“Thanks, Dad,” Jake replied despondently.
“Oh, sorry, son, I didn’t mean to make it worse. It was a lot easier in my day, too. We were still in the era of the ‘Great Segregation’ and the Circuit’s rules were still building. At least I knew my future life would be somewhere local. Who knows where in the world you’ll end up?”
Deborah broke down in tears at the realisation that her only son might soon be settling into a new life thousands of miles away. Jake still didn’t fully appreciate their feelings about today. The adjustment would be as difficult for them as it was for him. Even so, his focus remained squarely about self-interest. After all, it was his letter not theirs.
“You’re all deluded. It will never be better than it was in my day,” Paddy blurted insensitively, ignoring his daughter’s emotional pain. “We’ve brought all of this on ourselves because of an unquenchable thirst for abundance and an addiction to perfection.”
“How did it work in the old days, Grandad?” asked Tyra partly through genuine interest and mostly in the hope of dragging out her brother’s discomfort.
“Um…I can’t actually remember,” he said, rubbing his head.
“Sorry, I don’t understand,” said Tyra, bewildered by the concept of forgetfulness.
Memory loss was an alien condition for the younger generation of the West. They never forgot anything. It was a physical impossibility. Everything they’d ever thought, felt or seen was instantly accessible through the power of the Memory Cloud. It worked to both their advantage and disadvantage. It was impossible to lose anything important because you could always backtrack in your memory feed to see where you’d left it. Song titles never evaded recognition and people’s names and ranks were recalled instantly, even if you’d only met them once when you were four years old.
On the downside it became a lot harder to use your memory as an excuse for why you hadn’t done something. Avoiding chores or schoolwork was identified for what it really was, laziness or a lack of ability, not as it had been in the distant past because you’d ‘forgot’. The very word itself was about as common in today’s vocabulary as hearing someone say aeroplane.
“Wait, I’ll remember it,” gasped Paddy, screwing up his face in a vain attempt to jump-start his cognition.
“Dad, plug it in!” said Deborah pointing at the little metal box.
“I don’t need it! I’ll remember eventually, give me a second.” After a few minutes of deep and visible concentration Paddy’s recollection returned. “Ah yes, twenty-sixteen, that was the year it happened for me. Most people hated that year, but as far as I was concerned it was one of the best, a pleasure cruise compared to twenty-twenty.”
Everyone nodded in agreement, even those who weren’t born until a decade or two later.
“I’d taken a job as a junior sales assistant in a little office just outside Boston.”
“An office?” interrupted Tyra.
“Yes.”
“Which is?”
“What do they teach you in school?” he huffed.
“Important stuff rather than ancient history,” she replied with a classically teenage tone.
“It’s where lots of people used to work back in the day.”
“Ugh, that’s grim. Think of all the physical contact, must have been horrendous.”
“It was wonderful. People actually used to talk to each other. Not through this fake reality that we have to put up with now. Real conversations. Person to person. That’s where I first learnt to flirt.”
“I think I’m going to be sick!” screamed Tyra hysterically.
“That’s just how you did it back then. You met someone at work, or in the gym, or at the bus stop and you struck up a friendly conversation. You might compliment them on how they looked or offer a cheeky smile before politely asking if they’d like to go out for a drink or maybe even dinner. No algorithms, no rules and no letters. Well, unless they were love letters. I miss those. Much simpler. We didn’t need to infiltrate the memory feed of the person we fancied before bombarding them with a collection of unauthorised virtual emotions like an artificial sex pest!”
“I prefer it our way. Saves time,” argued Tyra who at fourteen was already on her seventh serious boyfriend as a result. None of them lasted that long before someone more interesting came along. What was the point of getting attached? It would all change on Ascension Day anyway.
“Pah! I didn’t need some powerful higher consciousness to tell me when I was in love. I knew it as soon as I laid eyes on your grandmother, God rest her soul. My Nina. It was a perfect match.”
“I know that feeling, too, Grandad,” added Jake. “The first time I saw Christie I thought my heart was going to leap out of my chest. Even now, every time I think about her or see her, I get butterflies in my stomach and a powerful energy surrounds my body.”
Tyra pretended to retch in disgust.
“Exactly!” replied Paddy so excited by his grandson’s empathy he almost lifted out of his chair. “Don’t let it go, Jake. Never.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be as lucky as you were, Grandad,” replied Jake solemnly. “It’s just not as simple as it was.”
“Let’s not get all depressed. The Circuit knows what’s good for us,” replied Kyle. “There are billions of people out there, and not one of us can truly know which one is perfect for us. But the Circuit can. They do all the hard work for us. You never know, Paddy, if you’d had the benefit of the system there was probably someone out there who was an even better match for you than Nina.”
“That’s my mother you’re talking about,” said Deborah angrily. “Half of the people in this room wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her, remember.”
“No offence, my love, I was just trying to comfort the boy.”
“It’s not working,” replied Jake.
“Oh, just open it,” sighed Tyra, who was already distracting herself from the conversation by chatting to her friends in her cloud feed. “Let’s just see what awful trauma the Circuit has in store for him and then all laugh!”
Jake took a seat as far from the others as possible. He caressed the letter under his finger and thumb. How did he open it? He’d never held one before. He searched for a button or sensor that might make the envelope dematerialise to reveal the letter underneath. There was none to be seen. When he turned it over, there was a small flap at the top and a code was printed in tiny letters. These codes were extremely common. As soon as your eyes noticed one, the chip in the optic nerve sent a message to the amygdala to immediately launch an instructional video in your cloud feed. Everything you bought had a code these days. Clothes, medicine, groceries, kitchen appliances, pets and anything that the Circuit deemed to be ancient in origin.
Jake watched intently as the brief instructional video was projected on the living room floor. In it a small child was demonstrating the most efficient method of opening a letter without disrupting the contents. They always used a child in these videos. It was how the Circuit kept you grounded. If an infant could complete any given task, then you could, too. If it transpired that you couldn’t, then no doubt they’d have a record of that emotion and it would work against you in the future. Maybe this was how they worked out someone’s ‘importance factor’? thought Jake He reflected on all the times the smug little ‘know it all’ in the projection had outwitted him in the last ten years. Too many to count.