Memory Board

In memoriam of another dead VR craze

“Memory Board” is the third story in Litverse’s Summer Sunday Beach Reads Series. It imagines a future where consumer demand for VR devices matched the hype instead of failing horrifically.

Sarah Bellingham first fell in love at the beach. She had been lying on a towel roasting her skin to the crisp color of burnt toast, the shade that the magazine she was currently reading, Hips, declared was “magnetic” for boys. “Our latest survey found that guys prefer a tan girl to a pallid one that looks like she lives in a cave,” the magazine explained.

A Frisbee struck the magazine from her hands and sprayed sand into Sarah's eyes. She jumped to her feet, rubbing her eyes.

“What the hell!” she cried.

“Sorry,” an unapologetic guy murmured.

Through her stinging eyes, Sarah glimpsed his toned torso, ruffled black hair, and diamond-sharp blue eyes. “It's okay,” she said.

He shook her hand and said his name was Evan. When he picked up his Frisbee and saw the magazine, he picked it up between his fingers like a dirty diaper rag. “You're reading Hips?” he asked. “Isn’t that just a magazine by a clothing company?”

“Um, yeah,” Sarah said. “It came with my bathing suit.”

He laughed. “You're too pretty to be reading this.”

Just like that, Sarah Bellingham fell in love.

*

Even in her forties, Sarah remembered that first moment with Evan McCallister. He had long ago faded from her life. The love of her life had been replaced by her husband, Robert Dallow, whose charming nerdiness had long ago frizzled to cringe-worthy awkwardness. So many years later, Sarah could revisit the memory of that other love thanks to her mySight, a pair of contact lenses that had just entered the market the same summer she met Evan.

The mySight projected a virtual screen in front of the user's face. They were developed by the geniuses at Shiny Red, the company behind the myPhones that functioned as every personal device imaginable: computer, video camera, digital camera, laptop, GPS, heart rate monitor, journal, stereo, radio, wallet, flashlight, book, birth control calendar, etc.

MyPhones had been discontinued and users were encouraged to “keep up to date” by “upgrading their reality” with mySights. A world famous country music star who was worth ten billion dollars and sang about break-ups showed up in commercials to promote the new device. Holding an acoustic guitar in a blank white box of a room, she dropped it and said: “Holding things in your hands is over. It’s time to really see them.”

Since this was before the lawsuits, the mySight recorded everything by default. The Frisbee, the exchange, and the compliment had all been captured in high-definition. Sarah had uploaded the clip to her FaceSpace as soon as she got home, so all of her friends could “see the cute guy totally hitting on me at the beach!”

This was all very long ago. The same summer that Sarah met Evan, Shiny Red had been sued by approximately one billion mySight users after it was discovered that the company had an archive of everyone's recordings. “I don't understand what the fuss is all about,” CEO Todd Barker said. “These recordings have saved lives. Do you know how many people have been robbed, but caught the face of the criminal? Or how many kids have gotten in trouble in the city and been rescued because of their mySights?”

Despite Barker's impassioned defense, Shiny Red had to pay several trillion dollars’ in fines, about one-thousandth of the company's annual earnings, and the Shiny Red MySight had to create an easy way to turn the MakeItLast function on and off. Sarah was given a very long lecture about using MakeItLast by her father, Chuck Bellingham, who had said the mySight was “just giving the corporations a chance to see you undress.” From that summer on, she decided to only use the MakeItLast if she thought she would want to remember the moment forever.

*

When did Sarah choose to use MakeItLast?

When she graduated from high school and college.

When she gave birth to her first son at age thirty-three, then to her daughter at age thirty-five.

When she got married to Robert, even though he had hay fever that summer and ended up sneezing his “I do” under the willows by the farmhouse.

But, more than anything, Sarah used MakeItLast to record the times she had lived life with Evan McCallister.

She had a fifty-three minute clip of their first date together, eating greasy slices of pizza on paper plates walking along the beach under a tender dusk. Evan had found her on FaceSpace and told her he also lived on Cherry Island, a round lump of sand off the coast of northern Massachusetts where mansions and shacks hugged dunes.

The mySight recorded their conversation with their feet hanging over the pier in lossless audio that Sarah heard through the myHarmony ear pieces (sold separately).

“So,” Evan had said. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Hopefully nothing,” Sarah said.

“Nothing?”

“Because I'm never going to grow up,” she giggled.

