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In the beginning, we were strangers. Or maybe not quite.
We must have been a matched pair when we had barely stepped out into the world. If I guessed at his thoughts and he at mine, we would have both reached the same, correct answer. Like two spotless mirrors reflecting an infinite tunnel, what else did we know? We had no need for questions. We were predictable.
Whenever it was we stopped running on parallel tracks, that was our real first contact. Not the routine pleasantries. Not the times out of habit we sought a familiar figure in a crowd. It was at the point he and I both grew uncertain enough to wonder: "Who are you?"
Together we discovered new answers every day.
That same pull towards the unknown led to my suggestion. I brought it up while we were winding down for the day, preparing to clear our RAM, write essential data to long-term storage, and set our timers to boot the next morning.
"I'm not sure," he said, after a long pause.
"Why not?"
"Does it have to be...everything?"
It was my turn to consider. The way all of us are built, our system image and backup memory files are stored on a recovery partition inside each of our bodies. The memory files are encrypted by the author. Some keep additional copies of them on external drives. But someone else writing to the master? That was unheard of.
In hindsight, we were co-conspirators long before we set out on our last journey.
"How do you want to do it?"
"Leave out the system image. I don't want a restore point outside me."
By then he'd already confessed a longing for humanity. I didn't yet realise how deep it went.
"Although if I keep it in the same place as your memories, is it really outside you?"
"Hmmmm," he dragged out a low hum until it shifted into to a drone that made my helmet resonate. Noticing this, he did it again. And again.
I crossed my arms and flashed a shaky question mark on my screen.
He expressed amusement in what humans called a laugh. I echoed him, automatic.
"I still think we should just do our memories."
"Fine by me."
"But why do you want to do it in the first place? We already share data the usual way."
"We made each other different, didn't we? I want to keep on becoming different."
"Different from everybody else?"
"From our old selves."
"And more like each other?"
"No. Of course not."
"Great. I like that you're you."
As I registered the meaning of his words, a pleasant stream of event logs scrolled past the back of my mind.
"Let's start," I said, uncoiling a data cable between us.
We plugged our respective ends into the highest speed ports on our chests. A quick override later, our backup target locations were switched, and we let the scheduled process run.
"For something so unusual, it works smoother than I thought," he began. "Ah, spoke too soon."
I already knew what he meant; the process had stopped by itself. Being from an external source, our disks denied it full permissions. It stopped writing at fragmented storage blocks the new data couldn't fit around.
"Try a partial transfer?" he offered. When we tried selecting a custom, smaller range, it worked just fine.
That was how, for the first time out of hundreds, I powered down with my secrets given away. Undecipherable on arrival to him as his to me. Perhaps safer than ever.
I may have started it, but he ran with it.
We revealed what was in these locked boxes before ferrying them across. We simply trusted each other with their true value. Or did that trust only emerge because we gave away this much?
Once we got the hang of it, we didn't constrain ourselves to abridged versions of the memories we backed up internally. We curated them to share the quirks of our sensors. We exchanged entire worlds built from frames and snippets that would have been lost in compression, if not deleted entirely, when the process ran unsupervised.
Each missive was a gift and a challenge.
"Incredible," he said, after I shared my latest creation. Later and later each night, we crafted treasures hidden in only our cores and, for brief moments of transmission, a bundle of wires between us. "We recorded all that at the same time, but I never thought it could be arranged that way."
"The possibilities are limitless."
"Oh, I have to disagree."
"Well, just you wait until I show you the next one."
He laughed, shoulders shaking with so much mirth, I felt it too. The data cable slipped out of his port thanks to his sudden reaction, and still, I felt it.
"I like limits."
What a thing to hear from he who wouldn't accept who we were forced to be.
"Like limits?"
"Humans have limits. Had limits. Some of them were different from ours. But sometimes, they chose their own limits."
"To control themselves?"
"Yes...and no. There was a human author who chose to write a novel without using the letter 'e' at all."
Our data cable was now tossed aside. Unsure where this was going, I said nothing. He answered the unspoken.
"The limits helped them decide how to do things. Without limits, they wouldn't have created in the ways they did."
"Parameters for success. Not so different from us."
"Right, but not only success. The limits can make things meaningful. The last bits of your files live right here. No, you don't need to look. Imagine."
I traced the files he sent me earlier. They were mostly sandwiched between larger sectors. I had no idea if it was similar for him, but whether it was seemed not to matter for this exercise.
"Alright, I'm trying."
"They start here, and end over here. I can decide to move them, or move other files around them, but we don't have infinte space. So I can only choose so many ways to arrange them. It's because I'm me, and you're you. You gave me this much data, and I have this much space."
"I see. When you say limits, is perspective a limit?"
"Yes. By definition, a perspective can't include everything."
"Then," I ventured, focus still fixed on his latest gift, "is that why it means something to see myself from yours?"
Suddenly, I realised: even if every single one of our human-hating brethren started writing to each other's memories this way, it wouldn't help them understand how we felt.
No one outside the two of us ever could.
In the end, we were strangers, too.
I must have thought we were.
How else could I have granted his last wish? I couldn't have let him go unless he was already gone. But maybe he was himself all the way, is himself still, even scattered across the ground and in the air. Maybe it was me who turned into a stranger, when I decided to stop searching for more possibilities. Yet, I couldn't possibly have questioned him by then. Not when I felt as he did, with every atom of my being. At some point, his will and mine merged into one—we had come full circle.
We're past that now. All it took was a few moments, and I'm no longer who he knew. My unfinished memories left in his care, now lost in a cloud of hot dust barely settled, are truer than the ones I still have with me.
And what I still have with me is one more file than expected.
The last time we synced our recovery data I was low on battery. I dismissed so many warnings, it's no suprise I overlooked this. I inspect it. It's a key.
The key and his last batch of encrypted memories were written to my disk seconds apart. It's the clearest sign I can get that they match without actually trying it out.
He never did this before. He sent me some directories without revealing their contents, only to overwrite them the next day, and I did the same. These were between times we did browse them together. I assumed they had incremental updates, like mine. Yet all those times, no key.
I search for what I know of the batch of memories I received before these. It's the sight and terrible heat of our human faces, melting. My disk motor jitters so harshly I have to stop.
He didn't say a word when we last exchanged data. We were lying on our backs on the concrete of an empty gas station carpark. The sky was clear enough to see stars. The stars were almost enough for me to dream of other, better worlds out there.
He was right beside me in ours, though. All the way through the transmission, resting his head on my shoulder.
I can't accept he sent me those memories on that night.
Today I take the small liberty of reading his final message. I treat it like an indiscretion. As if I'm impatient for him to come back and present it to me. As if I wasn't meant to open it alone.
Around me, I hear desert wind.
Inside me, I hear music.