“Happy Birthday, my dear Elara, Happy Birthday to you!” Mom sings the song completely off-key, with Dad giving her the tightest hug, her face almost fully engulfed by his arms. Elara is overwhelmed with joy, smiling with her teeth in full view as Mom takes photos, Dad’s booming laughter enveloping the room, the flickering light from the candles on the cake, displaying the number 8 prominently, bathing her in a warm yellow embrace. The living room smells of melting wax and a plethora of aromas from countless sweets, candies, and savoury treats, overwhelming the senses. Across the table, her little brother laughs uncontrollably, watching his sister in full embrace, and throws a napkin paper plane at her. Her mom now rushes in and hugs her, pulling her even tighter. “Make a wish, my love,” her mother whispers. Elara gazes intently into her eyes, feeling her warm breath on her cheek. The rest of the family start clapping, smiling wildly, singing once more. She blows on the candles. The flame flickers, moving rapidly back, and the world suddenly shatters into blue. The scent of food, the warmth of the candles, the light breeze swaying the curtains slowly, and the embraces are gone. It is replaced by the sharp smell of damp soil, rotting moss, and the slight drizzle tapping gently on the body, creating puddles around Elara. Elara gasps, convulses, inhaling the cold, brittle air, snapping from the golden light and the gentle winds in the dining room to the twilight in a mutated, lush green, untamed forest with gargantuan trees surrounding her. Elara is sitting on her knees on overgrown, deep dark green plants and shrubbery. Bioluminescent moss grows thick and voluptuously up the tree trunks, illuminating her surroundings in a subtle green-gold colour. Elara’s crystal-jagged lattice, her biological markings etched into her neck and collarbones, glows a subtle blue. She slumps to her left side on the forest wet floor, raises a hand to her face, feeling the cold, metallic implants fused to her jaw, eyes and head. She hears the clank and grind of her implants, readjusting to her position. The biomechanical umbilical cable, thick as a forest vine, pulsing, synchronised to the rhythm of her markings. It remains securely connected to the back of her head, in her cortex. She slowly gets up and reorients her body to her original kneeling position. She looks around the clearing, and nine others sit in the mud in a perfect, silent semi-circle, their cortices also connected to the umbilical cables. They are all slumped forward, eyes rolling in a quiet trance, drooling as they experience visions. At the centre of the connected cables stands MOTHER, a towering, black monolithic mainframe from the Old World, humming in a low, deep vibration. An ancient server, rusted, overgrown with vines engulfing it, absorbing the light with little to no reflection. In the distance, vehicles hover, parked neatly together in various shapes and sizes, some of the spacecraft still running, their Blue Shardian gravity inversion drives preparing for sub-light flight. “Are you OK?” A rough voice breaks through the dripping monotony of the forest. Elara looks away gently from the mainframe and sees another person standing over a dilapidated, centuries-old terminal, with features and garments similar to hers. It’s Adoman. He looks concerned, a green glow illuminating the lines of his face from the terminal. Pale, angular jawlines define their faces, and they wear enveloping, pitch-black hydrophobic tactical garments with the same dark red insignia on their backs and the sides of their shoulders, tight matte fabrics suited for combat, fitted with magnetic holsters for their energy weapons. Adoman’s cranial implants join to his jaw and down his neck, reflecting the sheen from the monitor, his crystal lattice red, subtle and opaque on his neck and down his right arm. “It was my birthday. I was blowing out the candles.” Elara says with a fragile, raspy voice, giving out a synthetic wheeze from her bionic throat. Tears cut through the grime on her face. “Mom and dad held me so tight. I felt so cherished.” Adoman looks down and puts his hand on his head, slightly shaking with concern. He is managing the countless devotees waiting for their turn to experience Old World memories. He helps an older devotee who has come to his memorial pilgrimage every cycle without fail. He is frail and elderly, with long, frizzy hair down to his hip, wearing a white robe and a waterproof red garment over his head. Adoman seats him in position and connects the cord to his cortex. He jolts immediately, swaying back and forth. Today is a relatively quiet day, with just two hundred people waiting by the side with their tickets in hand. Adoman travels far from his enclave to work on MOTHER. It was discovered a few decades ago by accident, during a drone survey of land owned by a mining company seeking