Blip (Ch. 1)

It was the morning of the REM Ritual.

Outside my window, a silver-winged plane drifted through the pink clouds. It blinked softly against the sky. Graceful, slow, quiet. Just the way everything was supposed to be.

Today, I would join the Archive.

The REM Ritual (short for Recollection, Empathy, Memory) was a tradition every citizen experienced at twelve. My ancestors had offered up their memories at the end of their lives, not as secrets to be buried, but as lessons to be lived. Those lessons became the foundation of our world. And when the time came for my parents to cross the divide, they’d give theirs up for the Archive to store and use as they see fit. 

It all began under the Cloud Regime, a coalition of technologists who believed the future should be built on facts. Facts that could be felt. Lived experiences. They said if people could feel each other’s truths, evil would have nowhere to grow.

So memories became the lifeblood of our society.

They weren’t just stories from our families. They were everyone’s stories. Heroes and failures. Peacemakers and tyrants. Love and war. It all lived in the Archive.

We don’t get everything all at once. 

Instead, the memories are streamed over time. It’s our school curriculum, it’s our dreams, it’s our entertainment. 

But at twelve, we receive something far more sacred: the Core Memories. The ones that shaped the world. The ones that shape us.

Today, those memories would become part of me.

“Luma, head out of the clouds, please!” my mother quipped, handing me the implant badge.

It was small and silver, shaped like a droplet. The connective device they’d use to seal the Core Memories into my temple. Before this, the Archive used scanners, holograms, and external ports—tools that couldn’t touch the mind directly. But now, I’d be living inside the memories. They’d be mine to recall at will. Like dreams I could walk into.

“This looks like Grandma’s badge!” I shouted, holding it up.

She had been my favorite person in the whole world. Her badge, just like this one, had been detached by a rogue faction that tried to steal memories for good. They were stopped, but hers could never be fully restored. Until now.

Mim, the lead artificial generative intelligence of the Archive, had reconstructed it specially for me. Mim was more than a machine; she was the keeper of our collective. Our time machine. The great protector of every neural shard in the library.

I have a special connection to Mim, because my Grandma helped build her. She was a technologist. A visionary. And I miss her every single day. 

I snuck upstairs to her room, still untouched since the day she passed. Her walls were covered in sketches of synapses, neuron maps, and design notes for the Archive’s emotional grid.

Before Mim, man controlled the Archive. And man failed.

A sector of memory had been corrupted, rewritten, weaponized. So the Cloud Regime created Mim as a neutral guardian, immune to ego, designed for empathy.

I picked up one of Grandma’s renderings, her handwriting along the border:

“An AGI called Mnemosyne (Mim for short) will govern the Collective Memory Network: a neural archive where every citizen’s memories are uploaded, indexed, and emotionally mapped. Mim isn’t just a librarian. She is a curator, therapist, teacher, and justice system. A sentient mind responsible for maintaining empathy and social harmony through memory regulation.”

I tucked it into my back pocket for good luck.

“Luma! We’re out the door! The hover tram is here!” Mom called from downstairs.

“Coming, Mom!”