Server Farm Chapter 2

One of Steve’s earliest memories, confusingly, was of plugging in. When you were plugged in, you couldn’t tell the difference between your memories or someone elses – one moment you would be immersed in a very powerful, physically rooted memory of someone you had never met, but the memory was so strong you were absolutely certain that that was who you were, who you always were, who you always would be – a sensation so peculiar it left if not itself the its effects on your mind long after the details of the specific memory were forgotten. The next minute you would be floating among tenuous associations of ideas, webbed together from the memories of several differect people: a summer job picking peppers, remembered in one person’s mind, would connect to memories of an cooking class in another person’s mind. Even connections between abstract thoughts, such as greed to lust for power to military conquest to Alexander the Great to Memphis to barbecued ribs – involved jumps from mind to mind as well as from idea to idea. In the middle of this you lost almost all sense of identity.Flitting among abstract ideas, from one to another – landmarks on the way to the grocery store; the best way to hold a knife if you want to chop green onions; the structure of the sexual organs in a flower; the axioms of Peano arithmetic… Once in a while an association train would lead somehow to an incident from his own past, one of his own memories. Details would then explode and it became less of an exploration of associations but rather more like a searching analysis and reappraisal of every detail – like watching the Zapruder film over and over.

Steve couldn’t remember his first plug-in. It must have happened when he was a toddler, though. And he must have uploaded something in that session, musn’t he? There should then be memories of his from before his first plug in stored somewhere in the servers. There must be memories of his infancy, then that he could conceivably access.

He tried to get to those memories as often as he could. However, it was difficult to pull what you wanted from a plug in session. Moving through the mnemoscape was more like surfing than sailing. There was very little navigation to it. What you got was driven by association. Sometimes he felt that he could control it. Every next association seemed to be something that he proposed. There were other times when he felt like he was trying to propose associations of his own, but before he could quite recognize them himself they were shoved aside in favor of other notions – ans he was as it were pushed in a direction he wouldn’t have chosen himself. And there were yet other times when he was swept rapidly along a series of associations rapid fire too quickly for him to even think about making a choice – it felt like being swamped and carried off by a tidal wave. Some said it was like a lot of other things, it was like life – the more in control and on top of things you seemed to be, the less you actually were.

He didn’t know if there was some quality of these early memories that kept him from accessing them, or whether he just couldn’t exercise enough control over the movement through associations to get there. Occasionally he would catch glimpses of someone’s early childhood, but though the impressions were very strong, often the details were vague. And these were never during one of the association runs which turned out to be a fully detailed retrieval of one of his own memories.

So sometimes he would wonder if some early childhood memory he encountered was one of his and it just couldn’t trigger that kind of explosion of natural memories. But he kind of doubted it – there were a lot of people in the world, a lot of childhoods – the chances that one of them was his, without some kind of emotional evidence, was close to nil.

One early memory, which he knew to be his own natural memory, was easy to recall. It was from around four years of age. It was a thing that happened to everyone at some point in their early childhood, and for everyone it is the earliest clear memory of plugging in. This was around four years of age.

His mother was near the window in the kitchen. As he walked toward her he moved into the beams of sunlight it let stream in. Their brightness blinded him to her featurs as she truned to his question. Her pose and voice were kind, though, as she asked him what he wanted. “Mommy, why do I have to plug in?”

As his eyes adjusted to the light, and her features became clear. Her forehead crinkled in worry. “Don’t you enjoy plugging in?”

“It’s boring. I don’t want to plug in anymore!”

“You used to like pluggin in. Is it no fun anymore?” He shook his head. “Why not? What don’t you like about it?”

“It makes me tired. And it’s boring.”

“Hmmm. Well Do you think you might be old enough to handle a special kind of plug in?”He lowered his brows in skepticism. “What kind?”

“You’ll see” said his mom. She tousled his hair. Her smile reassured him. “We’ll go the day after tomorrow.”

As the car crunched the gravel of the plug-in center’s parking lot, she said to him over her shoulder, “We’re not going to use the usual berths we use for you.” He thought about his walking through the cool late afternoon air toward the wide, slant-roofed building. Maybe they would go into the adult wing – wow! Maybe he would get to go past all the older kids he saw when he came to plug in at the kids section.

His anticipation gre as they went through the sliding glass doors, which hummed not from the clumsiness of their automation, but from the sound of so much surface sliding against so much surface, deep under the ground and high up into the ceiling. But they didn’t turn left into the adult berth wing, they turned right as usual into the kid’s wing. “Mommy! This is the same place! You said we were going to the grown-up berths!”

“I said we weren’t going to use the berths we usually use. And we won’t. Just hold on a second.”

In fact they turned left to walk deeper into the building, past berths of graded sizes to a closed door with some kind of label at the other end of the long room from the window that looked out onto the parking lot and the tree-lined street beyond it. His mother pushed open the door and on the other side was a small room with only two berths. They looked new.The plastic was much whiter than in his usual berths. They shone like when his dad waxed the car. “You get in that one, and then I’ll get in that one,” his mom said. She helped him in and he lay down in the berth. He was careful getting in. The lid had a sharply defined edge that almost gleamed, it wasn’t worn smooth like his usual beths. He didn’t want to get something like a paper cut on it. He had gotten a paper cut before. It hurt.

He felt the mental click he always felt as the conenctions engaged – but instead of the sensation of plunging into a running river that had always immediately followed that click, he felt blank, as if he were hanging in the middle of the air. There was a mechanical feeling of anticipation, like a humming that he could not hear. Then there was another click, and suddenly he was in that river. The river, however, was different. Before, the river always seemed to be taking something from him. Thoughts and images streamed away from him like white paint in a strong current. He never felt that he was left thirsty, though, or that he would lose these images that were being summoned out. They were not the kind of resource that is depleted by use.

This time images poured into him. He felt the current now pushing against him – gently at first so he was floating then gliding down a river as the current grew stronger. Then rushing. Finally it was as if he had been slammed to the bottom of a waterfall and he was being overwhelmed by the force crashing into him. He could hardly take a breath. And what was it? What was this force? It was love.

He was getting lots of images, and sounds, and sensations. And they were all fired with emotion. And they all featured his family. Some featured his parents without him – at home, or in a doctor’s office. But after those at the beginning, in almost all of them both he and his parents appeared together. Sometimes he saw one of his parents alone, but if it was his father at work then his picture was on the desk. If it was his mother on the street then she was thinking of him. Every scene was filled with their feeelings of love toward him. This love permeated the whole experience; it was the core of the force hitting him and pouring into him. It was what was overwhelming him.