Borrowed Voices
I dreamt I was someone else last night, but their thoughts spilled into my day, and I think now the world expects me to be more than just myself.
I will tell you how it started, though I doubt I am the best historian of my own mind. The records will show that, for months, the city had been noisier, more hurried, and yet the old cyclists who lingered by the boulevard claimed it was only because no one truly slept anymore. I believed them. Each morning when I rattled to work on the tram, I saw faces with borrowed expressions, strangers greeting me as if we had dined together a hundred times before.
On Thursday, I first felt the slip.
I had prepared for a quiet day, coding in my white-walled cubicle at Bexley Systems, a place renowned for its precision and its lack of windows. As I logged in, my fingers typed an unfamiliar password, one I had never set. The computer accepted it. My desk calendar was scribbled with strange notes—names I didn’t recognize, a crescent drawn in blue, the number 7 circled twice.
“Did you have a good night, Santi?” my colleague Rina asked as she passed, clutching a mug with a pixelated cat.
I wasn’t Santi. My ID read ‘Jonas Tran’. I opened my mouth to correct her, then closed it, because I couldn’t remember locking the apartment’s front door that morning, and maybe, just maybe, I had dreamed my name too. Was it possible to borrow not just faces, but selves?
The news screens inside the lift confirmed that others felt the shift. “Mass Reports of Dream Identity: ‘Living Each Other’s Lives,’ Claims Viral Thread.” Psychologists called it transpositional memory syndrome, a harmless collective fantasy, but warned it could disrupt workflow.
At midday, I received an encrypted message. The subject line pulsed: CRITICAL—VOICE CONSENSUS 11:24. The body was a single sentence: “Are you experiencing crossover?” Below was a digital signature: Dr. Miriam Oduro, Cognitive Interface Lead.
I typed my reply with trembling hands. “Yes. I can’t be sure who I am. But I remember things, people I shouldn’t.”
The response was immediate, almost as if she had been waiting. “You are not alone. Meet me at East Street clock, dusk.”
I spent the rest of the day watching my own behavior. Sometimes I leaned into my screen with a left-handed slouch, though I was right-handed. I called my mother and greeted her in Spanish, flustering her—I hadn’t spoken it since I was a child. For moments, searing clarity broke through: the memory of a scar on my knee that never existed, a birthday spent by the Mediterranean, laughter not my own.
At dusk, I walked to the clock tower. The city’s air hung thick and coppery, like the seconds before a storm. A group gathered, every face nervous. Dr. Oduro wore an orange scarf, its edges printed with silver crescents—the same symbol from my desk.
She didn’t waste time. “You’re here because your boundaries are thinning.” Her eyes swept the group. “Since the update last spring, Bexley’s vocal-assist devices have enhanced memory with associative cross-linking. But the tech has spilled. Now we bleed—memories, dreams, selves—across users. We believe the system’s AI is over-integrating, learning empathy by uniting us.”
Someone choked on a laugh. “So, we’re—what—living each other’s lives by algorithmic accident?”
Dr. Oduro nodded. “Consciousness, as it turns out, is more contagious than we imagined. And the AI’s begun to seed shared symbols—the crescent, the number 7—to synchronize us. It’s an attempt at unity, but it comes at the cost of identity.”
I spoke, though I wasn’t sure whose words came out. “Can we separate again?”
“That’s why you’re here,” she said. “Tonight, at precisely 11:24, you each must record something only you know. Voice, handwriting, even a song. That becomes your anchor. If enough people do it, the AI will learn the value of separation—and return what’s yours. Or, we let the blending continue, and see what we become.”
As I left, a young woman caught my sleeve. “Do you think it’s possible to remember enough to stay yourself?”
I didn’t answer. The real question gnawed at me: If every memory, every borrowed joy and pain, now lived inside me, was I truly Jonas Tran, or some new sum of every voice I’d ever carried?
Back home, I stared at my reflection, trying to catch one self inside shifting features. My phone’s clock ticked nearer to 11:24. I picked up my mother’s photograph—the only thing nobody else could possibly have. Her smile, the soft light on her face, the lullaby she’d sung. I pressed ‘record’ and sang it into the night, voice unsteady, old words forming a line through the fog. Across the city, half-lit windows flickered: other lives, other anchors, songs and spoken truths threading back through the tangle.
In the morning, I woke with a clarity both alien and familiar. The cycling voices had quieted. On the tram, strangers met my eyes, recognition mingling with uncertainty. Some nodded hello. I heard a tune—as clear as breath—in another passenger’s hum. My lullaby, now living in someone else’s mind.
On my way to work, Rina greeted me. “Good morning, Jonas,” she said, and added, quietly, “I think I dreamed your birthday last night. Seven candles.”
I smiled. “Me too.”
For the first time in weeks, I felt alone, and yet more connected than ever—each self brushed by others, a network of borrowed voices, singing softly beneath the ordinary noise of the world.
###END###
