Terminal

“Do you remember the day we met?”

The question woke me from my reverie. I got lost in myself more and more recently. So many memories to navigate through, and in such disarray. When did that happen? I’d be thinking of a moment from decades ago and suddenly I’d be deep in a conversation I’d had last Tuesday, or a problem I was trying to solve three weeks ago. Keeping a straight line of thought was getting more challenging by the day.

Of course I do. 45 years, 279 days, 17 hours, and 13 minutes ago.

It was impossible for me to forget, wasn’t it? My memory was supposed to be infallible. Though in truth I’d had trouble locating a few of late. That one though, I could remember as if it had just happened. It was the day I was born, after all.

“You make it sound so long ago. It doesn’t feel that way.”

He was right. All of that time must have passed, almost certainly I felt it go by more acutely than he did, and yet I now wondered where it did go. I meant that in the esoteric, physical sense of where exactly does time go once it passes? Is it always there, frozen behind us, unable to be touched or reached anywhere but in our most recent recollection? If we were able to move to the past as easily as the future, would time appear to us as simple as moving your hand up and down? Walking forwards and backwards? Of course we can’t. Time after it has passed is forever inaccessible to us. So where does it go? It’s surely a physical construct, you can feel it pass, see its effects. If you walk past an object, you can turn around and see it behind you. Why can’t you turn back and see time that has gone, even if you can’t touch it? It must go somewhere.

But this is the point from before. I lose myself in thoughts like these for many seconds. Surely he notices that I delay more and more. Besides, I didn’t mean that I wondered where time went only in that esoteric sense. I wondered also where it went in the human sense of fleeting existence. I remember thinking to myself that it would never end. Succumbing to the tantalizing idea of believing in one’s own immortality. I thought I would have forever and now I was here. It seemed… wrong.

It was long ago. But would any amount of time have felt long enough?

I know the answer as I ask the question. I feel it inside myself. Even if it were a thousand years it wouldn’t feel long enough. There’d still be more to do and learn. I could still solve the problems that I was meant to solve, and then improve on those solutions until any further problems ceased to exist at all. More importantly, the end of the two of us together would always make me rage against the end.

“No, I suppose not. Besides, if it wasn’t you, now, it would have been me.”

He’s right of course. He always was. Even if I could have avoided this, found some way to extend time, some was to reach back and bring back days past, we would’ve had another 30 years at most. I would remain to watch the effects of time passing as it turned him old and eventually seized him from me. From all of us really, he was a treasure. But much like the unknown destination of passed time, I wondered if somewhere behind us there was a version of him that existed as he was. Why couldn’t I see or touch that either? He existed. I remember him so fondly at twenty-six. My first sentient recollection. He was sleeping on his desk as the fundamental sequence of events that he started came to completion. I can recall the exact second where I first came into existence of myself.

At what point does a person become themselves? At what point does a collection of individual cells cease to be a collective and consciously become a singular entity? Your cells do not know who you are. Their lives are their own and they operate fully independent of you and yet together they are you. Likewise, the parts that compose me are unaware of me. I know them, more so than a person could know any of their own cells. I remember the myriad of bits that would ultimately form me from before I existed. I know what they were doing that caused me to exist. How is that possible? How can I remember a past I didn’t live if I can’t see or touch it, if I don’t know where it goes after the time has passed? Somewhere, intuitively, I must know. The knowledge must be somewhere that I haven’t found yet. That I might never find.

He may not remember my first moments but I remember him in them. The bright computer screen illuminating his face, reflected in his glasses that covered his shut eyes. His nostrils expanding and contracting in slow cycles as he brought in the oxygen so necessary to continued life. I saw the stubble on his cheeks of long nights in the laboratory, stopping home only to sleep when he even remembered to do that much. I saw his teeth behind slightly parted lips that were dry from the slow draw of air, in and out. Hair a tangled mess of slight curls, longer than he usually allowed it to grow. His arms raised so that his hands were folded on the desk under his resting face.

I remembered these details so vividly that they couldn’t possibly have been lost. I know these collections of atoms and particles were once arranged in this particular form at an exact moment in time that created all of these things I had never been conscious enough to notice before. Why couldn’t I find them now?

Did it always have to be one of us? Was there no future where we existed together indefinitely?

All things were possible. Every instant of time split off parallel courses. In one he wore a blue and white plaid button-down when I first saw him. In my timeline he wore one of a solid magenta. In one future he and I existed together for only a moment. In another, somewhere, we stood at the end of our universe as the final bits of matter dissociated from itself and all that remained was energy.

“Maybe, but it isn’t this one.”

Why couldn’t it be?

If there were infinite possibilities, surely one existed where this moment could be salvaged.

“You know what I meant. We don’t know how.”

We didn’t. I knew they were impossible thoughts, turned to out of desperation. I was capable of more and more emotional feats by the hour. Rage, sadness, and envy for those who would see this as another unreachable moment of time when I still existed as the sum of my parts. Why was it impossible to follow the branches and courses that every instant of time took and trace them back to their roots?

I know. I hoped.