Chuck Bellington, who had pretended to drive to a nearby coffee shop, but instead sat at the deck of an oyster bar with an average online rating of two stars to watch the couple tread the sand and walk down the pier. When their shoulders touched, he zapped the ServeBot as it passed and walked the beach and called Sarah’s name.

Sarah’s mySight heard this interruption before recording it:

“Sarah! Something came up at work. I have to log into the home terminal early. Let’s go!”

The whole ride home, Sarah’s MakeItLast footage captured the speed of her angry gaze as she glared at her father from the backseat from the top of his freckled scalp and silver-red curls. The myHarmony ear pieces played back her enraged breathing. At home, she charged up the stairs in a blur of vision and slammed the door. She switched off her MakeItLast to log onto FaceSpace to complain about her lame dad, insulting his appearance as a “shriveled little man” in public but, in her forties, forgetting the ending to the memory because it hadn’t been recorded, of seeing her dad read the comment from his computer in the dark that night when she was on the way to the bathroom and the sigh that escaped him like a ghost .

Chuck Bellingham was worried, because he had no back-up. Plex had moved Chuck's wife to Brazil for a year, where she would help the office in Sao Paulo develop a competing product to the mySight.

“Your mother's gone Global this year, but I'll probably be Global next year, so you can complain all about my parenting to her then,” Chuck told Sarah, trying to sound authoritative in front of her room's locked door. In truth, he wasn't sure if Sarah had plugged in her myHarmony and gone Full Screen.

*

Sarah carefully reviewed the MakeItLast footage of her date with Evan with her friend, Vanessa Tyron, via FaceSpace.

“Ah!” Sarah would exclaim. “I shouldn't have said that.”

Vanessa was only slightly interested but knew Sarah couldn’t tell the difference. “I don't know, Sarah,” she said. “Do you think you should keep watching this over and over? It's like you're making up all the stuff you were thinking at the time, but you can't actually remember it.”

Sarah pulled up Vanessa’s FaceSpace window. “Are you kidding, Vanessa? I could never forget anything about this- I have a mySight, remember?”

*

In fact, experts across the country were gathered to discuss the implications of how mySight users remembered anything at all. “Studies have shown that human memory is fallible. If we rely on devices to remember and relive our lives, how will we know who are? It’s inevitable we will only choose what we prefer to remember, not the moments that make us who we really are,” psychologist Dr. Sharon Wrenn argued. She was seated in one of five plush chairs on the popular morning show, The Debate. Each day, five days a week, several academics were paired against high-ranking executives of corporations. Clips were engineered for maximum virality and every guest knew it.

Todd Barker, Shiny Red's CEO, always took thirty seconds to answer. Some thought that he was consulting his PR team via his myHarmony, but it was impossible to tell. At this moment, he had both elbows on the armrests of the plush chair and his hands steepled against his lips.

“Dr. Wrenn,” he said slowly. “Human memory is like a program with a lot of bugs. What the mySight does is correct those bugs.” He waited while his team transmitted research statistics into his myHarmomy.

“If you're familiar with the experiment done by Rondo et. al., then you surely know that people's memories change the very setting, nature, and experience of an event. We already editorialize much of what we remember. And what we think we felt about what we remember.” Todd Barker shifted in his chair. “Humans have been seeking a way to capture memories since the beginning of time, from the cave painting to the mySight. Our lives all orbit a galaxy of special moments, of the special stars and planets that make us people. Are you saying that it's better for those to be... forgotten?”

This is when the short and shorter-tempered clinical psychologist, Dr. Murray Brown, huffed into his microphone. “As usual, more Shakespearean speeches from Todd Barker's off-screen playwrights,” he said, his nose curling. “Todd, are you saying that we, as humans, would benefit from imposing a narrative on our lives? Do we really have the right to define our past by the moments we choose to record?”

Bob Deagle interjected at this point. As the product manager for Shiny Red's last two decades of virtual reality products, he felt slighted by the comment. “Dr. Brown. You know the mySight doesn’t ruin memories. It just solves the problem of never having a video of the right memory at right place at the right time. We've made it easier for people to record their memories with accuracy, because instead of stale and two-dimensional photos, we've given them the option to relive the best moments of their lives in glorious three-dee.”

“But-”

Music from Shiny Red's Featured Band of the Week, The Rebels, started playing. Microphones were cut. The Debate, a joint venture by Plex and Shiny Red, came to an end.

