Swimming with Elephants
Travis Ezell
“Just the one today,” she says. The technician tries to smile. It’s his job.
She breathes in, breathes out, and remembers visiting Kerala. The golden-red sun; the warm ocean; the ripe manure smell; the elephants’ churning grace through the silvery blue water. The popcorn-popping laughter of someone special there with her. Who was it? Lee has already forgotten most of that trip, but until now she’s held on to this. Was this always her favorite memory? It’s her favorite memory right now, today.
The technician reads aloud the boilerplate. “By thumbing here, The Bearer relinquishes to Stergeron Data all rights, title, and access to the targeted memories extracted by this process, and to any digital products generated therefrom. Said memory or memories will then be expunged, in accordance with the Copyright Act of 1976 and subsequent associated legislation.”
Lee could have lip synced along, but she doesn’t want to seem rude.
The technician swivels the terminal and Lee presses thumb to screen, eager for the next part.
On a since-forgotten friend’s advice, she went to a dream clinic to sell some garbage memories. She’d heard of people doing it, like donating plasma or eggs. This company called Stergeron was buying up anything you were willing to part with. You had to pick carefully, though, because the memories would be erased after uploading. In mass quantities, even trivial memories were rich for data mining, AI training, and something Hollywood was doing now called “emotion capture”.
Everybody has memories they don’t need.
That first time, she’d trekked through sweltering heat, anything to avoid public transit. Something really bad had happened once, but she doesn’t remember what anymore. These days she loves the train. It has A/C.
The money didn’t seem like much, but it added up fast. They paid per gigabyte of coherent data, so the more you could remember the more they would take. What she hadn’t expected was the naked euphoria. Biology is a strange bird, and it turns out that the brain really likes letting go of things. Memories are burdens, weighing the brain down like sand in a balloon. Removing them was like a neurological detox: the brain experienced a profound relief. In effect, obliterate a couple thousand synaptic connections all at once and you get an explosive gush of pleasure chemicals, washing over you like a wave of orgasms on heroin.
Holy fuck, it felt good.
They say ignorance is bliss. Like most folk sayings, there’s truth behind these words.
Lee began chasing that feeling wherever it took her. It became like a hobby: evenings were spent rifling through her own life like a minimalist life coach, looking for things she could live without. Daydreaming about the mundane and making a list for each fresh memory to upload:
mom calls about weather
brushing teeth without water
emptying cagney’s litterbox
If she could remember it but didn’t need to, she could sell it. The more emotional the memory, the better:
lost at the mall
asking out carl
walked in on by roommate
They even paid for stuff she wanted to live without, painful or cringeworthy parts of childhood and adolescence:
playing doctor
kicking that dog
cheating with nathan
She stopped keeping a record of what she sold after that.
This piece of advice opened a door for Lee that could not be shut again. She began visiting different clinics under different names, doing a small circuit around the city, making money hand over fist. Not that the money was the point anymore.
Skills and learned behaviors get stored differently by the brain, so why bother remembering the lessons, or the teachers? What good does it do to hang on to awkward experiences, lost loves that still stung, or old friends long gone? Her grandparents lived on inside her whether she remembered them or not, right? As did childhood besties, exes, pets. Family, neighbors, friends. Parents.
All of it could go, and eventually it did, piece by euphoric piece. They didn’t care if it was a memory of sneezing on the toilet or a memory of your father’s untimely death – but only one of those memories rocketed you to the moon when you gave it up.
Most nights, she comes home feeling drained, a well running dry, unable to find an emotional vein to mine, or else too tired to try, numb, not high anymore, but not yet coming down. Those nights, she turns on feelvids. They’re perfect for what she needs: cozy, curated micro-experiences crafted from a composite of millions of mostly-garbage memories.
Much of it is curiously mundane, but she has to admit, the algorithm knows what she needs – little dramas with familiar characters, mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. Break-ups, gossip, a little sexy-times, some infidelity. Hilarious moments of discomfort, sentimental moments with loved ones. The sets feel as familiar as the cast, places that might as well exist right down the street.
What’s truly impressive, though, is how even the more exotic moments feel like home. It’s all so visceral and multisensory, that for a little while you can almost believe you’re the one who went swimming with elephants.
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