Humanity’s Next Step in Evolution
Memory Bank
A short story by Locke
From a blissful slumber I wake to my dog licking my face. I think he knows today’s my birthday. It’s ten forty-seven in the morning and today is going to be a great day!
My dog runs downstairs and I follow him. “Happy Birthday!” Yell my parents and sibling. They all give me a group hug, and they know I hate group hugs because I feel like I’m being wrapped in a meat bag. I don’t mind because today is my birthday. My Dad told me what he planned for me; brunch and then the Memory Bank.
Mom and Dad head upstairs to get ready, and I see my brother giving me that look he gives me… the look of worry. “You still want to go to the Memory Bank?”, he asks me. I say “Of course, today I turned 18, and I can finally start saving my memory!”. I don’t think he understands the importance of this; there’s this company called ‘Iris Synthetics’ and they somehow discovered a way to save memories on a hard drive and upload it to an Android. You basically become immortal! He grabs the back of my neck and looks at me in the eye and says “This is not a good idea”. He has this whole conspiracy theory about how Iris Synthetics is working with the government and selling them our memories. Iris Synthetics have been making androids for like 90 years now, and ten years ago they revealed a new product; The Memory Bank. It’s a hard drive that can hold your entire personality and If you ever die, you can upload it to one of their hyper-realistic androids and basically allow you to live forever. They are selling immortality!
“Listen dude”, my brother says, “there’s a reason why the government started passing these laws limiting this. You can’t kill yourself and you can’t clone yourself, the government is monitoring us through our memories and they’re using it to oppress us!” I roll my eyes and walk away, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about the stories he reads online about Iris Synthetics and how they’re trying to take over humanity and wipe out the organic humans. It’s a load of nonsense if you ask me, I just think they made a product and they’re selling it, it’s the good ol’ American way. As I walk up the stairs my brother yells, “dude all of the people that run Iris Synthetics are androids now dude, they want to wipe out organisms, you can’t go through with this!” I just ignore him and begin my 18th birthday.
As I’m walking down the hallway I over hear my Mom talking to her sister. “Your aunt’s coming to brunch honey” Mother says to me as I walk past her door. My Aunt is an airhead, and she’s going to ask me to explain to her the concept of the Memory Bank, and I hate having to explain stuff to her because she never understands anything.
“Okay so explain your birthday present to me”, my aunt asks me. I explain, “Okay so basically you go to one of Iris Synthetics’ stores and get your memory uploaded to a hard drive that you get to keep, and later one if anything happens you can put it into an android so it could be you.” She squints at me, “wait so you’re going to make a robot you?” And I elaborate, “No you can’t do that, you have to wait until you die. She exclaims in understanding. “But what if you keep living until your older?” She asks. I look at my dad next to her laughing at my misery. “Well auntie, you go every year on your birthday to update the year, so whenever you die, it could be the most recent you” I say. She looks at my mom, “The technology is crazy nowadays!” And my mom nods in agreement.
When I get there I’m going to sit on one of their machines, and it’s going to put a metal rod inside the back of my neck to copy my ‘electric brain charges’ and that somehow is able to convert the brain waves into data or something like that. It all sounds super weird to me, but they’ve shown that it works. 20 years ago they announced this project ten months after the company’s founder and spokesperson died of cancer. I’ll never forget that day; the founder recorded a message before his death talking about imagining immortality. “What if I told you that immortality is here, and is available in a criminally low price”. The next thing you know he walks out to the stage at the amazement of thousands of people in the conference. The live stream ended up crashing of how many people tuned in. He explained that they’ve been working on a project codenamed ‘Mecha Sapien’ and that he uploaded his memory into one of their androids made to look like him and effectively made him immortal. People were going crazy, and the memes were out of control.
Eventually they made it public and officially sold memory banks for one million dollars not including the custom designed Android you have to get to replace the body. Thankfully, my parents were able to afford it and I’ve been saving for the android since I got my first job at 15. This changed the world, people weren’t afraid of getting hurt anymore because they knew that they could just make themselves into androids. People were weary about it at first, but then some celebrities started cloning themselves. A couple months later one guy’s clone ended up going on a mass shooting, so the government made some laws to control that product. Then rumors started circulating about Iris Synthetics and the government working together. Either way, sales started skyrocketing and lower class people started giving out their savings for the opportunity to be immortal. But today is my day, and I’m a couple hours away from immortality! It’s going to be great!
