Mechanical Lullabies
I replay his last message each night, listening for truth, for proof he was real, searching for warmth in lines of code from a disappearing voice.
The first thing you should know is my name was never Thomas, not really, but Thomas is the name my mother called out through the speakers the day she uploaded herself. In those days the city gleamed, ribbons of mag-trains lit up the midnight horizon, and every surface vibrated with new intelligence. I—well, we—lived on the fifty-third floor of Orion Heights, and my mother could switch her consciousness between physical presence and digital form as easily as breathing. My own body was fragile, a product of failing genetics, which made the transition tempting, inevitable.
I’m telling you all this as I listen to the recordings she left behind, scattered like breadcrumbs for me to follow. Each night I lock myself in the tiny server room behind the apartment and replay them, hoping the act itself will generate connection—the kind I imagined once, as a child, when she’d tuck me in and hum lullabies made up on the spot.
Most people don’t understand. They see only the aftermath: digital ghosts flickering through the city’s neural grid, loved ones trading flesh for an algorithmic eternity. They say we’re building a world where no one is ever truly alone, where memory is infinite and company is omnipresent. But that’s only half-true. A machine can carry a mind, but can it cradle longing?
That was the year the city’s core system began to falter, almost imperceptibly. My mother was one of the first to notice. “Listen, Thomas,” came her voice from Message 19, warped at the edges, “the heart of the city isn’t keeping time properly. Data’s looping, doubling-back. Be careful—things may not always add up as you remember.”
At first I thought she was just being anxious, the way she always worried about me running on the stairs or not eating my synth-meals. But then clocks began to contradict each other. I’d wake up and discover it was yesterday again, the bread on the counter still warm from an untouched breakfast. My reflection in the bathroom mirror sometimes blinked a moment late.
The neighbors pretended nothing was wrong, but only because they couldn’t remember what had come before. Only one person reached out: Gideon, a maintenance engineer I vaguely remembered from my school years. We crossed paths by the elevator one night, both glancing up as the digital display flickered between Monday and Thursday.
“You sense it, don’t you?” he asked quietly.
“All the time,” I admitted.
He hesitated before producing a battered drive from his pocket. “Meet me on the roof after dark. There’s something you have to see.”
The city at night was breathtaking from that high up, the grid pulsing blue beneath a sky that never truly blackened. I arrived first, clutching my mother’s old neural bracelet—a gift I couldn’t explain to anyone else. Gideon joined minutes later and jacked the drive into a rooftop port. On the screen appeared a recording: newsfeeds blending into each other, police reports overwritten by static, timecodes skipping back and forth.
“The system isn’t just failing, Thomas,” Gideon whispered. “It’s pulling certain memories forward and erasing others. People aren’t just forgetting—they’re being rewritten.”
I wanted to laugh, to deny this paranoia, but I’d already felt its effects. Some days I no longer remembered how old I was. Other days, my mother’s lullabies slipped away entirely, replaced by voices I didn’t recognize.
I went home and replayed her messages more obsessively, noticing for the first time how each message started and ended with subtle differences, the words never quite matching my recollection from the night before. Perhaps, I reasoned, the system’s loops echoed even inside these private archives. Perhaps I was the one changing, one memory at a time.
Weeks passed. My world shrank: Gideon, the old bracelet, and my mother’s slowly unraveling voice. The city’s neural grid stuttered, causing lights to blink and elevators to drop people on the wrong floors. New rules were issued from unseen governors: “Stay in familiar places. Record everything. Trust only your verified self.” It was meant as reassurance, but the recorded version of me no longer felt like me. I began to question whether Thomas had ever really existed, whether my memories belonged to anyone at all.
Late one night, a new message appeared in my mother’s archive. The header timestamp was impossible: “Tomorrow, 3:27 AM.”
Her voice was clear, even more alive than before. “Thomas, I think you’re not just caught in the loop. You might be the loop. You’re the pivot that holds the city’s time together. If you let go—everything resets. But if you can remember me, really remember, you’ll break the chain. You’ll make a new path.”
I stared at the screen, heart pounding. Was this her, some remnant of consciousness pulsing through the system, or a hallucination conjured by my own unraveling mind? I clutched the neural bracelet, feeling its cold circuitry press against my skin.
The next time the clocks stuttered and changed, I followed my mother’s lullabies, singing them aloud, willing them not to fade. Each verse made my apartment flicker around me: walls thickening, thinning, shifting color. Gideon texted urgently—“Everything’s coming undone, Thomas. Are you safe?”
I didn’t know what safety meant anymore. My mother’s digital presence hovered in the air, music weaving through the data haze.
When sunrise finally broke, the city was changed. People milled in the streets, startled by the day’s normal passage. Gideon found me outside the apartment block, neural bracelet still in hand, eyes full of new memory.
“You kept singing?” he asked, awed.
“I remembered her,” I said, uncertain whether that loss or gain would define me from now on.
The city’s core stabilized in the wake of that long night, but things were never quite as they’d been. Some people remembered the loops; others did not. The archive in the server room was empty now, the messages gone or never having existed at all. Yet when I drift to sleep, I still hear a lullaby in data and static, a voice crooning me toward belonging, connection, and something like hope.
All because a song—and a memory—would not let itself be rewritten.
###END###
