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Trona had been dead for centuries at this point, but every day he thanked Queen Sphene that being an Endless allowed him to remain youthful instead of at the age he had passed. Imagine how terrible his eternal life would be if he was forced to remain a decrepit old man! The memory of aching joints and rattling breaths was faint, but Trona shuddered at it nonetheless.
His life now was simple. He no longer needed to sleep, but did so anyway, and rose at approximately six in the morning like he had every day of his living life (with the notable exception of a few late nights in post-grad). He had a job, because of course he did; spending an eternity submitting to nothing but gluttonous pleasure was a hell he would refuse to be a part of. No, Trona had a job, and a very important one at that: he continued the great work he had been doing in Preservation as a physician for the Endless.
Endless didn't need medics, as it were. Not the way squishy and fragile Alexandrians did, with their storm-wracked bodies and their vulnerability to levin sickness. The Endless were aether made corporeal. They were magnificent.
It was difficult to describe what an Endless was, even to one who had recently become one, so Trona hardly bothered to waste the time and scoffed at the paltry explanations given by the welcoming staff of Living Memory. Few understood that when their memories were extracted, a unique pattern could be generated from the collection: a signature of sorts, almost like an autograph but distinct to that person's memories. Each part of the pattern corresponded to a memory. The pattern was then saved in a collection of memory cells within a fantastic invention called a chip, one unit fitting neatly into each cell like perfect stacking blocks. The chip could store billions of memory cells. Then hundreds of thousands of chips were stored in hundreds of thousands of servers, and those servers were shelved in each terminal. It was a terrific feat of engineering that only the scientists at Preservation could have come up with.
Trona was one of those selfsame scientists. To an extent. He was in charge of detecting and repairing glitches in the system that interfered with an Endless's memories. He was the best at it, living or dead.
His clinic was on the first floor of the Daguerreo Medical Collection, while his personal office was on a higher floor overlooking the canal. Of course, the Collection wasn't where he conducted the finer points of his work; it was merely where he collected diagnostics. Trona affixed the badge that marked him as Authorized Personnel to his shirt pocket and smiled at his reflection in his bedroom mirror.
Not every Endless was granted a personal residence. It was difficult enough to keep the Endless alive while layering the simulations of Alexandria overtop the electrope that made up Living Memory. They were already staggering the amount of Endless that could be active at any given point. Aether was running out.
Trona didn't have to worry about being deactivated or losing his cozy apartment in a high-rise overlooking Canal Town. He gave seventy years of his life to Preservation, working all the way up to his dying breath, and he earned every bit of his experience now. It was only fair. He didn't need a lot to be happy.
The commute to work was a simple teleportation. Trona deposited himself in the wide courtyard in front of the massive, stately building. The burnished gold sky glinted off the many windows that spanned the front of the Collection. He liked to walk in the front doors and take the long way to his clinic. He believed that most problems could be diagnosed before a patient even entered the clinic: someone who flickered at the edges was adjusting poorly to the lower output of aether, while someone who was dazed or confused was dealing with a memory glitch. Even the number of Endless he passed could give him a hint as to what kind of day he'd have.
Today, the halls on the way to his clinic were sparsely populated. Trona grimaced. Internally. There were only so many afflictions an Endless could be subject to, and less than twenty meant it was likelier that it was twenty unique problems requiring twenty unique solutions, instead of one-hundred and twenty, which could be fixed in one fell swoop. He'd likely have to travel to multiple Terminals and fix people one at a time instead of retreating to his office and pushing a single update from his portable terminal interfacer (PTI, trademarked by Prevention).
The closer he got to his clinic, the less people he saw, until the only passerby were the automated archivists and occasional Preservation member. He signaled to those subtly, but they already knew him. All of Preservation knew of him, and would forever—that was how important his work had been to Alexandria.
Eventually, he came upon a tall door made to look like warm oak and glossed to a sheen. The glass inlaid in the center was crisscrossed with gold filigree to make sharp, geometric patterns. The doorknob was as pristine as the day the door was first skinned. Nothing became worn in Living Memory.
His clinic itself was a wide room with rows of hard wooden benches and ivory marble that tiled the floor. Vertical lights made of opaque white glass hung from the ceiling in tubes that narrowed into smaller concentric circles, like scrolls of paper, bracketed with their black metal frames. Trona had designed them himself. Electrope was an extremely rigid material, and before Preservation knew how to apply the appearance of a curved surface, everything had to have hard edges.
The warm glow of the lanterns complimented the golden light that streamed in from the large windows. On a bench closest to one such window sat a single Endless, the only one in the entire room. She sat with her hands folded on her shiny black pants, twitching and muttering to herself. A pair of headphones hung around her neck, nearly obscured by her electric blue hair.
Trona surmised that she was a recently created Endless, at least within the last five years. Alexandrian fashion had become horribly distasteful with bright neon and metallic colors.
The voice of his automated assistant at the receptionist's desk chirped up. "The doctor will see you now," the doe-eyed young hyune said. He smiled placidly.
Trona smiled back at him. It had taken ages to figure out how to skin the newest model of automaton so it would resemble an Alexandrian Hyune and not a silver-and-black robot with a screen for a face. He was pleased that the boy had retained his warm brown skin and black hair. Alexandrians used to have natural coloring.
He eyed the woman on the bench. She finally took notice of him.
"Doctor," she said, "I don't know what's wrong with me."
Her voice was strained. Trona clicked his tongue.
"Well, that's what I'm here for," he replied. "Up with you now, off we go, first room on your left."
He followed her as she moved slowly, hunched over, to the room he directed her toward. He catalogued that her steps shuffled and she clutched a hand over her stomach. Endless could not feel pain, so it was likely a habitual response.
