Recovery Package
The email arrived early on a Tuesday morning, two weeks after the breach. Nora had been sitting with her laptop at her kitchen table, sipping her cup of black coffee and enjoying the rhythmic sound of raindrops outside. She had always loved rainy mornings and the way they brought back nostalgia from her childhood.
The subject line of the email simply said: “Your Memory Recovery Package is Now Ready.” She almost deleted it.
She’d seen the news coverage about the forty-seven million accounts compromised and Genysis’s subsequent stock price free fall, driven entirely by the unprecedented privacy breach within their NeuroVault division. She’d heard that congressional hearings were even scheduled for March. So she had gone through the trouble of filling out the class action form, changing her passwords, and even signing up for credit monitoring (as though that had anything to do with anything). The breach hadn’t stolen her finances, but it had taken her archive of twelve years of uploaded memories: the ones she had labelled as “the good ones.”
So much for three hundred dollars a year for the premium tier with added security. Oh well. But apparently this recovery package was supposed to restore them.
She clicked through the email link to the portal, accepted the terms, and began the file download. The size of 4.3 gigabytes didn’t surprise her, so she poured herself another mug of coffee while it processed. She’d been meaning to revisit some of those files anyway, such as her mother’s last birthday and that solo trip to Lisbon she’d taken at thirty-three, which she only vaguely remembered as having felt important at the time, though she couldn’t now remember why anymore.
The file finished loading, so she opened the Memory-Retrieval App to play the first file in the list and confirm there weren’t any issues. The moment the MRA began the recall process, she immediately knew it wasn’t hers.
The stranger’s name, according to the metadata displayed on the MRA, was E. Harlow. The first initial only was probably a privacy setting set up before the breach made privacy settings meaningless. The memory was a summer afternoon in what looked like coastal New England: a porch, salt smell, a man in a green sweater reading with his feet up on the railing. The man looked up when E. Harlow walked out, and the way his face changed with a small, involuntary softening made Nora’s chest tighten.
She repeated it two more times, pretending she was just confirming that it wasn’t hers. She didn’t know anyone in New England, in fact she’d never been to that part of the country. She closed the file, drummed her fingertips against the side of her coffee mug, then opened the next memory.
This one was of a kitchen in the early morning, accompanied by the crackling sounds and smells of bacon frying. A child’s drawing stuck to the refrigerator with a lobster-shaped magnet. Someone just outside of view from the kitchen was humming off-key. E. Harlow stood at the window watching birds at a feeder, and soaking up the feeling that went with it. Nora could feel it exactly, which was the intent of such a detailed upload format…not just the memory of the five senses, but the singular synergy that accompanied them all. If she were to put words to this particular culmination of feelings, they would have something like: This is enough. This is exactly enough.
Nora couldn’t remember the last time she herself had felt that in her own life.
She lived in a clean apartment with good light and a job she was competent at. She had friends she saw in arranged intervals. She called her mother on Sundays, or her mother called her. Her life was correctly organized. That had always seemed like the point.
Just before midnight, she went ahead and sent her email to the Genysis Support Team: I believe I received someone else’s memory archive in my recovery package. How do I return them and retrieve my own?
The auto-reply came in four seconds. Due to unprecedented volume, response times may be 30-45 business days. We appreciate your patience.
She crawled into bed shortly after hitting the send button, but by two in the morning, instead of continuing her futile attempt at sleep, she got up and opened three more of E. Harlow’s memories.
He was not a particularly dramatic person, and this was exactly what pulled Nora in most. There were no landmark occasions, no skyward moments. Instead she noticed that there were a lot of mornings on the same porch, though the seasons changed. The same man in the green sweater appeared frequently, though the amount of gray in his hair varied depending on the file. His presence was so consistent that Nora even started to think of him as someone she knew herself, which she knew in her gut was likely problematic yet couldn’t allow herself to be deterred. Not yet, at least.
On the third day she happened upon the memory of an argument E. Harlow had had with his wife. Nora found herself reluctant to open it, but finally caved. It was the kind of argument that was more mean than angry, with words that were growled rather than shouted. It was all said in the kind of mean tone of voice that comes from familiarity, where both parties know exactly which words will hit the hardest. A few hours later, when the memory resumed, he was sitting alone in a parking garage. For over forty minutes he sat silently in his car and barely moved a muscle. Nora felt the full weight of it all. It wasn’t exactly sadness, but rather more like the realization that love wasn’t simple and never had been. Yet the same epiphany ironically urged E. Harlow towards feeling closer with his wife than he ever had. Sitting silently still in that car, he knew beyond a doubt that a life without her simply wasn’t an alternative that could be entertained.
Nora herself had been alone for six years. Not unhappily alone, but alone in a way she had told herself was right for her.
She closed her eyes, then closed the file. Then reopened both again.
Her own memories, she knew, were somewhere in Genysis’s compromised servers. She’d uploaded them meticulously since she was, by her nature, a selective and methodical person. Her files were probably clean, correctly labeled, and simply waiting for this recent data breach to resolve. Her mother’s last birthday should be in there, along with the way her mother’s hands looked that day when she was cutting fruit for the platter. Nora had been careful to upload specific details like this because they were the ones she was worried the most that she would forget. The late-afternoon light of Lisbon would be in there too, no doubt, kept for whatever reason she had prioritized at the time.
She tried her best to care about these memories, and was surprised to discover that she couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm for them as she had a week ago.
She had uploaded memories of happiness that she felt were significant. The moments and details she’d identified, in real time, as worth keeping. But something about them felt curated and now carried a lingering undercurrent of wanting to display rather than archiving.
Meanwhile on his end, he had uploaded forty minutes of sitting in melancholy in a parking garage, not knowing what to do next. He had uploaded memories of bird feeders on cold days. Apparently to E. Harlow, the ordinary moments were desperately worth saving.
She knew that his memories weren’t “better” per se, and Nora was very careful to make this distinction. Nor were they more beautiful or more interesting. They were just…oh God what were they…more “inhabited” maybe? They just had a humdrum authenticity of a life that didn’t know it was being observed.
Forty-one days after her support email, Genysis finally responded.
We have located your original archive. Please click the link below to initiate the retrieval process. Upon successful retrieval, any non-native memory files currently in your possession will be automatically purged from your account to comply with data privacy regulations. This process cannot be reversed.
Nora read it twice. The blue link was both inviting and ominous.
She thought about her mother’s hands, and Lisbon, and a handful other memories that danced quickly through her head as enticing examples. All of them felt deliberately complete and intentionally memorable.
When her mind shifted to E. Harlow in a parking garage, reeling in simultaneous sadness and discovery, she was flooded by the authenticity.
She took a deep breath, closed the email and convinced herself that it wasn’t a permanent decision. She just needed a few more days. The retrieval process would take time anyway; there was a good chance she might have read that somewhere. Besides, there were always delays. Forty-seven million accounts. Surely she was not the only one.
Before bed that night, she opened her MRA to the memory of the man in the green sweater on the sun-soaked New England porch. She stayed with the memory for longer than usual this time. Outside her actual window, it was raining. She was pretty sure she had always loved the rain, but in that moment she wouldn’t have been able to explain why.