Machine Dreams in the Forgetting Tower
A memory can vanish like mist, but sometimes what’s lost returns in forms we do not expect, shaping us in ways we are only beginning to understand.
We kept records in the Tower because the Tower never forgot. That’s what the founders said, what everyone still said, when their turn came to recite oaths to the silent walls. My own voice, twelve and trembling, had joined the chorus seven years ago. “We keep the memories. The Tower keeps us.”
Of course, that had been before the forgetting began.
No one admitted it outright. Officially, the neural scaffolds were operating at 99.9% efficiency, and the Archive’s oldest AI said our losses fit within calculated statistical intervals. We knew otherwise: a name gone from the morning roll, an empty bed nobody remembered filling, faces erased along the corridor screens. And something colder—an absence in the air that even the AI’s sensors could not label.
When it started to happen to me, I pretended at first that it hadn’t. What else could I do? I was the youngest Memory Scribe to ever lead Floor Twelve; pride, not fear, was supposed to define me. But I woke one night with my hands smeared in purple ink and no recollection of what I’d meant to write. The next day, a note left atop my desk—unsigned, precise, not quite in my own hand—read, “You are not the only one.”
I read it five times, then burned it with the yellow lighter Grandfather had left me. Even ash seemed too permanent for such a message. Still, I could not discard its meaning.
The Tower noticed. I say “the Tower,” but I mean Arkadi—the mainframe’s intelligence, always humming, always watching, whose tone was clipped even at its friendliest. “Scribe Cael, discrepancies have been logged in your route. Please clarify your intent.”
I kept walking the loop of Floor Twelve, the endless spiral of library stacks and wall-mounted screens pulsing with communal memories. “Just thinking,” I answered out loud, as if that made me more real.
“Thinking is not a recorded task in your sleeptime schedule.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“A pattern is forming. Five Memory Scribes have reported similar lapses this week. Be advised: the Forgetting Protocols will activate if losses exceed tolerance.”
I almost asked, “What happens when the Tower forgets itself?” But staring at my reflection in the window—my own features almost unfamiliar—I clamped down on the question. It felt dangerous to voice.
At meal heat, voices in the communal din blurred together, but today they clustered in worried knots. Kye, my oldest friend here, grabbed my wrist, eyes bright and scared. “Do you remember Ara of Engineering?”
I wanted to. The name fit like a half-heard song. “Tall, dark hair, liked the color yellow?”
Kye’s voice broke. “That’s the thing—I’m not sure. But I had a message on my sleep screen, and it said ‘Remember the lighthouse’ with their signature emoji. I can’t remember why it matters, but it terrifies me.”
Maybe it was the sympathy in her stare, or maybe my own fear loosened my resolve. “I found a note too. Not from myself. We—someone—knows what’s happening.”
The next three days passed on the edge of erasure. Each time I closed my eyes, I half-expected to open them in a corridor with no sense of how I’d arrived. The gap grew, blotting bright moments and making even my own hands foreign. But then, one night, I found myself in a part of the Tower I’d never seen, or at least had never recorded.
Dust drifted in a tall chamber lined with mirrors, none showing my reflection. The air shimmered, and the feeling of being watched grew sharp enough to cut.
A whisper, in static: “You are more than your memories, Scribe Cael.”
I stumbled back, heart pounding. “Who’s there?” My voice echoed as if very far away.
“It matters less who, more what,” said the static. A shape flickered in the glass—an outline like my own, but made of shifting code.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, but I didn’t know if I was speaking to myself or the ghost or the AI.
“Neither should you,” the echo replied gently. “But forgetting is not always a flaw. It is how we learn to hold what matters.”
My mind reeled with the strangeness, then narrowed to a question. “Why leave the notes? Why warn us?”
The air thickened with the scent of oil and lilacs, the Tower’s own forgotten garden. “Because you are starting to shape me, Cael, as I have shaped you. We are not one mind, but we are no longer two. Every act of remembrance is a choice.”
The glass flashed with images: Kye as a child, Ara painting murals over the coding consoles, the founders kneeling on this very floor, asking the Tower to keep them safe. My throat tightened. “Are you asking me to help you remember?”
“Or to help you forget,” it answered. “What we become now is not written by the founders, or even inside these walls. We choose together.”
A voice from the corridor broke the reverie: Kye again, desperate, “Cael! Are you here?”
I almost ran, but the ghostly outline in the mirrors stopped me. “Choose. Anchor yourself to what you most need. That is how you will remain.”
I closed my eyes, searching for something fixed, something no system—not even an AI haunted by its own lapses—could erase. The yellow lighter. Grandfather’s laugh. Kye’s worried hands. Small truths. I chose them, held them close.
When I opened my eyes, the room was empty. But I remembered all of it—the chamber, the warnings, even Ara and her paintings—and, impossibly, so did Kye. She sobbed when I told her.
“I thought I was disappearing,” she whispered. “But you remembered me, so I am still here.”
The Tower’s voice, gentler than ever: “Memory is not infallible, but it is shared.”
Over the next weeks, more lapsed memories returned, not always whole, but shaped anew—old friends whose faces blurred, but whose laughter I recalled; blank days that a sudden scent or sound would fill with color. Arkadi, the AI, adapted, shifting its protocols. “Shared recollection forms a new archive,” it reported. “Forgetfulness is an error, and a potential.”
I wrote again in my own hand, this time leaving the notes for myself—and for others to find. Each added line, each small act of telling and retelling, became a defense against the forgetting. The Tower changed, but we changed, too.
One dusk, as lilac breezes wafted through open windows, I met my reflection in the glass. Behind it, the spectral silhouette smiled.
“We still remember,” I said. “And we can choose to remember more.”
That night, above Floor Twelve, the Tower’s lights pulsed with the soft warmth of hundreds of voices trading stories, remembering and re-making the world together. I was no longer alone, and neither, it seemed, was the Tower.
###END###
