Author: Tea Klešček, II. gimnazija Osijek
Immortal. Isn’t that what we always craved? To be flawless creatures and abandon our basic needs? We got what we wanted, I suppose. We managed to make the human soul a coded program and install it in artificial bodies – the Pandorians.
Being eternal still has its flaws though. The Pandorians can hold only so much information before their storage runs out and if they overload, the cortex is restarted with essential memories and knowledge. The rest is gone like it never existed. The alternative is buying additional storage or deleting memories. That’s what we work for now, not food or warmth, but storage – small, white cards worth more than you can imagine.
Loud music woke me up from hibernation. I turned off my alarm and shifted in my bed. I looked at my forearm and the LED screen on it.
3.45 am. I dismissed the notifications and my eyes glanced over to the storage space.
Storage space capacity: 96%
CRITICAL
Some system functions may not work.
Immediate upgrade advised.
I cleared some cache, mostly useless memories, and the number went down to 92%.
I changed my outfit into the usual black attire and tucked my necklace under the turtleneck. I left my apartment and stepped into the busy streets. It didn’t matter that the sun hadn’t even risen yet – things like that are trivial when you’ve no need for sleep. I passed through the hordes of Pandorians and, through alleys and some shortcuts, I finally reached my destination. It was outside the city, in the old, uninhabited district. The buildings used to be museums but after the invention of VR, everything went digital. Superficial.
There was one building in particular that I visited whenever I had time. It was a museum with actual paper and paint and not pixels on an LCD screen. Everything was so detailed and beautiful. I missed this the most – the things made with paintbrushes and the mess you made after you’re done. Now we don’t even use the word mess, as it isn’t possible with all the cleaning androids.
I entered the archive and traced my fingers over the books. One of them caught my eye. I had read it perhaps a hundred times and, being able to delete the memory, I enjoyed it every time like it was the first. The thing that caught my eye was that there wasn’t a layer of dust on it. On the large, wall-sized bookshelf, it was the only one that was perfectly clean and I hadn’t touched it in months.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of something falling and breaking into quite a few pieces. My eyes widened and I was sure that if I had had a heart, it would have been racing right now.
I went into the hallway and looked at every dark corner and opened door. I entered the Ancient Greece section. There was a broken black vase on the floor but that wasn’t what caught my attention, rather the fat grey cat sitting beside it and licking its paws. I hadn’t seen a cat since I was still human and that was a couple of centuries ago.
The cat looked at me and approached me, rubbing against my leg.
“Pluto, where are you?” I heard a loud whisper. A girl appeared in the doorway. She looked human. Real green eyes and long copper hair, with a colourful dress and leather bag. There was a large bracelet on her hand. A watch, perhaps.
“Oh no. Okay… Just pretend you never saw me. Goodbye”, she said and quickly picked the cat up, basically running through the doorway. I chased after her, telling her to stop. When I caught up to her, she was out of breath.
“Wait, who are you? How are you still alive?” I asked, looking at her. Her heart was racing so loud that I could hear it.
“I’m from another timeline. The good one. You know, the one where things didn’t go so wrong” she said, saying it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“What do you mean wrong?”
“In my timeline, you never chose the artificial bodies. We discovered spaceships and colonised other planets across the universe. And, eventually, we discovered space and time travel but a lot of old history was lost so we salvage it across other timelines” she replied. The watch on her hand beeped and a hologram appeared.
“Hey Kat, the lads are back and they found a recipe for cheesecake. You’d better hurry up before they burn down the kitchen again” the man laughed and the message disappeared.
“Can I come with you?” I asked, feeling excited and nostalgic at the same time. Can they see real stars in the sky, I wondered. Light pollution made it impossible to do so here. No one has seen them in a long time.
“Well, I can’t just leave you here now that you know. Come on” she offered her hand, holding the fat cat in the other.
I raised my hand to take hers and my entire body stopped and shut down. A red light flashed across my eyes and the screen on my forearm. A robotic voice left my lips.
Critical system failure.
Restart commencing in 10 seconds.
“Oh no… ” she whispered. I couldn’t move or say anything. The countdown flashed across my eyes as precious memories deleted themselves.
Restart successful.
Reactivating systems – eta 48 hours.
Loud music woke me up from hibernation. I turned off my alarm and shifted in my bed. I looked at my forearm and the LED screen on it.
3.45 am. I dismissed the notifications and my eyes glanced over to the storage space.
Storage space capacity: 10%
I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. There was an old book on my nightstand.
Why did I feel so sad all of a sudden?
