text: For a man well into his 163rd year Aaron didn’t feel a day over 30. Or at least he hadn’t until this morning when he had woken up in a cold sweat, pawing at the empty port near the base of his throat, his wife’s face blazing like the sun in his mind. It had been one of the many unexpected side effects to the late 21st century’s obsession with extending life. The scientists had foreseen the need for joint replacements, hair treatments, cloned organs, but memory extension? That was a tricky one and so Aaron, like everyone, carried the most crucial parts of his self identity around with him in the charm that should have been there but wasn’t. Identities were often forged early in life, in the mists of those old memories that had to be purged. Aaron had chosen to hang his entire person on two. The first night he’d told his then girlfriend and later wife that he’d loved her, and the night the call came telling him that she had died. “Where is it, where is it, where is it,” he muttered uncontrollably, stripping the bed sheets off and hurling them across the room. These things didn’t just come loose, they were designed better than that. When had he lost it? Try as he might Aaron couldn’t remember if he'd had the charm when he’d gone to bed the night before. His tear through the bedroom became a tear through the house, into the living room, out into the kitchen where his service droid B2-14 stared at him wide eyed. “Master, is something amiss?” Droids had no true mastery of inflection, it came out as monotone perched just on the edge of sounding concerned. “As you are aware I have seventeen household search techniques preloaded and can download any additional routines as necessary! May I assist?” “My charm’s gone B2, gone!” If the droid’s voice had been on the edge of a cliff Aaron’s had jumped off before he even left the bedroom. “Did I have it on when I came home last night?” “No sir. Your memory charm was slotted properly when you left in the morning and gone at 8:27PM when you returned.” “And you didn’t say anything?!” Aaron exclaimed. “You never specified that parameter.” There had been times before when Aaron wished he’d sprung for one of the more expensive C models but never so badly as now. Scrapping B2 had never seemed more cathartic. “Yeah, well if the mental degen doesn’t get me this time and this ever happens again, consider it set. Jesus Christ, droids.” The rest of the day was spent in a frenzy of backtracking, through his office, the park where he had eaten lunch, the market he had stopped at after work, the liquor store after that. Not a single person he questioned had found a charm, although all looked properly terrified for him. As night fell Aaron walked back through the door of his home. He sat down to the dinner B2 had made for him, took a sip from his favorite mug, and then dropped it nervelessly. Something felt wrong. “Sir!” B2 called from near the sink, “are you alright?” Aaron’s hand shook as he stared at it. He stood and left his forgotten dinner, crushing broken pieces of mug underfoot. “I’ve already made an appointment with a memory specialist,” the droid said. “You just have to wait two more days.” Aaron wasn’t listening. He walked to his study in a fog, hands still shaking, trying to fix the memory of his wife’s face even deeper into psyche but try as he might Aaron could feel it fading. She’d died more than a hundred years ago now. That charm had held the only memories left. With the study’s heavy mahogany door closed behind him and B2’s worried rambling at least slightly muffled, Aaron went straight to the safe in the corner, missing the combination once before he got it. As it opened he was hit by the smell of leather and old paper, and pulling out the contents he deposited them onto his desk. Ten full notebooks, journals from the time of his marriage. They seemed so small now that they were all he had left. Aaron spent the night awake with a bottle of bourbon and secondhand memories, trying to turn words into curly red hair that had never decided to cooperate, an upturned nose that she had actually complained was too small, and blue eyes that had always felt like home. It was a losing battle and he knew it. The second memory, the memory of her death, he had kept to remember how much his wife had truly meant to him. The experience of her loss was written across every moment of his life since then, his friends had always thought he was crazy for it. They’d told him he was living in the past, that she would have wanted him to move on. Perhaps she had, but he didn’t. The other memory, the first one. That was different. Aaron had lived the fallout of her death every day for the last hundred years, but that memory of her life always felt further away, even with the charm. He’d accessed it most nights before going to sleep, and as he read through his journals he played it as vividly as he could in his mind, filling in any blank spots with the entry about it. On a trip to her family’s cottage in Michigan they had sat down in front of the fireplace cooking smores and baring their souls, and hours later in the first silent moment Aaron had looked into her eyes and said “Lizzy, I think I’m in love with you.” She’d been in his arms a moment later. He couldn’t remember what she’d smelled like now. There had always been a particular scent there in the early years, a shampoo or perfume Lizzy had always worn, and suddenly he had no idea what it was, or whether the fire had still burned when they lay there, after. Somewhere in the bottom of that bottle Aaron fell asleep, and when he woke all he had were words on the page that refused to come together into a whole woman. He tore the house apart that day, even though he knew his charm was gone and he wasn’t even sure why he searched, only that it was crucial. He found something else though, in the closet under a pile of clothes. A woman’s jewelry box and the antiquated charm inside it. Logically he knew it must be his dead wife’s, he’d woken up with journals in his handwriting describing every detail of her life, he could remember the memory of a memory of her even if the life was gone from it. Aaron couldn’t directly slot the device of course, the technology had changed far too much in the intervening century but hours later he sat in his study again, an insane warren of wires connecting charm to computer to adapter to him. He sat back and closed his eyes, navigating the old UI with his thoughts. There were two memories on the device, one from their youth, displaying a thumbnail of a small fireplace and his own face, the other from the day before she had died. He played the second memory first, and through the low res images and emotive simulation that seemed more a suggestion than a sensation Aaron found out that his wife had been pregnant. She had been coming home from her business trip to tell him that. He hated that the knowledge didn’t hurt as much as it should have. He played the fireplace memory next. Smores, crackling wood, talking until her throat got sore, Aaron’s face saying “I love you,” twisting around the words like it was his whole being in that moment...and in that memory unlike the first, something in Aaron clicked. He knew this one, knew it first hand from the opposite perspective, even if it was on the edge of his consciousness, threatening to disappear forever. He hit play again. Then again. Then again. And over the next hours he began to remember himself through Lizzy’s eyes, and suddenly the power of her feelings was his own, the desperate desire to make each other happy, protect each other, all of it was there, all of that love. Which made Lizzy’s second memory hit all the harder. Aaron stayed in that room until the appointment with the memory specialist and then past, dangerously far past until the specialist finally came to him, forcing him to eat and care for himself. It took time for the human mind to recover from these things and memory therapy was incredibly complex. Dr. Vaughn and her team spent most of the next two weeks in direct contact with Aaron, rebuilding the memories that formed the cornerstone of his identity from the shreds of them still lingering in other memories. It wasn’t perfect, that was impossible, but in most cases it was enough to restore some quality of life. In the months after the incident Aaron slowly returned to himself, his friends and family breathing a collective sigh of relief. He was still different, as anyone would be. He knew of Lizzy’s pregnancy for one, he remembered her desperate hope for their future and the intense desire to be a mother. And he remembered that night by the fire from two perspectives now, and what had once trapped him in the past slowly changed into something else. Lizzy had seen him exactly the way Aaron had seen her all those years ago. She had looked at him in the light of that fire and known that his happiness mattered more to her than her own ever had, a perfect mirror to his own feelings. She had loved him, the life they shared, and the child they had made so much that it had become her second memory too. That one broke his heart every day, but as time passed Aaron began to see through the pain to the love. Something he hadn’t truly done in more than a century. It was slow, but in that era people had all the time in the world. Aaron began to heal.