Erasure

"Please, sit down," the white-coated nurse instructed, gesturing to a thinly cushioned examination table in the center of the tiled room.

Avie sat as she was told, feeling the black leather press against the backs of her thighs. She slid her hands under her legs, providing a barrier between her warm skin and the cold seat. If she was nervous at one point, she no longer was.

The nurse handed her a rectangular tablet, and told her to read it thoroughly and then provide her thumbprint in the box at the bottom of the digital form. She slid her finger across the screen, and it scrolled. A list of bulleted liabilities and legalities flew by, their meaning barely registering in her mind...merely blurred formalities. Avie pressed her thumb to the box and held it until the border flashed green, confirming her authorization. She handed the tablet back to the nurse with what she hoped was a smile, before averting her eyes back to the patterned tile of the clinic floor.

The tile was white and lavender, colors meant to be soothing to the clients of the Memory Erasure Clinic. However, to Avie they only reminded her of why she was there. Lavender hospital walls, the place where she had lost Jule forever, as well as their darling little girl. In one painfully long millisecond, the future had been shattered into pieces, just like the glass windows of their car upon brutal impact, just like 143 miles per hour in the wrong lane.

Avie no longer had this future, so what what she doing with its ghost ? One decision, and her slate would be wiped clean. She would have no recollection of burning headlights and the stranger who got away with it. She would have no recollection of Lilly, and no recollection of Jule. How could she continue to dream of her green eyes and his loving words, if she never knew them in the first place ?

The nurse came back with a syringe of clear fluid and an oxygen mask. She instructed Avie to lay down, and with an almost motherly nature, tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ears.

"The formulas are designed to only target parts of the brain that contain the memories you aim to remove," the nurse spoke as she slipped the mask over Avie's face, cupping her nose and mouth. "However, side effects often include some loss of recent memory, as well as nausea and lightheadedness."

Avie nodded solemnly. None of her recent memories were worth keeping anyway; one should not preserve nightmares. The nurse turned Avie’s wrist upward, exposing the tattoo that criss-crossed it. She inserted the needle right above the lyrics of Jule’s favorite song, and plunged the cold fluid into Avie’s veins.

Tears welled as Avie realized she would wake up in a few hours, and only recognize the lyrics as the opening lines of a pleasant melody. The ceiling lights began to swim on their own accord, and her thoughts began to swirl as well. How long had she waited for this procedure ? Weeks had become months, and months had become years. Years that had been spent seeking, questioning, chasing answers that had never come...

...and now they never would, because the questions would soon no longer exist.

[Inspired by "The Truth" by Seven Lions. The only lyrics to this song are the repeated phrase, "getting over you"] 

Spruce and Deer

Vivian-T79 had no idea what a forest was. She had never set foot upon the soft ground and heard a twig snap beneath her weight. She had never brushed aside a sprig of young spruce, gotten moss underneath her fingernails, or teetered her way across a fallen log over a brook. She had never caught a centipede off the musty forest floor, and never caught a deer out of the corner of her eye.

In fact, she had no idea what half of those things even looked like in real life. She only knew they existed because somewhere, a scientist had decided that it was important for a robot girl to know what spruce and deer were, and had written those little details into a packet that was downloaded directly into her brain. Even though her primary function was limited to fashion modeling, her engineers clearly thought that a pretty face and perfectly ratioed body were not enough.

She had seen such green environments before, but only in digital form- when they downloaded educational packets into her brain, she saw nature documentaries and cross-section diagrams of ancient redwoods, concentric circles revealing their great age. The entertainment packets brought with them various recent and older films; scenes portraying quaint little cabins protected by tall, majestic trees. This silent mysteriousness of the forest is what made it so alluring to her. 

How she longed to experience the shaded, serene environment of these forests; the hush of those chartreuse mosses and dark green pines. 

However, when she looked outside her window, all she saw was white. Shiny, pure, white. White of porcelain sinks and operating tables. White of her first memory- the sterile assembly room in which she and her sisters, Vivian-T70 through Vivian-T78, were brought to life, and where they were likely going to be retired when their time was up- when their drives began skipping and their data began slipping away- when they simply began to forget. 

