In a conventional computer, memory is stored in binary code. That’s a long list of 0’s and 1’s, each one of them incredibly consequential. Computers have more than one type of memory, too. There’s RAM, which is sort of like the computer’s working memory; then there’s the information that gets stored on the hard drive. But either way, it works like this: you’ve got a bunch of chips in there. Each one has like, a zillion capacitors; each of those capacitors holds one bit of information. One 1 or 0. When you’ve got eight of those, you’ve got a byte. When you’ve thousand of those bytes, that’s a kilobyte. When you’ve got another thousand of those, you’ve got a megabyte. An average Mp3 song is two or three megabytes. A book filled with just text is about one megabyte. My dreams were about 10 megabytes. A thousand of those megabytes gets you 1 gigabtye, which is a movie in HD. According to science, my brain can handle somewhere around 621440 gigabytes. My hard drive, which feels like an extension of my person, only has 1,000 gigabytes of storage.
The first thing that a neuroscientist will remind you about is that our brains are not computers. We don’t stash and retrieve information in a binary state. Instead, we have memories and recollections and emotions and images and patterns that we can recognize that are stashed away in a vast net of neural connections. Each single neuron can connect with up to 1,000 others, maybe more. The memory stored in a computer, as long as it’s not corrupted, will retrieve the same thing each and every time that it’s called upon. But our human memories are not that precise. We can remember a lot, but only certain elements of a memory stick. Memories change, too; the emotions and associations that go along with each bit of memorable information color our memories. Some things are hazy. Some are vivid and clear and run through with fear.
But there is something that people and computers have in common. Sometimes, something happens and our memories become corrupted. For computers, this can happen if the memory is damaged–say, a coffee spill or something equally as frightful–or if there’s a short circuit that happens. After a year or two, corruption can start to occur on a drive. Now, drives are SMART: most modern drives have the ability to do a self-check, figure out which areas are corrupted or beginning to fail, and rope those sectors off so that it can keep recalling, keep calculating, keep doing whatever it’s supposed to do. Keep handling its daily business. Keep listening to, and responding to, its keeper. Sometimes, a single charged particle gets flung out of the sun with enough energy to make it to earth. Occasionally–as happened once in Belgium–one will hit a capacitor, causing a 1 to switch to an 0 and flipping the election results for an entire district.
For humans, a memory crash is a terrifying experience.
I’ve mentioned that there are a lot of things that I can’t remember as well as I wish I could. I can’t remember all the details of my story; can’t remember the nights when the house was noisy; can’t remember things people have reminded me of. Can’t remember my first kiss, can’t remember most of my birthdays, can’t remember summers or school trips, can’t remember…can’t remember. Only a few things cut through the haze for me, clarion clear and telling me that it’d probably be a bad idea to go back and retrieve whatever languishes there.
If I were a computer, I would be able to select the areas that I’d prefer to forget, separate them out from the things worth remembering, and quarantine the things that hurt. But that isn’t how the human mind works; some of the things that are most deeply, primally indelible? Etched into memory through justified fear. Here, even, my typing slows–like I’m hesitant that whatever words flow out here will have, hidden in their composition, something that I don’t want to recall. And some things are gone, not just because of an unconscious block or a memory dump–but because they weren’t relevant enough to treasure.
In the summer of 2020, I began to learn how to program, again. With a trusty electronic copy of Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, I started programming in python. As I wrote out my first functions, something felt natural and easy. “I used to do something similar when I was a kid,” I told my husband, “but it was all for a game. This is kind of similar.” Pulling out one of my old hard drives, filled with storage, I started to look back and see if anything had been preserved. If any of the old patches were still there. Deep in my recovery drive, I found a file. I opened it, expecting to see something. Only a few characters had been preserved: the ones which initiate player placement at a default zone on the map. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said my husband. “I don’t even think it’s like any real code.”
From what I’ve come to remember, and from the coding that I’ve done more recently, I definitely can say that the scripts that ran my dream definitely were something like the code I’d write in python. Not nearly as powerful–very limited, in fact–but script enough to make lovely things happen in a tiny world only 10 megabytes big. But that code was just one thing that had gone forgotten in my mind, not important enough to keep current or to keep evolving. But I can feel, in my mind, the deadened ping of that neural pathway working, becoming stronger, the more things I create. The more commands I ask my computer to carry out very politely, the more I can feel myself reaching back, grasping for whatever memory might be maintained. But it’s treacherous. It feels dangerous. Sometimes, something will peek through, and it will be either completely fine or an utter nightmare.
Let’s reach back. Let’s see what we can find. What does it feel like? What does it smell like? Who’s there?
Who are you?
I can feel it in my bones. It’s a brilliant day, in late Spring. I take the subway home from school like I do every day. Something is hiding here, hiding in all these half-starts, in all the flawed and unripe exposition. When I enter the house, it smells musty, dank and dirty. It smells rank, the kind of rancidity that comes from a house that’s been soaked in a century’s worth of cat urine and cooking oil. The air is thick with dust. In the hallway, there’s a set of stairs that’s covered in coarse, blue nylon carpet. That carpet was placed when my parents bought the house in the 1980’s. The bottom step is partially shedded, ripped up by our cats. They’re somewhere in the house. Maybe upstairs.
By the fish stand that serves as our hallway console table, there’s no shoes. Nobody is home. That means it’s safe and quiet. There’s an absence to this place that is warming, comforting even. I go to the kettle, boil water, make a cup of tea. I sit down in front of the old, dark-gray Dell computer and boot it up. I hear the hidden fan start to whirr, throwing off its thick coat of dust and cat hair. I log into Furcadia. I navigate to the place I normally drop portal for my dream, and the world begins. I shoot a whisper to my friend. We begin to play together.
You do not know anything about the worlds that I have created. They bore you. You become aggressive when I do not greet you effusively upon arriving home. “I’m writing with my friends.” I say. You make some kind of horrible bleat and chide me, but you don’t stop me from going back to the world that I’m in. To me, it’s everything. It’s hope and friendship and a kind of easy love that I haven’t had anywhere else. When I am not playing through dreams with my friends, I’m posting on fandom websites like FA. I have four hundred followers, and whenever I feel like I need to, I bare my soul to that world. I feel like I can tell these people…things that I can’t tell anyone else.
I try to remember. I looks wherever I can to trace my steps back, to try to figure out what the past was like. Who was I? How bad was it really? There’s an old graphic, posted sometime during the middle of high school, with my cartoon self and walls and walls and walls of text. Looking back, it was actually a pretty sophisticated use of igraphical image processing software. I think I’d scanned a sketch from my schoolbook notes, colored it digitally, and then added all the text.
I’m suicidal but I hide it by dramatizing it.
I like bathroom jokes and internet jokes.
I only sleep four hours a night and I’m so tired.
I hate my father because he is manipulative and weak.
Filling this space.
I fart a lot.
Oh, shit.
What the fuck was happening?