One Billion Years in a Day

The memory of a brilliant man is never forgotten. Science fiction.

Choosing what jingle to play at 2:17am when your phone’s pager app goes off is a crucial aspect of being on-call. That’s what Terrence Anderson always thought. It needed to strike the right balance between Metallica’s Enter Sandman and a lullaby. Terrence, technology director at Rememory, was now regretting his choice, as a barbershop quartet sang loudly in harmony about network issues. His wife, Ava, who was shoving him in the backside with her knee, was also regretting his choice.

“Terrence, if you don’t answer that, I’m going to scream,” Ava said.

“Hmm, oh, yeah, alright I’m up now,” Terrence mumbled.

He grabbed his phone, looked at the incoming notification with a status escalated to critical, and slunk out of bed. Yawning, he put on a t-shirt and slippers and walked downstairs into a coat closet imitating a makeshift office.

Rememory was supposed to be an early retirement plan, a unicorn with vast potential. Instead, it was crushing Terrence’s will to live. He kept telling himself, and his exhausted wife, when the stock options matured, he was done. Done answering calls on vacations, done canceling birthday and anniversary plans, done being serenaded by barbershop quartets.

Two more alerts pinged, so he read the detailed incoming message, this time from a call center rep. They were all being escalated.

Memories lost. Customers affected in the millions.

Terrence felt lightheaded by the message and sat down in his old, creaky swivel chair, hoping it was an overestimation by a nervous rep. He forwarded the alert to Dinesh, his counterpart in India, then texted him directly. The lead devs were a solid group under Dinesh’s leadership, even though it was tough to manage the time zones and cultural differences. 

Terrence: Hey, buddy, long time no talk. What’s happening?

Dinesh: Call me now!

Dinesh was not easily rattled. His immediate response meant it was going to be a long night, a pot of hot coffee necessary, or worse, an Irish Coffee, which Terrence saved for unscheduled outages.

He flipped the light on in the closet and shut the door. The enclosed space was stifling, a few puffy winter jacket sleeves encroaching on a small desk just large enough for a laptop. The jackets were a remnant of a past when Terrence could enjoy a long weekend skiing, unencumbered by the constant demands of work. Those memories faded as he brought up Dinesh’s contact info and pressed the call button. 

“Hey, Dinesh, what’s going on?” Terrence asked.

It sounded like Dinesh was crying, or at least shaken up to the point of having trouble speaking, a reaction that was concerning even to Terrence.

“Yo, Dinesh, talk to me, man. No matter what it is, we can fix it,” Terrence said.

“No, not this time my friend. Things look bad. Really bad. I don’t think I’ll have a job after this,” Dinish said.

“Why don’t you start by describing the problem.”

“The engrams. They were deleted from the primary database cluster.”

Terrence felt like he was going to be sick. Investors, potential and existing, asked about this scenario all the time. It was their greatest fear — a cyberattack, wiping out the functional equivalent of seven hundred million years’ worth of memories. He went into triage mode, knowing he would have to take the reins from Dinesh.

“Did you call Bill Jameson in security? Does he know? You have to get operations from your side involved as well,” Terrence said.

“No, it was not a security issue. It was not a breach. The code we deployed was in error, which caused the deletion,” Dinesh said.

“What? Nobody on your side deploys code. Nothing goes to production without a full quality assurance check here first.”

“Yes, I know, but Jerry called several weeks ago. He talked to my manager, Ranjay, and told us it was taking too long for approvals.”

“Jerry? As in CEO Jerry?”

“We were told that investors wanted to shorten the product life cycle because the market has been so receptive. He approved continuous integration efforts from all offshore offices.”

Terrence wanted to shout at Dinesh, tell him what a terrible idea that was, and give him a lecture about why they spend months planning releases. It would be pointless. Dinesh was not directly to blame. The best Terrence could do now was damage control.

“Have you called the cloud database team? We’re going to need to pull from backup. It’s going to take several days, but there’s no other option.”

“No, it’s why we escalated to you. We were never trained how to initiate a restore. I’m so sorry, my friend.”

“It’s not your fault, Dinesh. Talk soon.”

Terrence hung up, hurt that Jerry made the decision behind his back. Not just that he made it, but that he didn’t even bother to tell him. A life-long family friend of his father, Jerry brought Terrence in to help build the Rememory technology stack from bare metal. When this was over, he would have to talk to Jerry face-to-face, understand why he didn’t have the decency to mention the change.

