Delete Key

"Erasure demands a lifetime of rehearsal," Zora mutters, scraping grime off the memchip’s surface.

She rifles through the box of memory chips. A waft of synthetic food oil curls into her nostrils. She swallows it and wipes her nose. The guy at the stall prods her. “Hey are you gonna buy something or just mix up the collection?” “You said: 50 credits for the box?” She eyes him. “I said 80, but whatever, just get out of the way. You’re hogging space.” He lets his fingers trace over his mohawk. “This aint stolen is it?” She knows better than to ask. “Fine, forty, my final offer,” he smirks.

She moves her wrist over the scanner and the credits beam over. She lugs the box across the tech fleamarket and down the street. She goes down an alley and shoves some rubbish bins aside. Looking over her shoulder she lifts a metal plate and goes down a ladder.

“I’m home.” she says as she enters the boiler room of NewBurg National library. It’s stencilled proudly on the boiler, letters in copper gilding. Her dog sniffs at her hand and turns excitedly in little yelps. His barks are muffled, a red ring, long healed around his neck. She rubs his head affectionately and holds out a treat. Just synthtuna boy. She throws him the treat. “Just 40 000 credits more and we can move into a real house boy!” Might as well be a million she thinks

Zora plops down on a rickety couch and grabs the first memchip she finds. She slots the chip, bracing for the familiar neural jolt as someone’s recorded senses flooded her mind.

“The fall of earth.” blinks in green letters in her field of view. It’s a real retro job, done with very little artistry. I’ve seen this one in school. But that version was a lot flashier.

She thinks about popping it out when a man in a dark suit walks into frame and talks:

“This is a highly classified memory. Anyone caught with this will be eliminated with extreme prejudice and be erased from all databases. So if you are looking at this and are not in the top echelon, a minister or a member of Internal intelligence, switch it out and destroy it right now. You have ten seconds to comply.”

Ooh intriguing, this is decidedly not educational. She thinks.

The mem darkens and she is placed in a lab of some kind. She looks up and sees a sign. Terra Prime Collider. The woman whose memory she’s in lifts her cup

Wait, wait wait. The earth ended when we got hit by Apophis 99942. Everyone knows that. What is this? 29 May 2029 it says on the display. Well at least that’s right she shrugs. The day the world ended, forever etched into her teenage brain.

She briefly goes back to that day. She was in High School. The teacher was droning on when all their phones lit up like it’s Christmas. Sirens started wailing.

Though they are inland, tsunami warnings and rapid response was at the ready. “God of Chaos” they called it. It smashed into earth with the force of ten thousand schoolbusses. The earth shook all over. It shouldn’t have been technically possible. Birds were freaking out everywhere, animals started stampedes. Coastal areas were hit first as the waves started blocking out the sun.

I didn’t give a shit really. I was afraid, sure. We all were. But we’re safe now. Don’t ask.

But here we are, 100 lightyears away from what’s left of earth. Some people stayed, the barnacles they called them. They stayed as earth fell to ruin.

She shudders, the phantom wail of sirens echoing in her skull still. She forces herself back into Dr. Sunyi's past

I look through her eyes. Her nametag reflected in her screen, Dr. Lila Sunyi.

Several more suited doctors of science presumably are clustered around her.

This is it boys and girls, the first test of its kind. She checks her collar. “This moment will echo into the halls of eternity.”

Her hand hovers over the enter key.

Her intern enters and puts down her coffee. Dr Sunyi is looks at her with a stern expression, annoyed at the interruption. She turns and the edge of her coat catches the cup, it topples in slow motion. The coffee arcs toward the doc, she lifts her finger off the enter to shield herself. The coffee splashes her hand, scalding it and drips down.

Down into the keyboard, over Dr Sunyi’s lap. She jumps up. The keyboard flips. An error sounds. The silence like a deafening bang. All their eyes growing big as the implication sinks in. The dark liquid dripped onto the floor. “No no no no, my life’s work!”

Alarms blare.”Containment failure! Evacuate immediately!”

In an observatory 300 miles away a Nasa scientist watches the progress of the asteroid. He taps his chin. Should be missing earth by a mile, projections holding steady. He runs the calculation again. What’s this? Hello, are you changing course? What the hell?

He checks it again, waiting for the blinking cursor to say locked on earth… and again. His face turns from mildly ok into an ashen white of horror.

That’s when the Drod came in their ships, huge aliens with tentacles on their faces. They were greeted with scepticism but they had one huge ominous eye so people warmed up to them in time. They landed their hanger ships and announced the end of earth and they’d relocate us to safety. Saved by one-eyed octopi men.

Green text scrolled across Zora’s vision: Earth changed its course. The collider accident started a chainreaction that reverberated through time, a narrator chimes in. Several explanations of increasing difficulty fills her field of view. It all comes down to this. An intern ended the world.

She pops the memchip out of the slot. What was that? Her mouth is dry, she’s shaking. She curls up on the ground, her stomach heaving. How does nobody know this? She goes into full blown panic as she starts hyperventilating. She vomits on the floor. The betrayal, all of the world betrayed. Her mom and dad who decided to stay. Was it on purpose, an accident?

She looks down and sees it then. A red light blinking inside the bag. It’s a transponder. She hears the sirens again. They are coming for her.

Zora, you’ve got to run! The red light pulses like a malevolent eye. Sirens wail, closer now, echoing the ones from the memchip. They weren’t just coming for her. They were coming to delete the truth. Again. If the Drod were in on it... everything was a lie. She grabs the memchip, her fingers slick with sweat. 'Boy, come!' she hisses, scrambling towards the vent shaft. Forty thousand credits didn’t matter anymore. Survival just got a lot more expensive.

"Erasure demands a lifetime of rehearsal," Zora murmurs, tucking the memchip into her sleeve. But this time, she vows, we’ll rewrite the script.

*Author’s Note: The opening/closing quote ("Erasure demands a lifetime of rehearsal") is from the poem "Fugue" in Amanda Gorman's collection CALL US WHAT WE CARRY (Viking, 2021).*