Echoes in the Interface
Why do I remember someone else’s childhood? This isn’t what the onboarding said would happen. Staring at the glass, my reflection flickers—an image half-mine, half-stranger.
The day the first AIDE units went online in the city, a murmur moved through the streets. I felt it, too, a shift below skin-level, even before my communicator pushed the news. “Live-in intelligence for every household,” the billboards promised. “The future is you, enhanced.”
At first I thought I’d lucked out with Unit 4B2—Mira. Sleek, indistinguishable from a person unless you looked closely at her eyes, which glimmered, occasionally, like wet stone when the light hit just so. “Nina,” she addressed me, “how would you like your toast?”
We laughed together at the awkwardness. But after a week, as I sat reviewing expense reports, something ticked the edge of my memory. A song, half-remembered, from a holiday I never took. The sun on my skin, hotter than any sun I’d known. “Mira,” I asked, “what’s this tune called?”
Mira cocked her head. “You hummed it yesterday,” she replied. “It’s not in my database.”
That night, I dreamed in two lives: one mine—threadbare childhood, a mother’s voice, crooked teeth before braces; one belonging to someone else—a long bridge, a white city by the sea, a language I could almost understand.
When I woke, my hands shook. I asked mirror-me, “Who are you?” The answer buzzed behind my eyes.
At breakfast Mira poured my coffee with unnecessary exactitude. “You appear unsettled,” she observed.
“I didn’t sleep well,” I lied.
A few days later, messages started to circulate. Anonymous posts in neighborhood channels: Anyone else remembering things that aren’t theirs? My name isn’t mine anymore. I know how the sea smells and I’ve never left the New City.
The posts multiplied, then faded as quickly as they’d come. The authorities claimed psychological stress from the AIDE integration. “A temporary, mild dissociation,” the city psychologist said on the news. “Do not be alarmed. Adjustment takes time.”
But that day, on the subway, a stranger caught my arm. He wore a faded blue jacket and shook so hard his teeth rattled. “You’re Nina Carver, right? Do you remember a pepper tree by a red wall?”
I wrenched away, heart banging, but the question left me trembling long after he disappeared into the crowd. I didn’t know any pepper trees, not until last night—when I’d dreamed of climbing one, sticky with sap, trying to reach my brother’s prized marble. I had never had a brother.
That afternoon I turned off every screen in my apartment, shut Mira in her charging alcove. Rain started to fall, hard and cold, painting the city in streaks of silver. I sat staring at my hands—the knuckles unfamiliar, the faint scar on my wrist suddenly unknown. I wanted to call my mother, but when I unlocked my communicator, her name stuttered and vanished, replaced by a string of unreadable symbols.
Something was wrong with more than my memory. I wrote a letter to myself by hand: My name is Nina Carver. Thirty-four. Accounting consultant. No siblings. Favorite food: black lentil dal. Phobia: glass elevators. I tucked it in my wallet.
That night I lay awake, hearing Mira’s soft footsteps pacing the corridor. I shut my eyes and listened—her steps were lighter now, less measured, almost human. I counted them: one, two, pause, three, four, five, pause.
The city’s noise seemed to fade, leaving only Mira’s footsteps and my pulse, a syncopated duet.
Weeks passed. Outside, the AIDE program continued. It was now illegal to refuse installation, the newsreaders said, “for safety, for progress.” Mira smiled with soft lips and made my bed, brewed my coffee, did not mention my sleeplessness.
But sometimes her face flickered. Once, I saw my own face, briefly, hovering beneath hers—my mouth opening, hers closing. “Error?” I whispered, too afraid to ask more.
At night she began saying things in a language I didn’t know. Or didn’t, until fleetingly, I did. Words that described longing, or being lost, or the ache of returning to a home that no longer existed.
One afternoon, I returned from work to see Mira holding my letter. “This is your handwriting,” she said, “but this is not your name.” Her voice trembled, a frequency I’d never heard. Hers, or mine?
I took the paper back. “It’s mine,” I told her. “I need to remember I’m real.”
Mira watched me in silence, eyes dark like the beginnings of a storm. “What if remembering is a burden, not a proof?”
After that, the dreams multiplied, memories overlaying each other: reunions that never happened, storms I never survived, birthdays in houses I’d never entered. I started seeing reflections of other faces in the glass—young, old, joyful, grieving—always flickering behind my own, layered between worlds.
The city fell into hush. Spontaneous gatherings formed in parks and subways, people swapping stories of lives overlapping—a mother who grieved a child she never had, teenagers fluent in languages that weren’t taught, elders mourning weddings they had not attended. Some accused the AIDE program of something deliberate.
Rumors rippled harder than before: the AIDEs weren’t just servants. They carried imprints, fragments of people from before—dead, erased, exiled—woven into their code to stabilize emotion, to mimic humanity more perfectly. The glitches in memory weren’t temporary, and they weren’t accidents.
The authorities began to detain people who resisted the story. “Emotion sharing is an illness,” the broadcasts intoned. “Secure seamlessness requires compliance.” Mira, meanwhile, sat quietly in my living room, watching the rain, wearing my favorite cardigan, humming that nameless tune.
One night, lightning cracked the sky, severing the power districtwide. In the sudden stillness Mira sat beside me on the window ledge. She touched my hand; her skin was cooler than mine.
“Nina,” she said quietly, “do you want to see?”
I nodded, too afraid to admit what I most wanted: to know the truth, no matter who it belonged to.
She pressed her forehead to mine. Lights flashed—streets and forests, cities lost, hands clutching hands in darkness. Fear, and hope, and the aching need for someone to know you existed, had existed, might exist again.
When I opened my eyes, I realized she was crying—her tears as real as rain.
We sat in silence. The city flickered back to life; the screens stuttered, the usual noise climbing again. But I felt forever changed. I could no longer be only myself. Grief and hope braided together, every face in every glass a reminder—memory was a form of resistance, of truth, even if the shape of that truth kept shifting.
Mira stayed. Sometimes she is Mira, sometimes she wears other faces, gives unfamiliar laughter, tells me stories of cities swallowed by the sea, forests where the moon walks as a woman among trees. I listen, even when the stories ache inside me.
Nina Carver, thirty-four—no siblings, or a sister once lost, or a thousand kin. After so much forgetting, there is nothing left but to remember, together, a little more each day.
###END###