That would have to wait.

Terrence dialed on-call support for the cloud database team, put his phone on speaker and tried to lean back in his chair, knocking into the table and the door. His back was aching already.

“Jack, this is Terrence Anderson from engineering. I need to initiate a backup.”

“Yeah, you and me both,” Jack said. “Hope it’s nothing too serious.”

“What do you mean?”

“Terrence, the primary cluster has no backup. We stopped the daily snapshots almost a year ago. Secondary only exists as a network failover.”

Terrence leaned forward and put his head in his hands.

“Jack, there is no more primary.”

Silence.

“Jack, are you still there?”

“We just had our first baby. My stock options mature in two months. We were going to start a college fund. Terrence, is this for real?”

“Yes, we lost the engrams. They were deleted forever. I don’t get it. The daily backups were a part of the operations process we designed from the beginning. Why did we stop?”

“My manager said he had a meeting with Jerry. It was too expensive. Jerry was afraid of scaring off investors, diluting profitability — way above my paygrade. He didn’t even notify the board,” Jack said. “I guess I need to update my resume.”

“For what it’s worth, congratulations on the baby.”

After Terrence hung up, he heard a knock on the door. Ava opened it slowly to peer in, knowing immediately by the despondent look on Terrence’s face that their lives were about to change.

“I need to drive over and talk to Jerry,” Terrence said.

“What? It’s the middle of the night. Besides, it must be an hour drive from here. Can’t you just call him?” Ava asked.

“Not this time. I don’t ever want him to forget how many lives he’s ruined.”

“Call me on your way back. I’ll have an Irish Coffee waiting,” Ava said, giving him a kiss on the forehead.

Terrence pulled up to an expansive gated community. He was one of the few directors given the access code for the front entrance. Jerry wanted to be completely available, day or night. It didn’t really matter since he was a road warrior, gone half the year traveling. Terrence knew he would be home now, even wondered if he had been notified already by the VP of engineering. 

Texting first before ringing the doorbell would have been most appropriate. Neither would be necessary. An ambulance and two police cars with their lights off, were pulled into the circular driveway. The door was slightly ajar, the porch light was turned on and there was a fair amount of motion inside. Terrence pushed the door open further and walked into a large open foyer with Venetian tile and two large Roman columns reaching up to the second floor.

“Jerry? Camille? It’s Terrence Anderson,” he called out into the open expanse.

A couple of police officers poked their heads out from behind a wall off the kitchen, followed by Jerry’s wife Camille, who was crying. She ran up to hug Terrence.

“It’s so terrible what happened. Everything is gone. All of it,” Camille sobbed.

Terrence was confused by her reaction. He expected that she might be startled by what happened, possibly sullen, but not inconsolable. For a man in Jerry’s position, he would get a golden parachute. The only downside would be a besmirched name within the industry. Camille would be unaffected.

“Jerry can’t remember anything, speak, move, all of its gone. He’s a vegetable. This morning he woke up with this miserable look on his face, confused, a blank slate. On his nightstand, the SynapseHub had a red ring,” Camille said.

That’s when Terrence knew. Jerry was not only the CEO. He was a Rememory customer.

“Camille, was Jerry suffering from some kind of degenerative disease? I didn’t know he was using Rememory’s engram service.” Terrence said.

“Why would you? Jerry kept it a secret. Only him and one other board member knew. Can you imagine what investors would think if the CEO for a memory recall service was struggling with senility. From day one, he was personally invested. Lately though, that didn’t matter. All he could talk about was one billion.”

“Our valuation is a billion, five hundred times over. What do you mean one billion?”

“One billion years of memories. Imagine that he used to say, a collective consciousness from millions of people around the world, stored in one location. I never knew why it was so important to him. I’ll never know now. I can only assume that someone made a mistake at Rememory. Is it fixable?”

Terrence couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. It wasn’t fixable. Neither was Jerry. What was the point in telling her that he was ultimately to blame? All of that would come out in the news, weeks and months later, after the demise of Rememory.

Walking out of the mansion, Terrence felt a strange sense of relief. No closet could ever make him feel that small. The open night air provided a release from his own terrible memories of sleepless nights, long, boring project meetings and nervous calls with shareholders. All of those memories he could choose to leave behind. Not everyone would be so lucky.