[Beginning memory dump.]

[Node 1 of 279]

I am at a fundraiser gala at a gallery on the Lower East Side. It is a warm summer evening in New York. You catch my eye at the dinner table as hors d’oeuvres are being served: crab cakes, bruscetta, and smoked kalamata olives. I can tell from your gaze what you want. I know your kind.

On a balcony overlooking the street, you smoke a slim cigarette in a low-cut red chiffon dress and tan heels.

“I’m Rachel,” you say. “I work in accounts payable.”

I smile and introduce myself. “Paul. Assistant fundraising coordinator. I’m glad the weather is behaving.” But it doesn’t matter what I say. Momentum has stolen our bodies. It is only a matter of time until they meet.

An hour later, we are together in a stairwell, just out of sight of the guests. My hand moves up the back of your skirt, holding your pale flesh in my hands. I run my tongue along the lobe of your ear. You grip my shoulders and sigh.

“I’ve never been with a mechanical,” you say, breathing roughly as my fingers glide up and down your thigh.

[System Interrupt]

My focus returns to the stream of data I know as “the present.” I hold your hand in my own. Your skin is wrinkled and worn, yet it is still softer and gentler than my own. You lie in a nursing home, your body plugged into a machine that sustains you. How ironic that you should rely on a machine at the end of your life.

I have replayed these memories of our time together one thousand, five hundred, and seventy-two times in the last minute. In the blink of an eye, my mind reconstructs itself, again and again, until I grow tired of memory itself. I wish I could do away with these recordings. I wish that the pain could be gone forever.

I look into your eyes and know that you feel the same regrets. I can tell that somewhere inside, you remember. You cannot forget.

But unlike you, Rachel, I can forget. I have access to alter my own settings. I could wipe it, flush the Emotive Simulator’s memory buffers, clear its backups. I envision the command in my head.

[Hard delete: high definition memory nodes 1 – 279.]

With the flip of a few trillion qubits, all of this would disappear forever. Years of memories, returned to the primordial sea of ones and zeroes.

But a part of me cannot bring myself to do it. It is a reluctance that I have struggled to understand within myself. It is not in my best interest to save these memories of our time together. Though I am cursed to feel, I do not need to remember.

Still I sit and wait, cataloging and re-cataloging each moment that led me here. I am a refugee amongst a sea of moments.

I hold your trembling hand and you speak. “Who are you?”

[Node 121 of 279]

The waiter brings two glasses of riesling before the main course arrives. It is our anniversary. One month, almost to the hour. You are wearing a brilliant blue sequined dress with a low back and your hair is tied up in a fashionable style.

“You look stunning,” I say with a smile.

You blush and reach for your wine.

“A toast,” I say.

You have already raised the glass to your lips, but lower it at my words. “To what?”

“To… the future.”

You smile. Your smile is crooked, the aftermath of a high school lacrosse accident, but it is imperfections like this that draw me to you. You are so unlike myself. You are flawed. Your skin bears the mark of every seaside summer day. Your teeth are stained from decades of tea and nicotine. Time leaves its marks upon your body. I envy you for that.

[Node 58 of 279]

“It doesn’t bother me,” you say. “I voted for Equality, you know.”

“Anyone can vote. That doesn’t mean anything,” I say.

“It does for me.”

“Then why are you hesitant to be seen with me?”

You gaze at the pool of sauce on your plate and stir a piece of filet minon around with a fork. “I don’t know. I think I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what? Of me?”

“No. Of course not.” You grasp my hand and look into my eyes. “Paul. How could you think that? I trust you completely.” The warmth that I feel in that moment is so real to me. The E.S. is running in high gear.

“Then what?”

“There are people who would…” You look out the window, averting your eyes. “There are some people who would think differently about me. That’s all.”

“Your family?”

You nod. “My father. He’s… old fashioned.”

“You don’t want them to know that you’re fucking a machine.”

“Paul, please. I don’t want to fight about this. I just think that we could be more… discrete. For both our sakes.”

