“The creator, Ms. Larsson.”
“Creator of what?”
Inclining her delicate neck, she said in a disturbingly tranquil manner, “Of the Nostalgia Program, of course. Your chosen simulated reality.”
Instantly, all the apprehension and utter confusion sloshing through my head morphed into something else. Terror and anger and brutal, goring panic.
“Where is Kai?” I demanded, floundering on the bed heavily and uncoordinatedly. Because of the inactivity, I realized with a fresh pang of horror. The incubator. The advanced life support. The SR headset. Its pale blue light bleeding through my eyelids.
“Please lay back, Ms. Larsson,” the woman insisted, clutching my shoulder and pressing me down against the mattress. “Your memories will return to you shortly. I understand this is an unusual situation, but I assure you it is not unprecedented. Everything is being handled for you as we speak. All you need to do is stay calm and relax.”
Carefully, she released my shoulder and touched her hand on the white wall next to the bed. A compartment unfolded outward, something between a drawer and a desk. Atop it, two silver devices were set neatly within an inch from each other: a laptop and a mobile phone.
“Here are some of your personal belongings,” she continued in the same peaceable but firm manner. “Feel free to browse through them while we wait for Mr. Lawrence. They might help you reconnect with the real world.”
For a moment longer I went on staring at her, my head throbbing from the sheer effort of trying to work this whole thing out. Then, slowly, hesitantly, I picked up the phone, the device foreign in my hand, thin and sleek like a piece of glass.
Gathering breath, I glanced at my reflection on the unlighted screen. Nothing about me had changed. I looked exactly the same. The same person I’d always been and would always be. In and out of the Program.
My name was Anya Larsson. I was twenty-eight years old, an associate attorney at Lyndon & Smith, and I was without the first eighteen years of my life.
Of course, the memory deletion Hive offered in real life was a far more complex and selective procedure than what it had been in the Program. Although I could no longer remember my life with my parents, not even their names or faces, I could still remember certain things from my childhood, memories I’d been suggested by Hive to retain so as to prevent the immense mental disorientation and possible psychosis that comes with complete loss of identity.
I could remember for a fact that growing up my parents had abused me and that this was why I had decided to undergo memory deletion, although I could no longer recall the nature and severity of the abuse. I could not remember the inside of my house, but I still remembered my route to school, my days of studying, working bar shifts during the weekends in secret, saving money, and my teachers, proud and sympathetic, telling me that with my outstanding test scores I could pretty much go to any university I wanted, on a full scholarship too.
Law school, I decided. At first not just because of the money and therefore the freedom and security this particular career path promised, but because of the intricacies of law itself, which had fascinated me at the time. This was what I wanted to do with my life. To be able to dissect and decipher the delicate mechanisms of a system so inescapable that it could just as well be called the blood of society, running vitally and imperceptibly throughout its every vein. To know the law and to be able to practice it was my way of pinning down the exact point where this so powerful and austere system had failed me. And to maybe, justmaybe, do for others what so many people had failed to do for me.
It was a lot later that I would learn that this holy, revengeful work I imagined myself doing, helping the defenseless and abused find justice in a fundamentally unjust world, was in actuality ungrateful, unpaid work. Work that being who I was, a parentless, moneyless nobody from nowhere, and still deeply traumatized, having not gone through memory deletion yet, did not have the luxury of doing. Ugly thing to think about, but true. Because to do anything in this life, even good, especially good, you needed the money to do it.
Corporate firm, then. Soul-crushing disappointment of my mentors.A mind like yours. You could have made an actual difference in the world. You could have become a judge one day.
No, never mind. Not for me. I’d be just another money-grubbing litigator.The godless life, Theo, my boyfriend and colleague at the time, would call it after handling cases for people who did not even understand the concept of law. Because laws did not exist for people who made more than seven figures a year.
Yes, a godless, faithless, soulless life. Late-night office haze, catching inconsistencies, sustained only on ego and antidepressants. Going to bed after midnight feeling too jittery, too vulnerable to my own thoughts and memories to sleep. Another dose of alprazolam. It was prescribed for me. For Theo, not so much, but then again, everyone was doing it. Nothing hard to find. Where there was money, there was a way. And I had plenty now. Sexy virtual zeros in the bank. Got myself a downtown apartment so expensive it was borderline obscene. Highly intelligent security system. Face recognition lock. No passcodes. No one could get in but me. All my youth and drive and supposed genius sacrificed on the altar of safety.