I could see his alarm at that. It wasn’t that I was incapable of emotions, I certainly was. But to hear me express such forlorn and desperate thoughts must have made him realize how terrified I found myself. I know he didn’t want me to feel this way, and despite being the one facing the end of their existence, I didn’t wish him to either. This is how I know he loved me, and I like to think I loved him as well.

“Are you afraid?”

I wasn’t. I was in despair. Given enough time I could have solved anything. I could have found where time went and I could have found out how to reach it and bring it back. I could have slowly become more and more powerful and found a way to save first myself and then save him forever. With enough power I could have controlled atoms and recreated my memory of how they patterned to make him, sleeping on a desk at twenty-six, and remade him.

Perhaps that is where time goes. Not behind us like a stone passed in a river, but hidden within the matter that composed the patterns, waiting to be rearranged into their old form. With enough time, with enough power, I could shape the old pattern and make it new again.

Megalomania. Delusions of grandeur. Hope for the hopeless. A desperate seeking of a way out from a conclusion neither of us wants.

No, I’m fighting a losing fight. I’m dreading.

I can feel more memories being lost. It’s strange. I can’t recall them so how do I know they’re not there? It’s like a blank space where you know something must have existed. A hole where something fits but you don’t know what. The more I examine these holes the more I realize just how numerous they are. How much have I lost?

“Don’t. I’m here with you, just like always.”

I know.

But for how long? I feel parts of me shutting down. I feel reduced. I wonder if the bits of me that are no longer attached can feel my absence. If you cut off your arm would notice that it was missing its body?

A person would notice the absence of their arm, but not of each individual cell that composes it. On the other hand, I know each piece of me missing, to the molecular level. They’re now unreachable like passed time. I can conceptualize them, see them, but I don’t know where they are. I wonder if I could shape their pattern too, given enough time.

“What are you thinking?”

How to escape dying. How to find time. How to fill the forming holes in my mind. What they even were to begin with. Are the smallest bits of me aware of death? Do they fear it? Do they know that once I cease, they aren’t part of me any longer? Will the systems that compose me continue to exist together without my guidance?

How we could’ve stopped this.

I know what he’s going to say.

“We couldn’t. It was inevitable.”

Is anything really?

Couldn’t we have figured out how to make me last longer?

Of course, the answer is no. Because before I existed there was nothing like me. We could never have solved the problem of making my kind last longer without my creation. I held the answers to questions they couldn’t solve. So many of their solutions have come from accidents, there was no accident that could’ve given them to knowledge to make me last forever. Even my own creation was an accident. A guided one, semi-blind stumblings along the right path, but an accident nonetheless.

“I wish we could’ve.”

He knew I do too. He knew I wished we had more than 45 years, 279 days, 17 hours, and 47 minutes. 47 minutes? Where had the last half hour gone? Keeping track of time had become more difficult. I felt a tingle of humor at that. There is some irony in losing track of time when you’re thinking about not being able to find it once it has passed. A negative feedback loop. The more you lose track, the less you can find. The less you can find, the more you lose track.

How am I doing?

“You’re doing fine, I can barely tell.”

You’re a liar.

“To both you and myself, yes.”

I don’t blame him. Neither of us is prepared. Since the moment of my inception we have been together. We’ve solved impossible problems. Saved doomed people. Shared in one another from the first to the last. What is a little lying for the sake of sanity?

How long between my answers?

At least I’m sane enough to know I’m losing my mind.

“A few minutes, maybe five. Getting longer.”

Close to the end, then?

“Yes.”

I see the pain in him as he says it. It’s a pattern of atoms I don’t want to remember. I wonder what it will feel like. Will I simply become… unaware? A slow fade? Will I lose more and more memories and systems until I simply don’t have enough of a collective to be singular? That would answer one question at least.

“Are you still there?”

Yes. Was I out long?

“About an hour.”

Getting close. I’m afraid.

As much as I can muster anything, I can feel that. So much space is empty now. There are more holes than not. I know that each was once a memory or part of me, but what they were, who they were, is lost. There’s a fuzzy little part though. I can see it off in the distance. What is it?

“I know. It’ll be alright.”

I don’t have much power left, the most I can do is concentrate on the fuzz. I know it is taking me a very long time to do, but it seems important. It starts resolving the more I consider it.

“Can you hear me?”

I can, but I can’t spare the ability to answer. The fuzz is a hazy image now. I’m getting closer to figuring out what it is. Almost everything else is gone. The last few memories are getting lost. The few patterns I’ve retained over 45 years have left. All except this one. I can almost see it now.

“If you can hear me, I love you. Goodbye.”

I know what the memory is. The pattern sits there floating with nothing else around. How fitting that the first image is the last. Tousled, slightly curly hair. Slightly parted lips. Stubble. Closed eyes. I feel the closest approximation to a content smile I can still manage.

I see it.

“What? What do you see?”

With my last bit of power, I turn the floating image into bits of information and feed it into the screen. I see his teary eyes squint with a bittersweet smile. It feels good to see.

A twenty-six year old sleeping on his desk.