Autopilot

The lab was busier than usual, but it didn’t feel that way to me. Lights flickered on in familiar patterns, machines hummed through their startup cycles, and people gathered where they always did. Someone asked me to check a calibration. Someone else thanked me for yesterday. I nodded, adjusted a dial, said something back that sounded like my voice. Everything was moving forward at a perfectly reasonable pace. I was the only thing standing still.

I had forgotten when the room filled up around me, only that I was no longer sitting alone. Four familiar faces had taken shape around me, each of them comfortably being themselves, talking over one another, laughing, and somehow managing to work while doing it. It was seamless, and I found it to be inspirational.

Garrett said something that ended in a question. I was already nodding before I realized it. He needed help with a schematic, something simple, something he probably would’ve been laughed at for asking anyone else. I stood, leaned over his terminal, adjusted a few lines, corrected a mistake he hadn’t noticed. My hands moved without instruction. He thanked me afterward, I think. My attention had already slipped back inward.

I felt detached from it all, and the thought arrived uninvited: what could I possibly have done to deserve being here, surrounded by people like this? Time warped around the question. Half the day vanished between one breath and the next, while entire eternities passed in my head. This feeling that has settled in my chest, it was uncertain, and fragile. I could only bring myself to call it 'happiness'.

I truly felt happy with this change, but even so, there had to be something more I couldn't understand. What was it that was keeping me from being here, I want to be, but it's as if an invisible wall is standing between my soul and body.I only realized I was on autopilot when someone said my name.

Without thinking, I did what was needed. The interface was recalibrated before I remembered starting. Muscle memory. No hesitation. The kind of motion you don’t remember making until it’s already finished. That realization scarred me.

Was that me? A lifeless machine, capable of producing perfect results without thought or doubt. It couldn’t be me. I was here, inside my mind. So who was the one moving so effortlessly through the world? Someone who never second-guessed a social interaction, never hesitated over procedure. The perfect employee. And since perfection doesn’t exist, I found myself wondering what his flaw was.

In time, no one commented on how quiet I’d become. That almost made it worse.

Amelia filled the silence soon enough, talking animatedly about something, her pet, I think. She smiled as she spoke, though her hands barely touched her work. It was strange. Almost deliberate. As if she were covering for someone. The thought struck me as absurd. Who would matter enough for that?

That was when I realized I didn’t know what I was doing.

If I was aware of her, didn’t that mean I was staring? And if so then what of my hands? What were they working on? A chill ran through me as I became aware of the motion again. Slow. Precise. Familiar. I couldn’t be building a memory reader on instinct. Could I? 

It took me a moment to remember how to use my body, my first reaction was to move my head. When I looked down, I wasn't looking at the lab bench in front of me.

The room was smaller, and it appeared too white. The air smelled of antiseptic, sharp and clean, with something burned lingering beneath it. My hands were shaking. That was as much as the memory allowed me to process right now.

I looked around. Across from me lay a figure in a hospital bed, clad in a thin gown. Wires spread from their head like roots searching for soil. Beside me sat a terminal. It was old and clumsy, integrated with an early magical interface. On the wall hung a calendar, its date unmistakable. This was from the a few years back when magic had first been discovered, when people were still trying to teach it how to coexist with the mundane.

I tried to turn back to the patient, but something resisted. I couldn’t feel my heart in my chest, yet I felt its pulse flowing violently through my hands. It was beating too fast. Something exhilarating must've happened before and yet, I felt such a description to be wrong.

Then I remembered, moments earlier, I had used these hands to play god.

I knew it wasn't right. Even then, I knew. I simply didn’t care enough to act. The cost seemed negligible for the risk at hand. I lost my heart that day, and yet, I remain alive. The version of me that exists now sometimes wishes that weren’t true.

The patient stirred, clutching their head as consciousness returned. By the time my hands steadied, I was already back at the terminal. File Explorer was open. The E: drive was full. It had been for some time now, longer than the reader had been running. I knew that shouldn't have been true.

Memory readers are meant to display memory, they do this by hijacking the electrical signals between neurons, and then replicate them. They send one copy to the reader, the other goes back to the neuron. This way, memories can quite literally be read without interference. The magic comes in through both the display and the searching for memory, there's no need to recall a memory, the reader will track down exactly what you want it to.

To do this effectively, there's a delay between when it starts intercepting the neural pathways and when it displays the memory, the reason for this is to allow an excess of data to be stored preemptively. Think of it like pre-loading a video. This method prevents buffering because it already knows what to display next.

 I've heard it said that people look down on merchants because there's nothing they wouldn't leverage to line their pockets in gold. The same could be said about scientists, there's no ethical or moral boundary the higher ups wouldn't cross to satisfy their curiosity. Is it possible to record memory, to have emotions on hard drives?

They wanted an answer. So I disabled the replication function. Redirected the memory stream to my computer instead of the reader’s rolling storage, which unlike modern hard drives, it was designed to overwrite itself endlessly and never to store anything for too long. It was a glorified stick of RAM, praised more than the safety of those who trusted it. I knew it was a bad idea. I said as much. No one listened. My job was on the line.

I managed to find the resolve to face the patient before me, and I saw the face of my fiancée, unable to recognize the world around her. I had came up with the design of memory readers as my thesis in college, it was to have magic do something greater than just be a replacement to LED lights. That's why they sent me to conduct the trial, I know better than anyone how to make these accursed things. 

That's why I'm solely to blame for what happened to her.

I wanted to reach out for her. I wanted to apologize. To promise I would repent. To tell her I should never have been proud of seeing it work. That I should have been there for her instead of watching history unfold on a monitor.

Before my hand could touch hers, the world tore itself away. Otto was in front of me, checking if I was okay. Apparently my hands started shaking and I had cut myself on the crystals. Despite that I kept working getting bits of blood all over what I was working on. Taking another look at it, I was glad. I had been working on the same model reader that I designed back then, to see it destroyed was like a dream come true. I had finally escaped the confines of my mind and re-entered reality.

“Yeah,” I said, and the voice was mine this time. “I’m fine. Just lost in thought. Sorry if I worried you.”

I put on a smile, one that felt real as I allowed myself to process all their faces, their genuine concern for me. It didn't matter if I deserved it or not, what mattered is that they felt I did, so I should respect that.

"I just had an idea that relied on the old models of these things, since I was there way back when, I figured I could remake one but remembering the schematics wasn't easy." I lied, although only partially as to not worry them.

Otto's concern faded as was replaced with a pleasant smile "What a relief, I had thought we'd done something to offend you earlier."

"Don't scare us like that punk, if not you, who else could I rely on to get my work done right?" 

Rena gave Garrett a quick jab to his side, I guess she was upset that he has given up asking her for help. I was curious about those two, but I'll ask some other time. 

By the time I noticed my hunger, the day was already over.

"We were all going to stop by that new restaurant that just opened up tomorrow after work, you can make up for your silence today there. Sound like a plan?"

"We would've gone today but I need to take Puck to the vet." I think that was the first time Amelia spoke to me directly, it was odd not to see her so absent minded.

"Sounds like a plan" I accepted their offer, because denying it would've just felt wrong.

Change, it seemed, didn’t always announce itself. Sometimes, it simply waited for you to stop running on autopilot.