Have you ever noticed the smell of blacktop in the midday sun? The way it rises with the heat, mixes with the smell of road kill, diesel, and burned rubber on the side of the highway. I notice it now; I try to notice everything, all that I can. I’ve had my memories taken once, replaced by the suggestions made by others, so now I keep them, every part of them myself, trying to get every sensation to register. After all, what else do I have to do, when no one else even acknowledges my existence?
I wandered forward, my jaw hanging open and my eyes staring sightlessly forward. My feet pounded against the concrete, thick and tough like old leather as the hot blacktop burned the bottoms without end. I was no doubt a sorry sight, my feet too numb to feel the heat from below, and my back too scorched to notice the sun beating down on my from above.
It’d been two days since I’d been seen by another human being. Dogs still barked at me, but they couldn’t offer me answers, or directions, or help. I hit my knees on the pavement and dipped my hand into a puddle for a drink, slopping a few drops of water into my mouth before I’d stirred up the dust into the fluid and turned it to mud. I looked up at the sun, and wondered how long it would be until I reclaimed some measure of my humanity. I wondered if that was even the goal anymore, or if I should just resign myself to slowly fading from memory.
As the sun burned the dust around me, I thought back on the days before the problems. The days before the invention of the camera famousa, when my fiancé Kristine had been full bodied and kind and everything I wanted her to be. I remembered holding her a few weeks before our marriage when she first heard about the newest photo hardware.
The news had said it was a revolutionary breakthrough in visual technology, a camera that would capture not only the person’s outward appearance, but could also capture everything beneath the surface, every muscle, every tendon, every blood cell in its position. The film was said to be multilayered, and if viewed through the proper equipment it would show levels progressively deeper into the image, shedding layer after layer. It was declared to be the ultimate in medical and recording tools. After all, with it you could take your wedding pictures to the doctor and receive a complete medical record of the event, if you were sick a simple photo could be delivered to the doctor for examination, and an hour later a cell phone message could deliver prognosis, treatment, and suggested behavior to encourage recovery.
In short, the Camera Famousa was the greatest advancement in medical analysis, and personal visual recording in all of history to this point. It was perhaps also the worst curse to the human condition. They banned its private use after six years, but the damage had been done, countless photos had been taken and shared using the technology that would develop around the Famousa, and it had made its impact on us, on the way we thought and felt and even how we viewed the world around us. There were thousands of people like me now, still wandering around, all but invisible to the rest of the world, trying to gather up enough remaining evidence of our existence to return to society.
That’s what I was doing now, searching, hunting for the last pictures of myself. My wife was a bit of a camera junkie before the famousa craze, so naturally when the Camera Famousa hit the shelves she was among the first to purchase one. We were also among the first to get the Vic chips implanted.
Famousa film can’t be viewed normally you see, when it first came out you needed special glasses which would allow you to “fade” the outer layers of the picture and see what was underneath. While many people were fine with this, it did cut down on the value of the famousa as a simple family device, so the businessmen running the company found a solution. The Vic chips were tiny, so much so that they were injected into us like a vaccination. We had to keep our eyes closed for three hours after the procedure, but when we opened them we could see fine, and looking at a film plate, was like looking at a high quality photograph, one that you could “fade” just like with the glasses, but instead of using a dial on the side of a pair of glasses, you would think of fading it, your eye would dilate slightly and the chips would read the impulses, interpreting them into an image the brain could understand, or something like that. To be honest, the whole thing baffled me at the time. Kristine knew more about it, and that was ok with me, after all, she was the one who wanted all of this.
I looked up at the bright sun when I thought of her, after all, it was because of her that I was here. As I thought about it I realized, for perhaps the hundredth time that it wasn’t the camera that was to blame for what had happened to me, it was laziness. Shortly after the implants, they started advertising “services” you could get channeled through your Vic chips. We probably should have been suspicious when we didn’t need to upgrade to get them, but we were still a naive bunch back then, and the convenience they offered was too good to pass up. It was a simple offer, never to forget a name again. Every film plate developed was already turned in to a central database so that you could share them easily with friends, through small networks that had picked up the street name of “hives.” The companies offered to make it so that when you looked at someone, the Vic chips would automatically search the database for their face and when it had a match it would provide you with the person’s name automatically, as though you’d known it all along.
People flocked to the idea, and flocked to the hives, it wasn’t long before the individual networks were overstressed to accommodate everyone. We were given no warning when the hives vanished, just a sudden awareness of a suddenly larger library to access when we used our vic chips and much faster search times. The company hive had absorbed the smaller ones, turning all of our little networks into one digital information ziggurat of a database.
It was only a matter of time before someone would hack the system. Jun_Comm904 was the first to get caught. He’d hacked his own vic chip and added a program that would skim through the pictures of any individual he met, compiling a list of traits about them. Some thought it was insidious, others thought he was insane, the rest of us saw his genius and, thankfully, the Famousa Company didn’t press charges. In fact they were intrigued by his idea and a few months later offered a refined and vastly more reliable version as a premium service through our Vic chips. Kristine wanted it, so we got it, and suddenly no one we met was really a complete stranger anymore. New slang sprang up, “meeting on the hive” being the most popular of them, referencing people who would begin talking like old friends, only to realize they’d never actually seen each other before.
