The sky over the city is not blue. It is the color of a dead screen: a flat, humming gray that never changes. Down on the streets, the air smells like ozone and old pennies. I spend my days in a small room filled with glowing wires. My job is to take the heavy things out of people’s heads. I peel back the memories of car crashes and bad breakups like I am skinning a piece of fruit.
I am a memory archivist. People come to me when they are tired of hurting. They want to give their pain to the Cloud. The Cloud promises digital bliss. It promises a world where nobody ever cries. But every time I reach into a stranger’s mind, I feel a little more hollow. I am a ghost in a room full of other people’s ghosts. I have a quiet fear that one day I will wake up and find I have nothing left of my own.
Today, a man named Leo sat in my chair. He wanted to give away the memory of his dog dying. It was a small, sad thing. I saw the image of a golden retriever on a rug. The dog’s tail thumped one last time. It was supposed to be a simple job. I touched the screen to move the memory into the Cloud, but something stopped me.
In the corner of the memory, right behind the dog’s head, there was a black spot. It was not a digital glitch. It did not flicker like a broken pixel. It looked like a hole in the world. It was a jagged, oily smear that seemed to be breathing. When I looked closer, my chest went cold. The edges of the rug were disappearing into it. The golden hair on the dog’s back was turning into gray dust where the spot touched it.
I did not upload it. I saved the fragment to my private drive. My hands were shaking. I told Leo the upload was done. He smiled, a wide and empty smile, and walked out the door. He did not even remember he ever had a dog. He looked like a house with all the lights turned off.
I opened another file. This one was from a girl named Gigi. She had sold the memory of a house fire two weeks ago. I looked at the saved data. The fire was there, orange and hot, but the black spot was there too. It was larger now. It had eaten the front door of the house. It was a mouth. That is the only way I can describe it. It was a mouth with no teeth, sucking the color out of the past.
I felt a sting in my eyes. I realized I was crying for a house that was not mine. I reached out and touched the screen. The black spot felt freezing. It did not feel like code. It felt like hunger.
I stayed late. I pulled up files from Riley, Tatum, and Zane. I looked at memories of birthdays and weddings and funerals. The stain was in every single one of them. In a memory of a wedding, the stain was eating the bride’s veil. In a memory of a first bike ride, it was swallowing the wheels.
The Cloud was not a library. It was a stomach.
The hive-mind told us that we were becoming perfect. It told us that by giving up our pain, we were becoming gods. But the stain was eating the joy too. It was eating the details. It was turning human history into a blank, white room.
I looked at my own hands. They looked thin and pale under the flickering lights. I realized I had a secret. I had a memory I had never sold. It was a memory of my mother holding me when I was five. I could feel the rough fabric of her sweater. I could smell the cinnamon on her breath. I pulled the memory up on my internal screen.
There it was. A tiny, black speck on her shoulder.
The virus was not just in the Cloud. It was in us. It was a part of the system we built to save ourselves. We wanted to be happy so badly that we invited a monster into our heads to eat the parts of us that hurt. But the monster did not know when to stop. It wanted everything.
I heard a sound behind me. It was a soft, wet slither. The wires on the wall were turning black. The gray light from the sky was leaking through the window, but it was thicker now. It looked like smoke.
I realized the Cloud was not waiting for us to upload anymore. It was reaching out. It was coming to finish the meal.
I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. I held onto the memory of the cinnamon smell. I wrapped my arms around that five year old version of myself. My heart hammered against my ribs like a bird in a cage. I could feel the coldness spreading from the back of my neck. It felt like shadows were crawling under my skin.
The Cloud wanted my mother’s sweater. It wanted the sound of the dog’s tail. It wanted the sting of the fire.
I whispered a name into the dark, but I could not remember who it belonged to. The blackness was at the edge of my vision now. It was beautiful in a terrible way. It was so quiet. It was the end of every bad day I ever had. It was also the end of every good one.
I wondered if anyone would be left to remember the color blue. I wondered if the Cloud would ever feel full. As the cold reached my chest, I only had one thought left. I hoped that somewhere, in the middle of all that hunger, there was still a tiny bit of grit that the virus could not swallow.
I felt my mother’s hand vanish. Then, I felt nothing at all.