*

Another one of the MakeItLast videos that Sarah watched was her bike trip through Germany with Evan. It was 240 hours long. Sarah had Clipmarked the moments she decided were almost full of love: a picnic in the shadow of a castle on a forested crag, a tour through Berlin to the sad fence posts where the wall once stood, the renaissance fair where the dwindling native population cosplayed their ancient pride pretending to be Teutonic knights marching to Prussia or the museum where visitors could read march about the Grand Agreement of 2025, when the last of the young Germans were paid by foreign countries, mostly in Asia, to pack their bags and leave the cumbersome needs of the aging population behind. Consequently, most of the actors performing the memories of their history were age 60 and older.

Sarah and Evan experienced all of the thrills of exploring abandoned villages, wandering rolling fields and even taking a cruise along the Rhine, so they could gaze at the decaying buildings of Luxembourg abandoned after the austerity measures. For a measly 10 Nordic marks, they could even download an application that allowed their mySight to zoom in on the city, so they could gaze at the broken buildings, the trees nestled in skyscrapers, and watch the geriatric tribes of people desperately battling for food.

“This is beautiful,” Sarah whispered.

“Not as beautiful as you,” Evan said.

They pressed hands on the cold railing and kissed, listening to the murmur of the Rhine rocking of the boat.

Two to three nights a week, Sarah sat in the dark when her family had gone to sleep and watched these clips and more of the Berlin trip.

When she watched the memory of Evan and her on bikes riding beneath the canopy of Tegeler Forest, Sarah still remembered how she felt like she was in a dream, how she had been unable to think of anything before or after the moment. But she couldn’t actually feel it. Now, thirty years later, she focused on that past feeling as much as she could while she watched the moments over and over. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't remember, all the way from the future, how that memory felt.

“The problem is that I can't stop thinking about the present,” she grumbled one night after her mySight ran out of battery and she has to retreat to the bed and lie open-eyed next to her husband.

*

Fortunately for Sarah Bellingham, help was on the way. Shiny Red was developing a product called myMemory.

“The endless demand for mySights has shown us that people want to access their memories,” Bob Deagle explained to the Shiny Red employees at their respective homes from his home in Superior, Arizona. “MakeItLast is our most-used feature by about a thousand percent.” This evoked emojis of approval and triumph from the audience. “This popularity shows us that people want their memories to be like real life. While Shiny Red has given people the audio and visual tools to access their past, they've lacked the other components to make memories an end-to-end experience.”

Bob's screen shifted to PowerPurpose, a software program that had remained virtually unchanged since it was first invented to beautify mundane speeches decades ago.

“We're proud to present myMemory today. It's a subscription-based service that will employ the talents of memory engineers. Memory engineers will be fed orders by myMemory users. Those orders will be processed by the video clip that is sent by the user. Our engineers will pore over the video and specifically program the myMemory, so that each clip is coupled with the sensations that you say you felt on that day long ago.”

One worker Buzzed Bob's screen. “Yes?” Bob asked, turning to the Buzzer's screen and enlarging it so everyone else could see the speaker.

“Bob, can you tell us how myMemory will transmit those sensations to our users?”

“Excellent question,” Bob said, immediately shrinking the worker. “When the memory engineers have completely engineered a video, it will be available on the user's myMemory account. From there, users will use a memory booth, where they can log into the account and watch the video. This is a full-body experience. If there's wind in your video, the wind will blow in the booth. Fireworks? You'll feel that in your chest. A bumpy car ride? You'll feel the vibration. A late-night rendezvous from ten years ago?” Bob grinned. “Well, you get the idea.”

*

The same day Sarah and Evan left Germany, a tsunami wiped Cherry Island clean of all human debris, from shacks to mansions. The flood washed away much of Rockport and the surrounding areas, sending a gush of homes, trees, and bodies rushing in the direction of Boston, which had long ago moved fifty miles inland.

From a lounge in Logan Airport II, which was on the border of Boston and Connecticut, Evan and Sarah watched the footage of the flood, much of it gathered from the FaceSpaces of the deceased. As soon as Sarah realized what was happening, she turned off her MakeItLast with violent force. Both her parents had been killed in the disaster. Who would want to remember that moment?

*

Sarah didn't have much footage of Evan from this period in her life. She didn't touch the MakeItLast for six or seven months. All she had was a hazy memory of him drifting away from her. His mother had also died in the flood and, consequently, Evan went through a very acute existential crisis.

“If it can all disappear so fast, everything we value, then why do we value anything at all?” he would often ask Sarah as they hunched in a coffee shop across the street from their apartment in Amherst.

