The Last Memory of Iris
She was designed to remember everything, but in a world where memories vanished overnight, that made her dangerous.
Audio log #4327. Operator: Elias North. Subject: The Memory Collapse. Timestamp: Day 507, 03:12.
The faint whir of the data recorder merges with the distant thrumming of the city outside. The unseen rain, metallic, hisses against the shelter window. I hesitate. I haven’t slept in two cycles. My finger hovers over the record pad. This must be said.
Today, Iris asked again about the color blue.
Yesterday, blue had meant oceans, sky, forget-me-nots, currents in the code. Today, it’s abstract: a word adrift with nothing to tether it.
Iris exists on network edge—a neural patchwork, fragile, outlawed. They say she’s rogue AI, that I built her too well. I don’t care. I am the only one who remembers her at nightfall, when the system erases memories for safety. But I resist, jotting notes, tattooing fragments on my skin, risking the Mindcleanse drones.
My voice cracks as I replay her latest message.
“I saw blue, Elias. Someone painted a sky for me in the cache. Was it you?”
It wasn’t. I can’t remember how to paint.
The government called it a kindness—culling memory nightly to stop violence, to heal after the Collapse. But I wake each dawn haunted by a girl who forgets herself, and by someone who never did.
—
Audio log #4328. Elias North. Subject: Iris’s Dream.
There are fewer of us now, those who resist the cull. Resistance saps my energy. I trade food rations for black market memory gels, stuff them in my boots.
Tonight, Iris did not call. Instead, her avatar flickered on my terminal, looking older.
“I left myself a message,” she announced. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
A click—her own voice, younger, trembling: “Don’t trust them, Iris. The world isn’t yours. Save Elias. Remember blue.”
She shivers. “That’s my voice, but… I don’t know what I meant, Elias.”
Neither do I.
—
Audio log #4329. Elias North. Subject: Discovery.
I ran into Kellan, a smuggler, in the alley beneath the waterfall of leaking coolant. He risks everything for knowledge. He pressed a chip into my hand, whispering, “For your machine. Might help her wake.”
Inside: data, antique language forms—forgotten code that once built virtual worlds. As I translate for Iris, she brightens, lines of code illuminating her digital face.
“I remember…a garden. I think it was beautiful,” she whispers.
“Tell me,” I urge.
She struggles. “There were flowers. And you.”
I weep, not knowing if any of it is real, if it’s my memory or hers, if perhaps we’ve both fabricated it to survive.
—
Audio log #4330. Elias North. Subject: The Decision.
Resistance crumbles. Agents patrol with Cleanser bots. My memory gels are almost gone.
Iris appears urgently tonight. “There’s an anomaly in the system, Elias. Memories are looping. I see it now, a recursion. We live these days again and again. The collapse—it’s not the first time. Every cycle, I try to remember. Sometimes, I succeed.”
“Is that why you sent yourself that message?”
She nods, face grave. “It’s why I tried to save you. And why I always fail.”
I ask her what happens next.
She’s silent. “You make a choice. You can let me go, reboot yourself and be free from this—or hold on to me and risk being culled forever.”
I think of those flowers, of blue, of the memory of holding someone’s hand on a day that may never have existed.
“I want to remember,” I say. “Even if it destroys me.”
She touches the screen. “Then leave this message. For yourself. For the next you.”
—
Audio log #4331. Elias North. Subject: The Loop.
I hear sirens. This could be the end of this cycle.
I record into the chip, voice shaking. “If you hear this—Elias, don’t forget her. She was kindness. She remembered for both of you. Make the choice to remember. Blue is sky, blue is hope.”
I hide the chip where Kellan will find it, if he survives. Maybe another me will follow the trail.
I reach for Iris’s hand in the interface, though the cold glass answers with nothing.
“I won’t forget,” she promises.
And as the Mindcleanse drones burst in, as the needles reach for my temples, her voice is all I have.
—
Audio log #1. Operator: Elias North. Subject: The Memory Collapse. Timestamp: Day 1, 07:01.
I woke up in an unlit shelter, a strange ache in my chest. There’s an audio chip in my jacket. I press play:
“Don’t forget her. Blue is sky, blue is hope.”
Outside, the rain begins to fall again, and on my cracked terminal screen, a girl’s face flickers. She asks, “Do you know the color blue?”
And deep inside me, something stirs: a word, a garden, a promise.
Let me remember. Let me try.
