by NANCY GONGLIKWANYEOHEEEEEEEH, Alternate Reality News Service Technology Writer
Sri Ganesh Frilley was a heavy baby, and spent her entire life fighting obesity. Belgian government records show that she worked for all of her adult life as a file clerk in the Ministry of Pissing France Off. Travel documents show that she has never been outside of the European Union. Despite all of this, Frilley adamantly insists that she clearly remembers having danced for the Kirov Ballet when she was a young woman.
“It’s a glitch,” Gurganious Hardnett airily dismissed Frilley’s claim. “Bound to happen in any complex system.”
In his prime, Karl Rorschach was a contender for the middle heavyweight Madden Football Whatever The Hell Year It Is championship crown. Yet, in the home where he is now living out his twilight years, Rorschach, too, claims that he remembers having danced for the Kirov Ballet when he was a young woman.
“It’s a coincidence,” Hardnett, a little uneasily, responded. “Bound to happen when you have as many customers as we do.”
Libby Laconda was born in 2006. At the retirement community where she is currently living, she has tried to hold press conferences where she intended to talk about her experience being the second man to walk on the moon, even though that was actually Buzz Aldrin, and it happened before she was born.
“It’s a…a…a,” Hardnett tried to respond. “Oh, hell, can I get back to you on this?”
Hardnett is the President of Pzlplyx Enterprises, the leading memory outsourcing company in the world. Pzlplyx Enterprises, whose motto is “We can remember it for you wholesale,” maps a person’s brain, then downloads specific memories to its servers, freeing space in the person’s head to make new memories. Although some corporate executives use it to store personal memories in order to have more space in their heads for business information, most of Pzlplyx Enterprises’ clients are elderly people for whom memory space is a precious commodity.
“It’s the – hee hee – the quantum servers we – ha ha – use,” Pzlplyx Enterprises memory technician Rolo Ankelini, barely able to contain his apparently unwarranted glee, explained. “There seems to be some – ha ha ha ha ha – drift between storage…storage – I’m sorry, I can’t continue – hoo hoo!”
According to Ankelini, connections between the memories of different people are made inside the server. When customers access the server to re-experience events in their own life, they are convinced that the memories of other people are their own.
That would explain the experience of Mariangelina Trebuchet. Although her family insists that she was a housewife her entire life, she has memories of being a fighter pilot in the Afro-Canadian war, a juggler in a travelling flea circus and an Arctic firefighter.
“Having all those experiences in one life would be amazing enough,” Trebuchet’s daughter Angelinamarie, commented. “Believing that they all happened on your 23rd birthday is a bit much.”
Ankelini’s description of quantum drift within the server wouldn’t, however, explain why people who can afford to store their memories on private corporate servers do not have this problem.
“Ha ha ha ha – oh. Umm, it’s scale,” Ankelini explained. “They, uhh, the corporate servers only store a couple dozen memories on their servers. We have thousands – tee hee. There must be a threshold of – ha ha – of – ha ha ha – complexity! A threshold of complexity that we have surpassed and they…they…haven’t!”
“No, no, absolutely not, not a chance, no,” Hardnett responded when asked if the problem could be some type of sabotage. “When we say Pzlplyx Enterprises is the leader in memory storage, we mean we have ruthlessly crushed the competition through aggressive patent litigation and are the only company that actually provides this service. Who is left to – oh.
“Actually,” Hardnett added after a moment’s reflection, “what I meant to say was that we take security very seriously, and I feel certain that it simply isn’t possible for anybody to be able to sabotage our servers.”
“Ha ha ha – no,” Rolo Ankelini added, suddenly very, very sober. “It isn’t possible for somebody to be tampering with our servers. W…w…w…why? What have you heard?”
Angelinamarie Trebuchet shook her head sadly. “My mother seems to think that she was breastfeeding me at the same time as she was fighting fires in the Arctic. I know that the memories of older people get a little…confused. Still, this doesn’t seem right…does it?”