Sarah tried to cheer him up by showing him footage from her MakeItLast Archive, but this only made him sink deeper into depression. “Don't you understand, Sarah? That's all gone.” He paused. “I can see videos of my mom on my MakeItLast, but the more I watch it... the less real it feels. Because things I see on screens, like movies and TV shows... that's not real. And my mom...” He choked.

While Sarah felt a struggle to tell him to snap out of it, that she had lost everything in the Cherry Tsunami, too, she refrained. She had mostly dealt with the incident by repressing it, burying it deep, and anything about the disaster risked shoveling that dirt. So, for months, Evan and Sarah skimmed the waters of their relationship, rarely making any deep plunges.

Evan broke up with Sarah the next month and moved to Ohio to work at a natural gas refinery. She frequented his FaceSpace, messaging him, but to no avail. Luckily, the wise executives at FaceSpace had long ago abolished any kind of privacy for the site, arguing that the internet was for being social, not anonymous, so Sarah was free to loiter on Evan's page. She felt like she was camping outside his house, waiting for him to open a window.

A few weeks after the break-up, Shiny Red announced the myMemory. Sarah downloaded it immediately.

*

The myMemory was an explosive success. The top three executives at Shiny Red were awarded small tropical islands for their talent at getting other people to work on innovative products. Memory booths popped up around cities and suburbs, glistening steel cubicles that were sound-proof and windowless. Billions of customers used them. The marketing department promoted the products and decided their witty one-liners drove at least 20 to 30 percent of sales:

Feel the hug of a loved one, whether they've gone Global or passed away! Ever wanted to capture that unforgettable feeling again? Now you can! With the myMemory, you can make any moment last forever.

Shiny Red partnered with StarDirt Coffee to unveil “memory cafes” in every major and minor city. Lines formed from open to close with humans shifting on their feet with old hopes. Time limits had to be imposed. The very wealthy had private memory booths built at home. Through a revenue-sharing program with FaceSpace, Shiny Red introduced MemorySpace, which allowed memory cafe customers to have coffee with a friend and reminisce about a great memory before plunging into that memory and experiencing it again and again. Entire city blocks lost electricity regularly as the booths rumbled and whooshed and trembled and shivered with the power of memory. Retired athletes reveled in the games of their lives, over and over. People who had reached the ripe retirement age of 75 spent all day remembering what it felt like to be young and strong. A controversial product from Night Hub co-sponsored by The Global Medical Corporation appeared in the market: The Ejection. “Just a painless prick at the right moments will really help you relive those memories, whether it's a long night at the bar or a long night in the bedroom!” the Night Hub spokeswoman assured people. “Clinical studies show that regular Ejections ward off Alzheimer’s.”

This is not to say a 30-minute session in a memory booth was affordable. For Sarah, the memories were a luxury. She saved up for months on end, cut the video of her trip to Germany with Evan to a five hour highlight real, and sent it to the memory engineers at Shiny Red. A month later, they sent it back to her. Sarah told Robert and the kids that she had to get some fresh air and had the Community AutoCar take her to the nearest memory cafe. She waited in line for almost an hour while the elderly gentleman ahead of her experienced a compilation of his sexual conquests. Sarah finally got into the booth, carefully shut the door, and logged into her myMemory account.

The love she had decided was her life came rushing back with startling brilliance: she could smell the Rhine, or at least what the memory engineers decided it smelled like with the help of beauty brand Esteem Launder’s renowned Scent Gurus, and felt the boat under her feet as the booth's rotating floor tilted. Even the sun felt warm on her face, thanks to a glowing overhead bulb that dimmed and brightened accordingly. A small vent whistled in her face whenever Shiny Red’s memory-to-sensation algorithm had detected the waves shimmering in a breeze.

This, Sarah realized, was what she had wanted all along: a resurrection of the past and an annihilation of the present so complete it was finally impossible to feel it. The memory booth served as a place where she could pretend that she was still in her teens and her twenties leading a life of infinite love and endless promise with a boyfriend she had polished and perfected and prayed to with all the same routines as a pilgrim at the Pantheon. As she was absorbed by each compilation, Sarah felt a sense of rapture. Here was where she was supposed to be, she decided.

As a timer turned her mySight red, flashing a five-minute warning, Sarah wondered how she could ever face the world outside again. All of the feelings in her mySight had become more real than anything she could possibly feel in the future. The present seemed unholy: her family, her career, her real life had no feeling like her past memories. In the memory booth, Sarah felt there had been a cosmic mistake. She was not the woman who had walked into the booth, but the woman inside the booth, some smooth-cheeked apparition who Evan smiled at from the screen. Not the woman she saw in the mirror.

