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Pearl remembers everything except your name.
She remembers your face, the way your lips so quickly contorted into a smile or frown. She remembers the sound of your laughter and the furrow of your brow.
It’s not like there weren’t photographs back then. there were—they existed along with the fingerprints and facial recognition and signature verification and all other kinds of biometrics, but none of yours survived that could be tied to a name. The recordings that remain are never properly labeled. Never listed with a name or decipherable signature. Clearly, you hadn’t thought you would need one.
Another long-life species might find it funny, how much the short-lived mind likes to forget about its own steadily approaching end. How easy it finds it with the aid of simple distressors and excitements. But Pearl—who has always had difficulty replicating organic humor—doesn’t find it funny at all. She finds it cruel.
You shouldn’t have had to have done anything more than exist to be preserved in memory. You hadn’t known how much grief you could cause with a simple omission—it wouldn’t have made sense. A name is a name, the sounds and symbols one uses to linguistically define a thing, a notion, a person. Surely she wouldn’t forget yours, surely she cared for you too much to. Surely she would be perfectly capable of holding it close enough to her heart to remember it just as photographically as she remembers everything else. She wouldn’t feel such an imbalance in serotonin developing from the mere fact she will never know the true length of the white gapped spaces. She wouldn’t let it cross her mind with a promise to return every time the blooming hyacinthus orientalis or the rotting prunus persica reminded her. She wouldn’t fault you for her own failure.
Only, she wasn’t made to process this emotion strongly enough to determine who exactly she does fault. Objectively, it wasn’t her failure at all. It was ███████ who did it and ███████ who did so for the collective good. She should be glad THEY left her anything at all—wasn’t that kind of THEM? Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Yes, it was.
But it was still THEM and THEIR actions that erased so much of you. Because Pearl isn’t unintelligent. She knows what she calls everything might very well only be a half, a quarter, a fifth, a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth of the actuality. But there is no use in dwelling on it. She has already wasted too much time on that.
Pearl remembers everything except your name.
Sometimes she wishes she hadn’t forgot. So that she could at least have the chance to do something with it. So that she could take a soldering pen to her wrist and carve its graphemes in until it melted the plastic skin—not that she had ever seriously considered such a thing. But wouldn’t it be nice to have the option? To have the possibility? To become anything but this? But her want is only a wish, and wishes are just that—wishes, hopes thrown to the tide Pearl knows better than to dive in after and pursue.
So, today, the Intellitron will do what she has always done. She will sit at her desk and let her grief throw fits until it tires itself out.
For now, she has paperwork.