Vivian-T79 did not want to forget. With unblinking hazel eyes, she stared out of the window to the window at the end of the hall, and through that window, she saw the door. She had only ever seen human handlers go in and out that way; the regulation packet clearly stated that models were not allowed to leave their indoor duties. However, she couldn't help treating herself to some curiosity, a glitch trait that her developers were having a hard time overwriting. 

How could she forget a forest, if she never really knew what it was in the first place ? 

Views from the Outside

Some thinky thoughts loosely derived from a conversation held in line for the Star Tours ride at Disneyland.

I wonder... if aliens were to visit Earth as tourists, what would they think of us ?

Would they look upon us with a sense of patronizing humor, the way that an adult lavishly praises a child's elaborately and carefully concocted mud pie or crayon drawing ?

Or would they look upon us with a sense of helpless pity, the way that someone driving home from work glances at a homeless man and his bony, dirt-ridden dog ?

Or would they look at us with a sense of complete and utter bafflement, the way that students respond to a teacher when she explains something that is entirely out of line with the flow of the lesson ?


Over the summer when I was teaching in Taiwan, one of the lessons that we shared with the students was the various holidays that we celebrate in the US. Maybe it's because I've grown up with Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, St. Patricks Day, etc... but I've never really questioned these major American holidays. We grow up making paper pilgrims in preschool and drinking eggnog in elementary, listening to Christmas classics and scooping the goopy brains out of innocent pumpkins before stabbing geometric shapes into their dusty orange shells. We grow older and retain our enthusiasm for these special days-- even if it does mean that the pilgrims and pumpkins are replaced by consecutive beers. Yet still, we grow up, and we understand, that these are all very normal things to do at their given times of the year.

However, when we were explaining these holidays to our aboriginal Taiwanese students, many of them were  confused, and even cynical. Why do you have to wear green on St. Patrick's Day ? Why don't you just eat the pumpkin? Why is Santa always so fat?

These are incredibly difficult questions to answer; it's kind of like asking an Eskimo to explain snow. They've never had to explain it, because it's just always been there.

Just as these Taiwanese children were entirely foreign to the concept of American holidays, would aliens also be entirely baffled by these small shrines to the human experience that are, essentially, social constructs ? Perhaps they would look at our commercialized Christmas and raise an eyebrow or earbrow or whatever puzzlement-expressing anatomical feature they possess. Perhaps they would observe the drunken carousing of New Year's and completely miss the concept... because their planet rotates so slowly, and revolves around the sun so quickly, that a day and a year are essentially equivalent.

Even holidays that are generally self-explanatory, like Mother's Day, or Father's Day... maybe they reproduce asexually, and instead, they celebrate Mitosis Day, or Budding Day, or whatever. Happy Spawnday ! *throws confetti*

Even if they were to peel away the commercial layers of Christmas and decipher it down to its spiritual roots, would they understand the concept of religion ? Alien civilizations that have developed such advanced technology to travel beyond their star systems into ours must have reached a level of scientific understanding that has either confirmed or denied the veritability of the world's major religions (it would be pretty neat if they found a way to go back in time and interview Jesus).

Or, another interesting possibility...even if they had come to a science-based, all-inclusive-yes-or-no-conclusion on the concept of religion, that they still celebrate holidays for the sake of their own social constructs ?

Do aliens have religion ?

Alien civilizations, no matter how advanced at this point in time, would certainly have risen from similarly humble hunter-gathering backgrounds. In Earth's young era, religion was often used to explain the unexplainable-- cosmic phenomena, strange happenings, and natural disasters. To say that a civilization came to being entirely bereft of religion is a weighty claim, and I personally am very curious to see what types of global religions exist on alien planets. God created an entire universe, and being an artistic creator, I doubt that He would have played out the exact same story on all of his habitable planets. What other miracles of water and wine, or light and shadow, exist on these other worlds--each as unique as our own? And then from these, what types of customs, traditions, and holidays arose and evolved over the span of time ?

It's certainly baffling to think about.


[currently listening: Velvetine - The Great Divide (Seven Lions Remix)]