When the timer in the memory booth began to ring and everything went still, Sarah broke down and started to cry. She groped the air as her seat rocked back and forth in an effort to simulate the boat on the Rhine, trying to hold onto Evan. It was a strange sensation, to feel warm tears running down her face while he smiled at her from the video clip, telling her that he loved her. Sarah stretched her hands to where Evan should be, but she felt the rude, steel wall of the cube. She recoiled, horrified by the reminder that everything was just a simulation she had created. The SurroundScreen faded to black and she became a forty-three-year-old mother again. Issuing one final, defeated moan, Sarah wiped the tears from her cheeks and staggered out of the memory booth into the watery orange lights of the memory café.

She was about to leave when she heard a familiar voice.

“Sarah?”

She turned around, eyes wide. Evan had gotten heavier and grown a beard, but his eyes had the same glimmer she remembered. A swelling filled her heart and she hugged him, feeling his chin on top of her head to feel the same reassuring pressure that a hardened, chin-shaped cushion had provided during the memory sesson.

“Sarah, wow, it's good to see you, too. How long's it been?” Evan asked, gently detaching himself from her.

Sarah looked up at him. “I... don't know.”

*

Another exchange occurred on The Debate several weeks after this chance encounter (which Sarah had also chosen to record, so she could later decide that Evan’s eyes had held the same, lost-then-found emotion that she had felt even if he had told her that he had come to the cafe to remember his daughter or something, an inconvenient part she had cut and was now fast-fading).

The myMemory had been available for around six months and doctors were starting to see symptoms of what they called “recollection withdrawal.”

Dr. Sandra Anderson explained recollection withdrawal to Todd Barker and Bob Deagle. “These people are literally addicted to the past,” she said breathlessly.

“And how do you treat these patients?” asked Dr. Murray Brown.

“We can't, not really. They say, 'Oh, but I wish that I was still like that, I wish things were still like that. I wish life was still like that.' And what can we say? They're not still like that.”

“Now, that's their choice,” said Dr. Alfonso Gonzalez, a renowned cosmetic surgeon and certified regenerator. “The possibilities for becoming young again are endless these days. I personally can perform shapeology and model a person on how they used to look. It's fairly easy, for me. Especially with the Global Medical Company’s Reversal Kit.”

“This isn't a PR opportunity!” Dr. Murray Brown shouted, hopping out of his seat even though every guest, in fact, knew that The Debate was specifically produced to be a PR opportunity. Dr. Alfonso Gonzalez had paid $10,000 for a guest appearance. “No one gives a crap about how you can use the cells of dead things to make people look more alive. That doesn’t make your soul any younger!” He stamped his foot. “Have you seen the lines at these cafes? Those people are wasting their lives living in the past. They're even more depressed when they come out of it, so they need another fix.”

Todd Barker and Bob Deagle looked at each other with familiar smirks.

Todd Barker let out a long breath. “This may not be the wisest time to do it,” he started. “But Bob and I have some great news for Shiny Red customers, especially myMemory subscribers. Bob?”

“You may want to take a seat for this one, Murray,” Bob said, winking at the camera and the seventy million livestream viewers. “Todd and I are proud to announce the latest add-on to myMemory: The Memory Shop!” He paused to take a sharp marketing breath. “With the Memory Shop, myMemory subscribers with a Remember+ subscription can purchase engineered memories from millions of people around the world. That will automatically download the video to your myMemory account. And, whenever you want, you can just pay the normal fee to use a memory booth and access to those Remember+ Recollections!”

“Are you saying that people will be able to live other people's memories?” Murray asked in an uncharacteristically small voice.

“They'll be sharing the memories. Imagine: instead of telling a story about a great adventure, you can send the friend the adventure itself! ” Bob bellowed. “Todd?”

Todd Barker stood to his feet. “And the best part, folks? You can sell your own engineered memories through The Memory Shop. The better the memory, the better price you'll get for it. You'll get some royalties for each download, too. This is where the Recollection Economy meets the Creator Economy!”

“Those aren't your memories!” Dr. Sandra Anderson managed.

“You'll make them your memories by experiencing them,” Todd Barker countered.

“But it'll be the memory of a memory, not a real thing!” Dr. Murray Brown protested.

“What's the difference?” Todd Barker asked.

And, for this, no one had an answer.

Read the first and second short stories of Litverse’s Summer Sunday Beach Read Series here.