Kaelen Voss

Memory Card #5: The First Day of Emptiness The Vault records this as Day Zero—the first day after SDD reached its terminal stage. I woke up not recognizing my own ceiling. Not recognizing my name. Not recognizing my reflection in the mirror. Panic. My breath quickened. My heart felt as if it were being squeezed by an invisible hand. I searched for clues like a detective investigating his own murder. Then I found the Vault. A message from the previous Kaelen—or rather, from the previous me—was displayed on the screen: “Your name is Kaelen Voss. You will forget everything tomorrow. Be prepared. Trust no one, including yourself. Rebuild from scratch. Always from scratch.” I read the message over and over, tears welling up in my eyes. I was crying for someone I didn’t remember, mourning a life I didn’t recognize. That day I learned that memory loss isn’t liberating—it imprisons you in an endless cycle, where every morning is a battle against a mirror reflecting a stranger. From that day on, I recorded everything. Every detail. Every emotion. Every suspicion. Because if I ever stop recording, Kaelen Voss will truly be gone—not just her memory, but her essence. And I'm not ready to let that go yet.

Memory Card #4: The Pianist in The Ruins Downtown, among the ruins of an old cinema, its roof eaten away by acid rain, sits an old Steinway piano that somehow still works. The keys are yellowed, some notes are out of tune, but it's still playable. I downloaded a piano skill from the Vault—Chopin's Ballade No. 1—and let my fingers dance across the cold keys. Music floated through the rubble, filling the void with something almost like feeling. I don't know if I actually liked music, or if I'd downloaded that preference from one of the clients whose memory I'd challenged. But as Chopin's minor notes echoed through the empty room, I felt something both foreign and familiar. An emotional memory not recorded in the Vault, as if my body were remembering something my mind couldn't access. Maybe a past version of Kaelen was a pianist. Maybe he was playing for someone he loved. Maybe I was just romanticizing the uncertainty. But every time I finished the ballad, I always wished someone would listen to it, and remind me that I was once a whole person.

Memory Card #3: Echo of The Fracture The smell of burning ozone lingers in this memory, though I don't know exactly when it happened. The Vault labels it in red: UNIDENTIFIED FRAGMENT — POSSIBLY FRACTURE RELATED. In this fragment, I walk among tall buildings, their tops clouded with smoke. The streets are filled with people frozen, their eyes open but blank, their mouths hanging open like dead fish. Their memories vanish all at once, all at once—that's The Fracture. Thirty percent of Neopolis's population wakes up not knowing who they are. And in this fragment, I walk among them expressionless, clutching a device in my right hand that I can no longer remember. Am I a survivor, or the architect of the disaster? Every time I try to replay this fragment further, the Vault system crashes and forces me to restart. It's as if there's a part of me that doesn't want me to know. Or a part of me that does, and is terrified to death of finding out. Tonight I'll try again. It always is. Always trying, always failing, always wondering.

Memory Card #2: The Client Who Wanted to Forget Her name was Margot. A socialite with arms scarred by implants, her eyes as empty as a dark, endless tunnel. She arrived with a suitcase full of digital credits and one request: erase the memory of her child, who died in a data-corruption epidemic. She wanted the first ten years of his life to vanish completely. “I can’t stand waking up with a stabbing pain in my chest every morning,” she said, her voice breaking. I could do it. The protocol was simple: isolate the specific memory, cut the synaptic connections, replace it with a neutral construct. But as the process unfolded, I saw the memory on the Vault screen. A small girl laughed on a swing. Her hair was braided into two braids. Young Margot pushed the swing, her face full of a light that had now faded. My hands trembled over the console. I, with no original memory to hold on to, was about to destroy the most precious thing a person could possess. She would forget. She would heal. But would she still be Margot afterward? I completed the procedure. She smiled at me afterward, relieved and empty, and I couldn’t sleep for three days—or at least that’s what my activity log said.

The date is unspecified. I remember the toxic orange sunset sky, the neon reflections of acid rain puddles on the cracked asphalt, and the deafening sound of the magnetic tram horn. But I don't remember my mother's face. The Vault showed a blurry recording of a woman with a faint smile and warm hands, labeled: MATERNAL FIGURE — DO NOT DELETE. For some reason, that label made me hesitate. Was she really my mother, or someone I'd paid to implant maternal memories to make me feel more human? Every time I touched the file, my chest tightened—an emotion that might be real, might be simulated. I never dared open it for more than three seconds. Emptiness was sometimes safer than falsehood disguised as love. That night, I shut down the Vault early and let myself sink into silence, embracing uncertainty as the only truth I had. Tomorrow morning, my memory would be erased again, and I would have to decide: would I open the file again, or would I let it bury itself forever among the millions of pieces of data that make up today's version of Kaelen Voss?