Ever since I was a little girl, this was all I wanted. This was the greatest happiness I could possibly imagine. To live with just a modicum of dignity, clean and safe and independent.
But no, not anymore. Because from now on and for the remainder of my days, whenever I would think of a happy life, I would always picture this: a house by the ocean, filled with laughter and music and books. And Kai. Just Kai, right in the center of everything.
???
In hindsight, it was funny to think how all of these elaborate procedures were marketed as something akin to advanced wellness treatments. Hive itself was self-characterized as a mental health and wellness organization. Back then, I was unable to recognize the dystopian quality of it all. The only thing I knew was my suffering and my increasing, overwhelming need to stop this suffering. Or in my case, delete the cause of it.
It was the year I turned twenty-six when I finally had enough money saved to go through memory deletion. Living with my brand-new trauma-free mind, I tried everything I could to claim a sense of normalcy for myself. I stopped the antidepressants and gave up alcohol. I woke up early, went on walks, socialized more, read better books, watched better movies. I went to the theater and to art exhibitions. I got tickets to all the latest and most talked-about shows. I ate good food at good restaurants with good people. I lived mindfully and intentionally while still pursuing excellence at work, cultivating what is considered to be a healthy sense of ambition. Healthy, yes. And yet the more present and involved I became in my life, the more unhappy I grew with the world around me.
It was an unfamiliar kind of unhappiness, one venturing far past my individual suffering. Now that I wasn’t struggling to survive the day, I was forced to experience it, only that there was nothing to experience here anymore. Nothing but the homogenized concrete grayness of the city, all beauty sacrificed in the name of function, the landscape so refined it looked alien. Had the earth always been so barren? I didn’t know. I would never know.
And during those shows I went to see, I couldn’t stay still for longer than ten minutes without checking my phone, missing the plot, wondering why I even bothered getting out of the house at all. And at those glamorous dinner parties of mine, no one ever talked about anything except to recapitulate things we’d already been exposed to online. Wars, violences, pollution, insults to everything humanity encompassed were all mentioned casually and in the same conversation about trends and celebrity gossip. What was the point in debating about such things anyway when every possible political and philosophical discourse could fit into one minute of pleasingly aesthetic video content? Why form an opinion of your own at all when you could just ask your artificially intelligent pal—the same intelligent pal that one day soon was going to render my job obsolete—to tell you exactly what you were supposed to think, knowing that its far superior subjectiveness had to be the truth?
As if we cared about truth. As if we cared about anything other than consuming our own starved souls. Because that was life now. That was normal. All day long, floundering helplessly in an infinite information-land, where even the concept of meaning was meaningless, where the bizarre was an opening hook, where our basic human emotions were exploited for views, where our attention spans were exchanged for currency that would later be spent to perpetuate this endless cycle of unreality we calledreal life.
I could not live like this anymore. I could not stand my own overstimulated passivity, my sick inability to do anything about anything. My life had become a tedious, soul-crushing cycle of going to work, paying my bills, hearing about the new horrible thing happening to the world, dissociating in the middle of the conversation so I wouldn’t have to think about the said horrible thing, and then waking up the next morning to do it all over again. I had never felt more unlike a human being, so useless and inert.
Perhaps, I would think, it’d be better if we knew nothing. Nothing at all. Perhaps our human minds could not survive the magnitude of disaster, pain, and injustice happening in the world all at once. Maybe we were killing ourselves one anxiety attack at a time for things that seemed to be completely and irreversibly out of our control.
And yet, who would choose to stay blindfolded? Awareness had given us empathy, and empathy was the one most crucial quality humans had to offer to each other.
That was the dilemma. That was the question, the most important one: How do you live? Do you kill yourself knowing everything all at once in the name of humanity, in the name of what we owe to each other as members of the human race, or do you self-preserve, shut your eyes and ears and mouth, and escape from the world?
