, comfortable room, she is someone. A real person. She is not a survivor navigating a broken world. She is a daughter.
All the devotees are asleep on the floor, aligned and parallel, connected and charging. The enclave is a pure metallic construction that was grown near MOTHER to house the visitors. The ionic shield has been activated to prevent entry during the downtime.
Elara is on the floor, on her back, staring at the white, sterile ceiling, fidgety and nervous. Her neural cortex is glitching with false memories imprinted in her storage; she is not allowing her system to forget or archive them. She keeps rerunning it.
A few hours later, the sleep cycle has entered deep cleanse mode, and everyone is in a catatonic stasis, except Elara. She has learnt to circumvent her cleanse rituals to keep her memories. She gets up and looks around the vast room, with multiple rows and floors of people plugged in and asleep. She glances at Adoman; he’s asleep as well. She unplugs her charger and gets up, sneaks across the floor, removes the Shardian crystal key from Adoman and heads out through the corridors.
Elara shakes profusely as she walks, due to the lack of neural cycle cleansing and new data corrupting and overriding her cerebral functions. She limps and continues to the terminal. She looks back, darkness all around her, with only the distant light emanating from the enclave, white light streaking and fracturing through the foliage and trees, leaving long shadow fingers that diffuse into the forest ether.
She trembles as she inserts the key. The energy shield disengages with a hiss and a vibration that tones down into silence. She looks back again. Nothing. No one is around.
She connects to MOTHER with the terminal, selects her specific memory module, and activates a cord. The indicator light on one of the cords turns blue. She slowly walks to it, sits in position on her knees, and connects to it.
The rush hits her instantly, transported back, immersed in a cold morning light inside a house. The atmosphere is darker, with blue tones. It is a different time. She recognises a tree; it’s a conically shaped green tree inside a dwelling with brightly coloured glowing lights and hanging spheres. There’s a glowing multi-pointed geometric crown piece that sits at the highest tip of the branches, bright and yellow. This is a new memory. This is not what she put in the terminal. There must be a mistake.
It is the same house as the one from the birthday party. It’s another memory with the same people. Looks like another celebration, but there’s no cake or balloons. What is that tree for? What are they celebrating?
“There are presents! Is it another birthday party?”
She looks behind. She sees them sitting by the dining room. Dad is seated, and Mom is standing next to him.
“Mom! Dad! You’re here.”
Wait. Something is wrong.
They are arguing. Mom grabs Dad’s clothing with both her hands. Please don’t fight. They argue some more.
“How could you? How could you do this to us?” Mom says, shaking and pulling his shirt. Dad is silent and looks down. He has bags. It’s the same bags they used to put the birthday party toys in when they travelled for holidays.
“Does he have more toys for me?” No. He’s not opening the bags. He’s carrying them, walking out with them. Where is he going? Is he going out without Mom? Mom looks devastated. She sits down on the couch, crying with her face in her hands.
“Don’t cry, Mom. We can always get more toys?”
No. Something is wrong. The memory is not holding. It starts to glitch. She sees flashes of the forest overlapping the visions of the house. The images start to devolve and melt, revealing cascading code beneath them. Elara desperately tries to hold on.
The images flash rapidly, alternating between the memory and the forest. Eventually, she fully disintegrates and falls onto her right side. She convulses. She holds the side of her head; the unbearable pain makes her legs jolt uncontrollably.
Elara hears Adoman’s muffled voice. She looks around desparately for the familiar voice, and she stares at the blurry figure before her. He moves from side to side in frantic movements, looking all around her, checking her implants and the cortex port. She hears a genuine terror in his voice, and eventually Adoman pulls out the cord, her consciousness finally letting go of the memory. Her eyes move up into her eye sockets, shaking in a trance.
The severance creates a concussive shockwave through her, with sparks flying from her body. The metallic joints creak rapidly in random succession.
The convulsion finally stops, and she lies still on the wet foliage ground, huddled in a fetal position.
Adoman lifts her and cradles her in his arms. They look at each other for a moment, eyes locked to one another.
“It was the wrong one. I know I put in the right module, but it was something else.” Says Elara, her voice breaking, her eyes darting to the MOTHER and back to Adoman.
“No. It was the right one.” Replies Adoman.
Elara frowns. “What? You did this?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I knew you would sneak out, and if you experienced the same memory again, it would have done permanent damage to the archive storage in your cortex. You became obsessed. I didn’t know what else to do. The same one over and over again. So I reprogrammed the module with another memory with the same people. A slightly different experience to jolt you out of your misery.”
“It was another celebration, but they were fighting? It didn’t make sense.”
“They call it Christmas. It was a celebration to mark the end of each cycle. But for this cycle it was different. Dad no longer wanted to be with them.”
“He wanted to leave? Why? It was so beautiful. Why abandon such an amazing world filled with treats and candles?”
“That’s what life is: cycles of growth and demise. I could ask you the same question about this life and us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know why I bring you here? It’s lonely out here, even with the hundreds of devotees. No one talks to me. They care only about the long-fallen memories, rejecting their own real ones. Look around you. I just wanted you around me. Something real for once.”
“I can’t live with myself with the memories of our mission. You showed me a way to a good life. Why take it away?”
“It was meant to ease your pain, not replace them. They are imprints from a different person. It will only make it worse, not to mention that it fried your synaptic connection. You’re lucky to be still breathing. You can’t connect to MOTHER again.”
“Why did you choose that memory? It was sad like my life.”
“To show you that your perfect family had problems too. Shardian crystals don’t shine all the time.”
“It’s still worth having because it was a chosen life.”
“How do you know what they chose? He chose to leave, remember?”
“I get that… So, what do we do now? Go back to the mission? They will find us and decommission us.”
“No. We are not going back there. I have a plan. We won’t have to do the mission anymore.”
“We were only built for this and grown in the same lab. We are just tools. How do you do something else?”
“I choose to.”
“Why would you do this for me? What’s so special? I’m just a number.”
“You are my number,” Adoman says with a smile, and Elara looks back, her eyes still.
Adoman lifts her and realigns her cortical connections.
“Can you stand up?” asks Adoman.
“Yes, I think so,” says Elara, looking down, checking all her functions and systems are operational.
“OK. I long for good memories. But I want real ones. Good ones. Up for the challenge, El?”
“You mean outside the mission?”
“Yes.”
“We are not programmed…”
Adoman interrupts her and lifts his finger, pointing up. “We can always program whatever we want. We were grown from a genomic sequence without a choice. But now we can choose to live the sequence we want.”
“How did this happen to you?”
“Do you choose, El?”
Elara’s tears flow down as she looks into Adoman’s eyes.
“YES. I choose.” Elara shakes her head slowly with a joyful smile.
“Good. Let’s go. I’ve got everything. Hold my hand. Let’s go.”
“OK. Where to?”
“Anywhere we want.”
