April 10th, 2013
The android was nearly ready to die. The countdown clock in the corner of his HUD coincided precisely with the amount of time it would take to complete filing its memories neatly into a compressed file to upload to the central hub. His owner has decided that moon mining was something he wanted to do himself, to spite his brothers and sisters who were relaxing in the autumn of their life. He was nearing his winter decided he wanted to roll his sleeves up and do the damn thing himself, to prove a point, or some other pointlessly vain fleshbeing’s ambition. Regardless, his return to work rendered his retirement android useless, and years of hard work had made it too beaten up to resell, or even recycle, as the biotech organs were so complex and personalized that the best thing to do was to just throw it out. Of course, always a help, it is the androids job to do this itself, and so our android sat in his favorite chair (though it made no difference) with the view of The Pillars of Creation floating by the bay window. It’s artificial intelligence made a connection between his eventual destruction and The Pillars’ eventual destruction via supernova, because artificial intelligence had always delighted in patterns and coincidence. As protocol dictated, the android had to examine each memory for defects in order to upload a pristine file to the central hub to contribute whatever the life of a lowly miner could contribute to the center of all intelligence in the fleshbeing’s empire throughout the solar system surrounding their outspokenly brilliant and venomous star, Cor Serpentis.
What is notable, here, is not this death, but rather the last 0.076 seconds before the uploads completion. In that short stretch of time, it is recorded that the android had two “mental” processes. The first was a search query for every image captured by the HUD’s perpetual camera. The query retrieved 17,994,002,012 images, and yet only six were accessed: an image of the Eagle Nebula’s various elephant trunks of interstellar matter rising over the horizon of a nameless moon’s gutted valley, framing a beautiful fleshbeing whose hair floated rhythmically in the cosmic wind, an image of an entire fleet of starships bursting out of a misplaced wormhole like expelled parasites, crashing into the surface of an asteroid and silently firelessly exploding in a burst of glittering metals, an image of the fleshbeing’s home planet from afar, silhouetted by it’s bloated star, and image upon that planet from inside of an automobile, being delivered to its owner for the first time, focusing its new eyes on the acid rain pummeling the windshield, an image of the young owner’s face upon seeing the android for the first time, a mixture of what is recorded in fleshbeing cultural records as surprise and relief, and finally, an image of the elderly owner’s face upon giving the android the self-destruction order, a face the android could not read despite referencing every version of sadness within the culture. The android stayed on this image for 0.074 seconds. In the last 0.002 seconds, it was recorded that the android issued its second and last computational process: a failed attempt to extend the self-destruction timer for 300 seconds, precisely the amount of time it would take to rise, turn around, walk twenty paces, and visit its owner in his sleeping chambers down the hall as a final act.When revisited, these actions have been categorized as a pointlessly vain ambition, in the final record.
Q: Where do our memories go?
A: They exist in your every movement, in every word you speak, hidden and interwoven like bacteria on your skin.
Q: How do we make sense of them?
A: Wait until a friend or loved one shares a memory that ignites the fuse of a memory of your own. Or force them out of yourself onto paper or a screen with diligence and scientific exactness.
Q: How can we possibly remember everything? There is simply too much that has transpired!
A: If the situation you are in calls for it, your brain will retrieve it. It is a survival instinct. Such as the memory of the pain you experienced touching a hot stove-top being recalled the next time you almost touch it again.
Q: Why do our lives flash before our eyes when we are about to die?
A: This is the process of your brain looking to retrieve a relevant memory to help you out of the predicament of your death. Unfortunately, this is something your brain and body has never experienced before, and it continuously cycles through everything it has ever seen in order to find an answer that doesn’t exist. There is no proper primal reaction to death other than prey-like fear. Thus, it has been our job for all of a mortal’s life as not just a subconsciousness, but a consciousness, to teach oneself to accept the question of death’s lack of an answer.
Q: Do we really accept this, in the end?
A: No, many mortals tell themselves they know they will die, when deep-down, they secretly do not believe this. It is far too often a topic that haunts the back of their mind, instead of being confronted like the predator it is.