She sat on the bed when he gestured toward it. He busied himself with doing all the standard checks: counting her refresh rate, her aetherial density and pressure, and a quick remote search on his PTI for the ambient temperature of her terminal's sector. Everything appeared normal. Trona allowed himself a minute smile. He always enjoyed ferreting out a difficult problem, and only one patient meant visiting only one terminal.
"My name is Dr. Trona Teberis," he began conversationally, "what seems to be the problem? Your vital signs are all perfectly normal."
The woman had large yellow eyes the color of lemons that teared up as she frowned. "Reverse in happening everything's," she said, then clasped her hands over her mouth. Her lemony eyes watered.
"Ah," Trona said. "I see. Or, rather, I hear."
The woman did not find his joke amusing. He sighed. Few people did.
"Is it only some of the time?" he continued.
"As far as I can gather."
He hummed and typed his notes into his PTI. Speech affliction. Issue with the vocal interpretor?
"Keep talking," he encouraged her as he downloaded her file from his assistant's memory cache. "How long has this been going on?"
"It began a few days ago. It alternates, but not by every sentence. If I try to speak the in reverse will it then sentence long a middle." The woman made an exasperated noise and clenched her fists. "I can barely stand to hear myself speak, me understand can else nobody and!"
Trona certainly couldn't, which was why he waited for the voice-to-text function on his PTI to finish compiling her words before he responded. "Well, that must be very frustrating."
The look the woman gave him could melt electrope. "Can you fix me?"
A few more notes in the woman's file, and Trona folded his PTI shut. "Of course I can. You'll be better in no time, Ms. ..?"
"Reverie," the woman smiled. "Thank Trona Doctor, you." And just like that, the smile was gone.
It didn't matter to Trona, he had a good idea of what was causing her issue. He sent her out to finish paperwork with his assistant (just because it was eternity didn't mean that there was no longer a need for paperwork, imagine how ridiculous—!) and began to pack up his things. Luckily, Reverie's chip was in the Hydro Terminal, which was a short trip across Canal Town, and shorter if he teleported. Which he did. He'd hate for Reverie to be stuck speaking like a living boustrophedon for longer than necessary.
Hydro Terminal was inaccessible to the Endless at large, but not him: his Authorized Personnel badge had a small magnetic chip of its own, and it unlocked any terminal he wanted. As far as he knew, he was one of maybe a dozen other Endless Preservation members who had unlimited access. The terminal itself didn't even look like a structure one could enter, which delighted Trona even more.
Inside the structure was extremely dark but for the purple glow of electrope, the blue lights of the terminal, and the trillions of little blinking stars that glittered on all the servers. Instead of an extremely wide room that housed rows of server racks, the terminals in Living Memory were vertically oriented, with only about sixteen columns but each stretching until they disappeared into the vast distance overhead.
Trona stepped lightly onto a panel on the ground that was made of raw electrope. The pressure plates activated and released the clamps holding the panel to the floor, and with a hiss, it began to levitate. He didn't need to keep his balance; he'd been doing this for centuries. It was second nature to adjust his weight minutely to stay balanced on the small panel. A quick check of his PTI let him know that Reverie's chip was on a server in quadrant III, zone BX-07, number 202414. He tapped his foot against the interactive map on the panel to direct it to the correct spot.
Reverie's chip was almost at the very top of the terminal, and if Trona was a weaker man, he'd be terrified of the long fall should he lose his footing. But he wasn't a weak man, and so all he did was locate the server, plug his PTI into the terminal, and begin working.
He imagined the reverse speech was an issue with the vocal interpreter. Once memories were given form with aether, it was considered wasteful for more aether to be used to project a voice, and downright irresponsible now that the aether restrictions were being enforced. Instead, the engineers at Preservation had designed a short program that could interpret the desire to speak and contents thereof that the Endless wished, and use electrope to generate a voice based on the memories of the Endless. Then, once generated, the voice was displaced through the ambient aether to appear as if it was coming from the Endless.
At first glance, nothing in the code seemed amiss. He downloaded the code into a testing environment on his PTI and made the input his own commands, so a copy of Reverie's voice echoed in the cavernous terminal. It was still reversing intermittently, but he couldn't tell why.
It took nearly three quarters of a bell before he realized what the issue was. When the program interpreted a desire to speak, it would map the impulse to words (which was generally a straightforward process since the desire to say, for instance, eat and the word eat had a cosine similarity of about 6.9°), and then collect those words to be transmitted. For some reason, instead of using a carriage return to signify when a new line of text should be started, Reverie's code simply began the new line in reverse, meaning her words wrapped around from the end of one line. Trona narrowed his eyes. What a strange bug...he half-wondered if it was one of those freak incidents where dust or moisture got into the terminal and corrupted the code on some way. He had been staunchly against placing the hydro terminal in Canal Town, but was outvoted by Schorl, who was a civil engineer and insisted that it looked much nicer placed by the water.
Well. It was a simple enough fix, and once he was certain the code worked properly on his PTI, he pushed it back to the server. Then came the checks to ensure that nothing he changed affected any of the other chips hosted on the server, and there were no changes, so he packed up his gear and returned to the entrance of the terminal.
Reverie was already gone by the time Trona returned to the clinic, which was good: if there had still been a problem, she would have remained. His automated assistant dutifully repeated all of her thanks and gratitude to him. Trona pat the boy on the head and retreated to his office on the upper levels. If a new patient needed to be seen, the boy would alert him.
He stared out the window to watch the Endless stroll along the clear blue waters in the canals. He smiled. This eternal paradise was perfect, entirely his, and it would never, ever, change.
Meanwhile, far away from the Daguerreo Medical Collection, the Gate of Remembrance flickered.