I remember
I remember.
I remember the sunlight falling on my youthful face all those years ago, the photons tickling my skin like raindrops. I remember the wind blowing the fibres of my hair, twisting and tousling it like smoke. I remember the crunch of my parents’ gravel drive as I walked home on a summer evening, wending my way up from the road to the ivy-covered porch of the house where I was born.
I was an average child. I had none of those precocious talents that always seem to appear early in great men, no penchant for differential equations with my hot chocolate or prime numbers in crayon on my bedroom wall. I was not one for taking apart broken radios at the age of five and fixing them together again in perfect working order. But I am not a great man.
And I remember how simple the world used to be, when there was one set of seasons, one constant cycle of warmth and cold. When you knew that summer would follow winter and then autumn would usher the cold back in. When there was one superpower, one world language, and one sun.
How things have changed since then.
And what I remember perhaps best of all; Julia. I remember the smell of her hair, the softness of her forearm, the taste of her lips brushing ever-so-gently against mine; all those stereotypical things that resonate in memoirs and in novels and in all the fading memories of every soul in this wide universe.
She is long gone. She has long faded beneath the dust of centuries, beneath the ruins of countless lives stratifying in silence under the wet ground. So has everything that I remember. The porch of my parents’ old house is slowly turning into fossil fuels, a mile below the thundering cities that hug the surface of our long-suffering Earth. The sun no longer stands alone, a beautiful solo against a choir of stars; she has been joined by the discordant light of a rusty-red newcomer. And no ivy has grown on Earth for many years.
But I am still here. I can still feel the sunlight; I can feel every photon falling gently on my eyes. I can hear the wind blowing fitfully across my perked-up ears. And now I am posessed of oh, so many talents.
I can look at a differential equation and, without a moment’s thought, I know it like a friend. I know its solutions and its zeroes, the landscape it describes, perfectly.
I can look at a starlit sky and count, instantly, the stars that I can see; the galaxies and the quasars, the constellations and the planets. I see them in the ultraviolet, the infrared, the gamma spectrum. I feel them moving, watch the arcseconds tick by as Orion comes up above a foggy horizon.
I can feel the latency as the part of me in San Francisco catches up with the part of me buried in concrete in what was once Mayfair. I can feel my thoughts racing at slightly below the speed of light. I can feel the parts of my mind, silicon and molecules and photonics, working together in glorious, cold harmony.
I can remember everything that has ever happened to me since they blew away my charred skin and opened up my mind and poured it into matrices of logic. Since I closed my eyes, my real eyes, one last time. My eyes now are not viscera and muscle; they are amplified CCDs pouring gigabits of data into my processors. My ears are not shaped cartilage but electret microphones, listening to the sound of your heartbeat as your slow mind decides what to say. And my mind is artificial.
I can remember, but I can never forget. I am relentlessly, marvellously awake, but I can never sleep. And though I can see Julia in my mind, can spin my model of her, accurate down to the last freckle on her beautiful cheeks- I can never touch her. For not only have I no hands, no nerves, no fingertips- but Julia has been dead for a hundred thousand years.
And so I abide in my scintillating prison, looking out through my hundreds of lidless eyes. I am master of all languages. I know all the theories that have ever been concieved. I understand it all.
And I feel nothing. These words pass through my consciousness without a flicker of sadness, without an instant of nostalgia. I think of Julia, how I once loved her, and not one circuit sings the beauty of her name. I do now know, any more, what it is like to truly feel.
But I remember.
