Most of all, though, he loved Christie Tucci, his childhood sweetheart.
Whatever his destiny was, Christie wouldn’t be part of it. She couldn’t be. It was a few months before she reached her own Ascension Eve, which meant her destiny had yet to be determined. How could his letter include her, if Christie hadn’t received the news herself yet? That wasn’t how the Circuit worked. The process started during the ‘Great Segregation’ of the twenty-twenties, when protectionism forced people to exist in small circles of society. Back then it was impossible to know who your best match was across seven billion people because everyone lived in enclosed sects. Not so now.
Now there were no limits.
They were doing Jake a favour.
Based on their profiling of him, somewhere out there was a more suitable match than Christie. The same was true for her, and every other eighteen-year-old. But there was more to it than matching someone to your own preference. The survival of the human race relied on couples who’d produce genetically superior and resilient offspring, less susceptible to modern disease and capable of surviving on an increasingly inhospitable planet.
Everyone had to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Jake couldn’t care less about the rest of the world. He cared about his world. He’d always been independent and strong-willed. He didn’t care about politics, or how other people behaved. It didn’t have anything to do with him. All he really wanted from life was to be left to get on with it.
When did he ever get what he wanted?
Jake watched the drone nervously from his first-floor bedroom window. It had landed twenty minutes ago and was acting a little jittery. Nothing for it. Either he faced destiny, or he’d be forced to explain to his parents why a small drone was impatiently firing rockets at their front door.
- Chapter 2 -
Third Generation
Access to the Memory Cloud was normally facilitated by technology implanted inside the body. There were two standard devices. One embedded in a region of the brain called the amygdala, and a second attached to the optic nerve. The duality of these microchips provided a connection to a virtual world of almost unlimited knowledge and a portal to a repository of everything you’d ever experienced.
The surgical procedure to achieve this higher state of consciousness was usually performed during infancy. It was recommended by medical experts that it should be completed no more than three months after the birth of the recipient. Human behavioural scientists insisted it marked the point at which our earliest memories and emotions formed. Anyone receiving the implants later than this date would lose vital data about their early development. All of these claims were backed up by the manufacturer, who just happened to be the Circuit.
Everyone else believed there was a second reason for it.
It didn’t matter how many powerful new age anaesthetic drugs were used during surgery, people knew from experience that the recovery period was long and extremely painful. It took months for the host to adjust to the foreign objects burrowing into their flesh. Metal and wire fought with tissue and bone to see which would reach optimal performance first. Babies found verbalising their distress particularly challenging. Which meant they couldn’t complain. They resorted to screaming their heads off, a behaviour that didn’t deviate from what every mother had experienced for generations.
The physical pain was just the beginning. Eventually it relented but for some the trauma associated with the event lasted much longer. Jake knew this only too well. He’d suffered from the consequence of having two small, wirelessly connected microchips embedded in his organs for years.
He was one of the unlucky ones.
Most users experienced no side effects from the surgery. Jake, on the other hand, endured debilitating headaches that felt like storms had broken out inside his head. They were as common as the passing of the months. When he suffered natural headaches, the real world could be stopped. He’d just send himself to bed, turn off the lights, pop a few painkillers and sit it out. Not with these headaches. The Memory Cloud never stopped. The connection was permanent, and until the cause relented the pain in his head was constant. Occasionally it would intensify over a period of several weeks and months. When it reached a state of permanency only one remedy was successful.
It was always the same.
An upgrade.
He’d lost count of how many he’d had. When it became impossible to think straight, move or remember past memories without screaming in anguish, he knew he’d get the message. An alert would arrive in his cloud feed mandating him to visit his nearest Conversion Room for more invasive surgery, more recovery and normally an even greater level of pain sometime in the future. The more advanced the upgrades became, the more they hurt. The last implant, grafted to his nerves just after his seventeenth birthday, had more power, greater processing speed, more capacity and more functions. His fragile body couldn’t keep pace with the rapid rate of mechanical advancement. Which meant it was only a matter of time before the donor electronics rejected the host and the whole process cycled around again.
But even then, Jake’s headaches and countless upgrades were not the worst part of being connected to the cloud. Another phenomenon haunted him.
Flashbacks.
But they weren’t his.
It had long been rumoured, usually quietly and in secret code, that the Memory Cloud was not as secure as the Circuit pronounced. Anyone who’d received the regulation implants, whatever version they wore, became connected, twenty-four hours a day. Every second was extracted, recorded and, if prompted by the owner, shared with others. What if this interconnectivity was more fluid and the mathematical sluice gates allowed more data through than the Circuit acknowledged? Or maybe the flashbacks had something to do with the East? After all, their network was a different system all together. Theirs was called the Realm, at least that’s how people in the West translated it. The Realm and the Circuit had battled for subscriber supremacy for decades. They’d do whatever it took to disrupt the other. Perhaps the East had infiltrated the Memory Cloud and Jake was suffering as a consequence? Whatever the reasons, Jake was certain he wasn’t just passing his memories into his own cloud, he was receiving them from somewhere else.
He didn’t know why it was, but he knew what it was.
He felt things.
Things he’d not directly experienced for himself. Which meant the feelings weren’t from his memories. Which meant he was trespassing on virtual land that didn’t belong to him. What if it worked both ways? What if others could access his personal experiences? Although he had no control over these flashbacks, he was certain the Circuit wouldn’t believe it was innocent. Their control over their intellectual and ideological property was total. Step out of line and the Circuit stepped in. Often that resulted in a mandatory upgrade of new technology or, in the rarest of cases, confinement at the Source.
The Source wasn’t one specific place.
It was a series of secretive central hubs that occupied large swathes of territory in all countries under the Circuit’s control. The largest one he knew about was on the East Coast not far from where he lived. He’d learnt in Circology class that the Source was closed to citizens and only contained those deemed a threat to the rest of society, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Although this was how the authorities portrayed it, Jake didn’t know anybody who’d been there and returned again. Few people were foolish enough to put themselves in a position where they might find out.