The Memory Box

15 Minute Write

There was a particular event he was desperate to remember and felt sure that it had been committed to a diary he had kept all through a ten-year tenure at a dead-end job when he was in his late twenties. Although he couldn’t be certain anything was there, all the timings seemed to add up. Girlfriends, moving jobs and the fact that he vividly remembered a disk where he had backed up all of the diaries that he had written on his work PC: a SyQuest EZ 135 Drive. For years after that job, he held onto this disk even though he had no way to read it. The drives were state of the art, and the hardware to read them was expensive at the time, but soon became obsolete and then impossible to find - these were the days before eBay. The disk was in a cardboard box of things from that period. Cassette tapes ( even one with four songs that his short-lived band recorded) Credit card bills (which told a story of his life through money spent he didn’t have) birthday and Christmas cards, letters, business cards, leaflets, notes from free lunchtime concerts. In short the whole history of his time during the ‘Dead-end job’ period.

At some point, he had become detached from this box. He had fits of throwing ‘rubbish he would never use’ away - but felt sure he’d never part with, at least, the cassette tapes and the computer disk. At one point he even went to the effort of sending letters to each of the places he had lived ( this turned out to be thirteen - unlucky for him ) before he left London for good. But he never heard anything back, let alone getting reunited with his precious box. To all intents and purposes and certainly for him, it was lost forever. With it, the evening, in East London, out with his girlfriend and her friend. He thought little of it at the time, but later became obsessed with the friend - he couldn’t remember her name, what she did or whether anything happened between them - but he recalled a deep connection. He was certain it would have changed his life had things worked out differently and wanted to know all he could, yet had no way to pick up the thread. He had to resign himself to the fact that that evening, like the box, was lost.

But it was not. He had left it in the loft of the house he had last lived in London. In the mad panic to sort everything before moving it had been overlooked. It had sat in the same place until the house’s owner had passed away, some thirty years later. From there it was taken, via a house clearance to a junk shop where it was sold to a newly-wed young collector who had a nostalgia for cassette tapes. It sat in his garage, having been opened just once, for another forty-six years when another clearout put it into the hands of a memory collector.

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Things move so quickly here in 2086. Original items from the IT revolution command high prices not just for physical object collectors, but especially if these objects store data of a historical nature. The SyQuest disk was sold for an eye-watering amount of UniCrypt to a data collector. Using the latest tools he was able to access the whole thing, extract all the data and perform a deep AI historic search of the Originet for supporting material, whereupon he hit the jackpot. The contents of the disk were part of a large collection of online data from an individual who documented his whole life. Writings, photographs, videos, audio recordings and scanned ephemera ( if only the originals of these were still in existence!) The information had always been there but had remained undiscovered amongst the brontobytes of HistoData and the combination of this newly discovered data and the disk data enabled a massively rich and detailed RealWorld to be generated. The scripts took a few weeks to run but the resulting RealProjections were the most incredible and detailed look into 1990’s life anyone had ever seen. 

The staggering discovery, however, was that the author of the data had known the mother of the President of the United Earth. Seems they had met only once, in a bar on a hot summer's evening in London, where she made quite the impact upon him. 

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Image: Rachel Whiteread: EMBANKMENT at Tate Modern. 2005. Nikon d70

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