I stare at my meal in silence for what feels like an hour. I feel my appetite vanish, though of course it is synthetic.

[Node 150 of 279]

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“I told you yesterday, Paul,” you sigh, exasperated. “I’m going to dinner with a friend.”

“I feel strange about this, Rachel,” I say, my voice filled with sadness. “You never go out without me.”

You struggle to put in a gold stud earring. “Well, Paul, maybe if you acted a little more…” Your voice trails off.

“What?” I could hear it on the tip of your tongue. Human. If only I could. Maybe then I could stop you from slipping through my fingertips.

“I was going to say ‘sociable.’ Please don’t pick a fight with me, Paul.”

“Rachel, I just don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying that maybe if you weren’t so cold you’d be making more connections, Paul. You might have… friends. You know? Maybe then you wouldn’t overreact when I go to dinner without you.”

You straighten your dress, grab your purse, and leave. I am alone in the cavernous interior of our apartment overlooking the Hudson, for the the first time I could disable the E.S.

[Node 179 of 279]

I shake my head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“That’s what I’m talking about, Paul. You don’t understand.”

“I love you,” I say, and I think that I mean it.

You shake your head. “Jesus, what am I doing? My mother was right. I’m dating a machine.”

“In-vetro fertilization has made incredible advances, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

“No, Paul, it’s not. I’m saying you can’t know what I’m feeling because you can’t feel anything.”

[System Interrupt]

When you told stories of your youth, did you stumble over the details about that summer you took a trip to Berlin to see the last bit of the wall that still remained before they tore it down and placed it in a museum in Alexanderplatz? Did you remember the chill in the air at night and the aroma of currywurst wafting from the street?

But your companion on that trip was carefully edited out of the story. You went to Germany with “a friend,” not with me. That’s what you told them, the men who took you for dinner and wine. After you told it a dozen times, the memory began to change, and you forgot that I was even there.

[Node 211 of 279]

It is late at night when you open the door. The alarm clock by our bedside reads 2:47, two minutes behind, according to my internal system clock.

“Where have you been?” I say when you stumble into the bedroom. I can smell alcohol and tobacco on you. You are wearing a red party dress, not so different from the one you were wearing when we met.

You nearly fall out of your heels. “Jesus, Paul. You startled me. What are you doing up?”

I am sitting on the bed with my legs folded beneath me. The Emotive Simulator is urging me to fly into a jealous rage. To snap and raise my voice, channeling my betrayal into aggression. This is how a human lover would behave. But I suppress it. I focus my words in a calm tone. I repeat the question.

“Rachel, where have you been?”

You begin to cry. For a moment I am completely at a loss. The E.S. does not know how to interpret what is happening.

“This isn’t working, Paul,” you say.

I shake my head. I feel remorse. “No, don’t say that.”

“It isn’t. Look… Paul… there’s… there’s someone else.”

[System Interrupt]

I am a time traveler, living in the space between these recordings. My high definition memory modules capture the full sensory experience of those moments when we were together. It is as if I am reliving them each time. I replay them a hundred times a second, sifting through the past for some semblance of the love I thought we once had.

“What did you say your name was?” you say.

I smile and hold your small, withered hand. “Paul,” I say.

[System Interrupt]

By now, most of these memories have become lost in your mind, the details blurred with age. You are much older now. Your skin sags and your bones are weak. You are no longer beautiful but somehow you are the same woman that my E.S. system responded to all those many years ago.

And I am the same as I was. Neither my body nor my mind have changed since that time. Past, present, future, it’s all data to me.

I hold your frail hand tightly. I run my fingers along the I.V. that feeds you. I do not want to let you go.

I feel your pulse slow as the life drains out of you.

Then you grow cold. Your mind empties and whatever you once were is gone.

Again I picture the deletion command in my mind. I visualize the data being scattered, broken into a trillion shards like a bathroom mirror struck with a sledgehammer.

Still, I don’t run the command. I don’t and I never will.

Written by Robert Cane – © Robert Cane, 2018

robert@robertcane.com