Forgetting and Remembering

De-sync

Everyone lives their lives disorganized in some way. The better-to-do (who aren't geniuses) just control and minimize that disorder, synchronizing and re-synchronizing with the world as needed, while the others let disorder run rampant, choosing to follow their own clocks.

Has anyone wondered what would happen if their memories became as desynchronized as two clocks, one stationary and one travelling at almost light speed? If not, perhaps that's because the mind has always been a bit of a black box.

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A second run passed by, dragging the better part of another week with it (people still used weeks, yes). Not one sector had more data recovered than in the previous run, and yet, at the same time, not one sector had less behavioral error. Which, of course, lead to Peter cradling his head in his arms and suffering half a mental breakdown when he completed the run.

The deadline of a month loomed, and requesting an extension was, to say the least, not a good option. Only enough time for some three runs remained, but even that didn't matter if each loop was worse than the last.

No, something was wrong, something was missing, and critically so. Something close, at the very least, to the girl in his charge that he didn't know and couldn't find out.

And maybe close to him as well. No, no no no, what am I thinking? What's been going on with me lately?  Peter shook his head to clear his thoughts (at least, to throw them out for a while).

Peter sat back from his previous position hunched over his desk, splaying himself over his chair instead. Looked up at the blank ceiling, and thought. What could the missing part be? 

The most obvious answer in this world was, of course, memory-altering drugs. As memories created by these drugs tended to last longer and otherwise be more conspicuous, she probably hadn't taken too many input-style drugs like Boy Meets Girl, Green Blue, Homestead, or Hero (originally named Heroine, as in a female hero, but that didn't carry over well to the English world, and Asian languages couldn't care less). The artificial memories (when they first came out, they were mocked as 'mimories,' a pitiful mimickry of natural memories) stick around better against mental damage than natural memories.

No, what she had probably taken was Lethe. The unadvisable (and frankly, unhealthy) method of dealing with trauma was still used and abused, though doctors and psychiatrists and the companies themselves advised against using it. The "drink to forget about X" powder. Usually calibrated so you forget drinking the powder itself, too.

Not like Peter could do much alone with that knowledge regardless, since the girl's core was far too far gone by the time he received her to actually measure out residue and reconstruct what she had forgotten. He'd have to pull strings, call in favors with the rest of the android modding community, and get information almost akin to gathering intel, just to find out what the Lethe prescription was for assuming there was one.

Other causes of something being completely erased from her core data... some kind of glitch? Physical trauma isn't this precise, and if there was a virus it wouldn't be more effective than Lethe. No other major leads on potential damage meant Peter could only try to contextually sniff out the issue by checking how adding in different events affected the behavioral error.

Which one was the best, then?  The second sector of the first run. Lower than all of the rest, and yet done while Peter was in the worst mental condition. Of course something wasn't right, if the worst mental condition outputted the best results. It couldn't possibly be correct, right?

He looked at it again, and then opened the restored files. Right?

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The files were gloomy, and Peter was too. It couldn't be right and yet it seemed so true.

Looking at the files would have one believe the girl was depressed. Extraordinarily so. Alone most of the time, a dim smile that reeked of cover-up. A quiet tone that sounded normal but hid weariness and loneliness.

Something had happened to her in or since the first sector, but what? Clicking back to the file manager,  he stared at the stats again. Opened the first sector's restored files. Scrolled through.

Found nothing. Again, and nothing. Something wasn't fitting with reality, but Peter couldn't tell what. Something was just completely disconnected.

And that something  led to the core data being desynchronized from the real world and the real world's strict timeline.

Peter thought back to his own memory. Realized again how something was missing back in his mind as well. He checked the dating of the recovered files in the first sector; fragmented, but it spanned some 21 years ago (apparently she was four years old) to 15 years ago (now ten). Examining the second sector more closely, he found it had a few happier memories prior to a massive jump from 15 years ago to seven or eight years ago (17), before ending the sector at a date six years ago (19). 

The year beforehand was relatively happy, but simultaneously had no shortage of deviation error. The years afterward were gloom, but Peter couldn't tell why. Somewhere in the third sector, the girl grew cheery again, and Peter still couldn't tell why.

Well, having seen this much, that was a lie. Peter knew why, it was obvious. Lethe, targeting everything from ten to seventeen, blanket-wiping everything with the option enabled, letting her forget that she had ever forgotten anything.

That gap, when she was ten to seventeen, was key to this entire series.

That gap, along with the small gap of her taking Lethe, was the de-sync.

Peter pulled up and sifted through the third and fourth sectors. Some recalls of having been to a consultation center for memory-altering drug usage assistance. No personal records or such, the Lethe was thorough. Even patched her as not having chosen to take anything.

He was the router, she was the terminal. The only way to figure out what she had forgotten, and the only way to reconstruct it, would be troubleshooting the old-fashioned way.

Test and fail, rinse and repeat. Seven years of blank space had to be filled with something. And from that something, he could correct the thought and emotion metadata in the rest of the memories. As long as he found that something.

And so, he began aligning himself on two completely separate time axes, searching for the start.

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hahahahaha, this took a bit too long. Got sidetracked modding a fun game.