WELCOME TO THE FUTURE
A (W.T².F.) Sunday Series

–Short Story Time–

Andy steps out of his autocar and is immediately taken aback by the dark gloss of the Memories Inc.  HQ.

It’s not his first time here, nor will it be the last, but each time he looks up to the gentle swirls of images that hint of familiar forms as they shift, he becomes momentarily transfixed.

One of the hosts greats him by name within seconds. Andy follows her to the entrance of Memories Inc., then disappears into the building himself. As the door shuts behind him, his spine tingles and his ears strain to pick up some sort of sound in the silence. It’s intentionally silent here so that nothing can distract from the memory deposit.

The man behind the desk smiles at Andy, and nods to the host who takes her leave. Andy fills out the digiwork and verifies his ID via the Memories Inc. bio-recognition unit. Then, he’s ushered through a series of pristine monotone hallways to the quarter that contains his memory bank.

When they arrive at the appropriate terminal, Andy returns a nod, and after a deep breath sits down. Although it’s guaranteed to be a safe process, downloading his memories is one of the few times he can feel the biolace on the surface of his brain, and it’s a very, very unusual sensation.

Andy pulls out the data drive where his current memories are backed-up day by day, and starts the memory bank deposit. Once this is complete, he pulls the extension connector from the wall and attaches it to the implant behind his ear where the biolace can be accessed. Andy feels the gentle tingle of energy from ear to ear as soon as the connection is made.

This download is never one of exact memories, but rather a checkpoint of his self at the time of the deposit, like a marker to log the placement of the memories. It doesn’t take a second, and once the tingle fades Andy disconnects from the memory bank.

It was a while after memory banking became available that Andy decided to hold an account with Memory Inc. With no network and a deep underground storage, it was one of the safest ways to store memories. He’d never do this on his home system where hacking would always be a risk.

For Andy, the choice to memory bank was made more out of curiosity than of any real need to bank. His file was off the memory market, a new and hugely profitable industry, and it was seldom that he revisited pathways to refresh old memories. Rather, he stored most of his critical knowledge on a quicklink drive that he could connect to as he needed to revisit knowledge that had faded in his neural network. It came in handy just yesterday when he needed to revisit an old coding language as he encountered bugs in the new software updates.

Problem solved, he thought, but as he exited Memories Inc. and returned to his autocar, he still mused over the many peculiarities of the memory market.

A (W.T².F.) Series

By @scifiannemarie