Cleaning Services (2)...
fiction
Deborah sat on the couch with a large glass of wine next to her. Grief was creeping around the edges of her day. She knew it would happen. There was no way to comfort a friend who had lost a parent without remembering your own loss. She had the virtual reality headset sitting on the cushion next to her, if she was going to grieve again she might as well wallow a bit is how she looked at it.
Her mother had been one of the original customers of the Brain Scan and Storage Service. Back when it was somewhat experimental. Sensors hooked up to your head scanning your thoughts and memories. It was designed to enhance new learning. It didn't really work that way. You didn't end up with that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind thing, you ended up with a copy of your memories being stored somewhere else. Maybe good if you were worried about dementia, or alzheimer's disease, but otherwise not much use.
Until the government realized what a great treasure trove of access it provided. Law enforcement was completely on board. How easy would it be to solve a crime if you could just subpoena the brain scan of your suspect? Did they do it? Yep. Here's the memory. And while we're here let's just take a look around for other things they might have done. After all it's not our fault they left the evidence of the crime just out in the open in their head like this.
The Service, as everyone now called it, became mandatory. Twice a year from the time you were 15 until you died you had to update your files. It was automatic now. Nobody thought that what they thought was completely private. Only a few of them even seemed to remember a time that was normal. And even fewer still seemed to resent this new intrusion. "If you have nothing to feel guilty about, what's the big deal?"
And privacy was dead.
She never believed for an instant that law enforcement or the government at large waited for legal permission to review files they were interested in. She had a bigger suspicion that The Service itself tipped them off to things they should pay attention to. Even though they swore they never looked, that it was all encrypted until unlocked by the Key Magistrate and that they only did that under court order. Pinkie swear.
Even if Sarah took her advice and used the cleaning service she recommended the files sent to deletion would be held for 6 months until given the legal authorization for deletion. Odds are they would be trashed without a problem, she couldn't image that Sarah's mother held any state secrets or unsolved crimes in her head, but still, they would be held. The other files would be sorted and saved neatly. Not at all the jumble they were probably in right now. She had heard from friends that they got what amounted to file cabinets they could look through to pull up exact memories. Chronological or event based depending on what you chose.
Neat and tidy.
Not what she got with her mother's scans. That was just old boxes with labels written in sharpie. If they were labeled at all. Or labeled correctly. It was clear that some memories had been just shoved into a space with other ones for no real reason. Or maybe there had been a reason but she didn't know what it was. Maybe they all were attached to the same time of year, or the same smell, or color blouse, or who knows what. It made sense to her mother but she couldn't very well ask her about it when she started the sorting process.
It took her a few years to sort through it all, but of course that was with the six months she couldn't even look at the headset let alone put it on to sort more files.
Brains don't store everything. That was interesting to her to discover. And that every brain has a shorthand. The things you do all the time, brushing your teeth, driving your car, there is no real memory of that, just an action key, unless it was eventful. The day you accidentally put hair cream instead of toothpaste on the brush, the day the deer came crashing out of the woods and you missed hitting it by inches. Close enough to see the panicked white around its eyes and thinking it must see the same thing in yours.
Even things you might think would be there, sometimes aren't. Or at least not in any detail. She knew from reviewing her own scans that there was a boyfriend from college that was just gone. The only memory she had of him was one date. They had gone bowling. She had the best french fries she had ever had in her life from the bowling alley snack bar. They were crinkle cut and every single jagged edge of them was crispy, salty perfection. But the entirety of the rest of the 6 month relationship? Gone. Which she supposed if her best memory of that time was of french fries it made sense.
She reached over and put on the headset. It was like walking into an old storage shed. She could almost smell the musty old papers smell. She could see dust motes floating through sunbeams that were filtering through the walls and roof of the storage room. It was always sunny in her mother's memory storage. Which made sense if you had known her mother.