It was months after that when problems began springing up. Problems like mine. You see, when you have faces and names and traits and family history fed to you like that, sometimes the line between your own memories and the vic chip feeds begins to fade. The doctors say it has to do with where the vic chip was injected. You wander on for a while wondering to yourself which weddings you’d been to, and which you had seen film plates from. What’s worse is that there are only so many facial features in the world, and only so many ways that they can fit together into a recognizable person, so you can imagine Kristine’s frustration when she found me casually cuddling with a strange woman in the park when we went on vacation. She was married to a man who had my face, or a very near one. The Vic chips fed me a picture of her wedding and there I was next to her as the groom, and the miss-understanding grew from there. The doctors said it was becoming a more common problem than the company would ever admit. People were losing their own identities, and abilities to form their identities, and were instead relying on the Vic chip feeds to tell them who they were in relation to everyone around them, even their families and spouses.
Kristine and I had gone home, discussed the problem with mixed amounts of apprehension and frustration, and decided that the only thing to do was to make more memories together without the camera present, so that we wouldn’t be able to rely on it. That lasted until we walked out the door the next day and were assaulted again with the prevalence of the devices in society. They’d replaced most every other type of camera in society, and that made avoiding them difficult. Deactivating them wasn’t an option at that point either. They were too ingrained in society; not having one active would be like not being able to see or read, or like speaking an ancient and otherwise dead language. A person could theoretically survive in those conditions, but to thrive with them would be nigh on impossible, so we went on with our lives.
The worst part of this condition, however, was the slap back that trying to self treat it in that way causes. As the problem grew, the number of people using our idea of dealing with it grew as well. Suddenly there were thousands of us who’s only information was outdated snapshots and public transit shots, as security camera’s had been replaced with the camera famousa. We became enigmas. Traits were programmed to time out on the personal profiles that get uploaded into the vic chip when you see someone, and so, slowly our profiles got shorter and shorter, until nothing existed but our names.
That was the worst time, when a small portion of the population seemingly didn’t exist to those who still used their chips and let themselves be photographed. I asked Kristine once what my profile said about me. She screwed up her face, trying to sort out the difference between her own memories and the Vic chip memories, then she laughed.
“According to the Vic, you enjoy being in the Monohane file company, and in the therapists office, and that you do little besides that.” she said playfully. I laughed in response, but my question had darker implications I didn’t want to tell her yet. In short, I was forgetting who I was. It may sound odd, but as my own profile faded away I began to forget old talents and hobbies I’d enjoyed. I had first noticed it when I came across a fishing pole in my cabinet. I couldn’t imagine why we had it, until I pulled out an old tackle box with a Polaroid of my high school friends and I out on the docks. That was when I remembered that I’d been an amateur fisherman a few years prior. Not a good one, mind you, but I’d caught a few fish with the boys in my day. I held the pole in my hand and gave it a few experimental swings. I still had the motions, so why had I forgotten that I’d been a fisherman?
That was what scared me initially, was forgetting such simple things about myself. If I couldn’t remember them after they’d faded from the hive, certainly no one else would remember either. Kristine had walked in, drinking a can of Sprite, while I had the pole in hand.
“Where did that come from?” she asked. I looked at her incredulously.
“The closet. I used to fish, remember?” I asked. She thought hard for a moment then nodded.
“Yes, I’d forgotten, but now that I think on it, I do seem to remember a few fishing trips before we got married. But that was some time ago.” She said. I nodded and stood, putting the poles away and turned away.
The next time we were at the doctor’s we reported the discovery. The doctor made a note of it in her notebook and muttered to herself, then confided in us that many couples were discovering these troubles. Shortly afterward we heard on the news that the doctors were beginning to oppose the use of the Hive. Studies were being turned in that the Hive was proving to be highly detrimental to social psychological stability, and that there were a handful of doctors pushing for it to be taken offline. Within weeks the handful turned into hundreds, and then into thousands of medical professionals, the very people whose profession benefited most from the development of the camera famousa. The surgeon general had to step in eventually. As a general order on the part of congress, under advisory and direction of the surgeon general, the hive was taken offline.
That was the moment, October 17th, at 4:18 am, when I ceased to exist. The hive shut down and immediately chaos ensued. People didn’t know who anyone, even their own spouses, were anymore. They had been so reliant on the hive, that without it they didn’t know anything, about themselves or anyone else for that matter. An hour after the event the president made a speech where in she declared that a horrible mistake had been made. The hive would be reactivated, in part, but it would be a much more regulated and limited database. Furthermore, the camera Famousa was officially outlawed outside of the medical field. There had been a number of privacy and sexual harassment cases arising from the easy access to such materials as the camera famousa became more prevalent.
The promises were wonderful in theory, but as any time based promise, it failed. It’s been 12 years since the Hive silence, and if anything the hive knowledge is more prevalent than ever. My chips burned out long ago, I am the enigma, the figure about which nothing is known, and because there is no signal coming from my chips anymore, I am overlooked, taken as a part of the landscape. If I am noticed, I am avoided, shunned, uncivilized. I am the dangerous one about which nothing is known, and who no one wants to be near. I left Kristine when I walked in one day and she didn’t recognize me. It’d taken me twenty minutes and four wedding pictures on the walls to convince her I was her husband. That evening I packed my bags knowing it would only get worse. There’s a theory that if people like me got another injection, and could find enough old filmplates of ourselves we could just walk back into society. I tried it once. The new chips reacted badly with the old ones and couldn’t make a good connection with the old ones, but they’re there. If I activated them I’d give off a signal, if I could find enough plates I could form a profile, re-enter society, even go home and Kristine would know me again.
So I get up from the pavement and stagger forward, my clothing the only luggage I still carry, the only thing I still need really, not that anyone would notice if I didn’t have it, or be any more disturbed by me than they are. I’m walking the road traveling by foot to the various tourists locations I’d visited in the six years the camera famousa was legal for private use. That is my life now, my existence, the result of my attempts to maintain my own thoughts for my own well being.