She sat down in front of her favorite box. It was the college box. Her brother's graduation. He had been the first person in her mother's entire family to graduate from college. She had been so incredibly proud that day. Her sister's graduation was here too. Her mother had felt a little silly but her thought was she was the first woman in her family to graduate from college. Which, of course she was, if her son was the first then her younger daughter would be the first woman. But it still filled her with pride. And then there was Deborah's graduation. The first time she had looked through this box she had prepared herself to know that her mother would not have the same feeling of pride with her graduation. She wasn't the first ever, she wasn't the first woman, but that wasn't what happened. The pride was still there. All three of her children had gone to college and all three had graduated. It was a huge day for her mother. Maybe even bigger than it was for Deborah herself.
She moved from that box to the baking with the grandkids box. It was a collection of memories of holiday baking, summer vacation baking, birthday cake baking, and for some reason quite a few episodes of Beat Bobby Flay. Seeing her kids and their cousins all cooking with her mother never failed to cheer her up. They were all so little then. Covered in flour, chocolate smears on their faces, smiles that seemed to make the room glow. Which she knew she saw it that way because that's what her mother saw. Just light radiating off of these little people. Her joys.
She was ready to go back to the real world when she spotted the other box. The one she couldn't bring herself to even throw away because it would mean touching it again. The box didn't look like any of the others. It was dark, like it had been grease stained. The sides were bowed from everything that had been stuffed into it. Barely holding together. There was no label. Just the box.
She remembered opening it. Looking through the first few memories then the next. Then dumping the contents out and rifling through it all. The whole time bile rising in her throat. Anger building in her body like a physical presence. She had ripped the headset off and thrown it across the room. When she had put it back on later she was surprised that the mess she had made was no longer there. Everything was stuffed back in the box. When the program reset everything would go back to how it was stored. Unless she clicked delete. And she hadn't. Not yet. She might someday, but it wouldn't do her any good since she had already seen the information and it was now her memory too.
Her father had been a good man. That's what everyone always said. That's what she believed. She had good memories of him. He was busy, traveled a lot for work, was a little more distant than her mother, but she always viewed that as a product of his time. Her brother was a much better father. More involved with his kids lives. More of a partner to his wife. And hopefully much more faithful.
Her father, that good man, had multiple affairs. Her mother had found out about the first one when she was pregnant with her brother. She had gone to her mother and had been told that she needed to understand that just because she had been sick and miserable and absolutely not in the mood for sex didn't mean his sex drive had gone away and that he had to put that drive somewhere. It would be temporary and she should just be quiet about it and it would pass.
And it did.
Until he did it again.
And again.
And again.
She wasn't sure if he was just terrible at sneaking around or if her mother had been an excellent snoop. Most likely the more he got away with it the more careless he became. Maybe he even thought she didn't care. He was gone long before her mother. Long before The Service had ever been invented so there was no way to know what he thought.
The thing that upset her the most wasn't even that her father had been such a philanderer, though that was upsetting on its own, it was how it made her mother feel about herself. There was a memory of her looking in the mirror thinking, "I am the sort of woman who gets cheated on. I am that pathetic wife who stays." Her mother had been so much but she was never pathetic, not to her.
Deborah couldn't tell why she chose to stay, the reasons in the box were jumbled and mixed and there wasn't a clear line through other than she just did. She imagined it was mostly fear and that's what she was raised to do. To stay.
She hated that box. She hated thinking her mother had ever spent time thinking there was something wrong with her. She wondered what life would have been like if she had left. Clearly if she had left the first time there would be no Deborah so she would be lying if she said she had strong convictions that staying was the wrong choice.
But as much as she hated that box what she could look at now, what she could do now, was realize how small that box was in comparison to everything else in that storage shed. How it sat in a shadowed corner while everything else was in sunbeams. How it never even touched the boxes with memories her mother had of her father at other times. Dating, marriage, raising their children, sitting on the couch working on crossword puzzles together. The relationship that Deborah had always thought they had. They had that.
But her mother still had that other box.
She took the headset off.
She hoped that Sarah would take her advice and delete the files without looking at them.
And if not, then she hoped that the affair Sarah's mother had with her father hadn't been all that memorable.