new Shardian crystal deposits. Instead, they found only an overgrown forest in this region, with a mysterious server and no other indications of civilisation. It is just this server and nothing else. A landing party was sent to study the mystery of this mainframe and transport it back to the city. It was immovable. With all the might and power of their tools, it would not budge. It was to be abandoned until one of the research members found a way to connect to it through the terminal and discovered ancient, long-forgotten data about sentient beings from a faraway world. Within a few years, implants were invented to connect the memories directly to the cortex. Imprints of long-lost lives that can be relived from any perspective. Intricately detailed, well-catalogued events of sentient lives, some exciting, some unusual, and some mundane. It became a fascinating study for the scholars of the remote outpost city of Lumiya, with such elaborate records of experiences that were fundamentally obscure compared to their ways of life. Many people from the city came to find out more and eventually made it a regular pilgrimage to worship the lives of others. The word spread through the sector, and many more would arrive to experience it; thus, the city retrofitted its soldiers to manage the influx into this remote region. Adoman, a retired elite assassin of the Obsidian Order, works the terminal. He’s the Overseer. He smuggled Elara in and registered her as a devotee from his enclave so she could experience it and give him company while he works for many months at a time at the pilgrimage zone. Now there are hundreds of desperate devotees from throughout the sector, from ground soldiers to high-ranking dignitaries, who come to experience lives they never knew existed. There are many prospective devotees on the ground shaking their heads back and forth in anticipation, waiting for their turn to plug in. Occasionally, the memories can imprint on the cerebral pathways too rapidly, blurring the perception of reality and distorting their real lives. Adoman realises this in Elara; her withdrawal arrives where she sits, and she immediately removes the heavy cable from her cortex. “They are not real, El,” says Adoman with his hand on her shoulder, showing signs of concern and sorrow. “It’s all just data. Remnants of a world that no longer exists. All dead. Gone.” Adoman lifts Elara as she looks visibly shaken with brutal withdrawal, her eyes darting to and fro. “Why do you like these false imprints so much? And always this one. The same one. Over and over again.” Adoman asks her, looking her directly in the eyes, holding her with both his hands on her shoulders. “BECAUSE… because I got to see a life where I was loved. Not grown in a lab!” Elara replies. Adoman patches and realigns her neural port. “It’s someone else’s memory. Look around you. It’s not perfect. It’s desolate and hard, but it’s still beautiful. It’s real. We are real.” “We are not real. We are artificial. We are designed. We never chose our own purpose.” Responds Elara. “You cannot keep doing this; it will permanently fry your memory conduits.” “Then I will die with something beautiful, instead of being tormented with the visions of what we did for the mission.” “Let’s head back to the enclave. My session has ended for the day. When you get back, run a deep cycle, and remove all of this. You will end up with a cascading bionic rupture. It’s not worth it.” Adoman holds her steady so she does not collapse and heads back together. Later at the devotee enclave, the devotees sit together and share their false experiences as if it’s their own. One shouts proudly that they rose in the ranks of the military, decorated for winning in battle. They don’t know of the enemies they fought, merely that they defeated them. Another whispers about their connection to weird and wonderful creatures that roamed the land. They describe it as 4-legged with deep, long furry hair that protruded along the ridges of their backs, so majestic that people rode them in the wind. They came in so many sizes and shapes. Such freedom and joy. Adoman gets meals for himself and Elara and feeds her. She is not able to eat on her own, still shifting and recovering from the overload of data. She is in pain but speaks of love and belonging. Mom. Dad. The words are sweet nectar, concepts so foreign and ancient they feel like pure magic. In this cosy, comfortable room, she is someone. A real person. She is not a survivor navigating a broken world. She is a daughter. All the devotees are asleep on the floor, aligned and parallel, connected and charging. The enclave is a pure metallic construction that was grown near MOTHER to house the visitors. The ionic shield has been activated to prevent entry during the downtime. Elara is on the floor, on her back, staring at the white, sterile ceiling, fidgety and nervous. Her neural cortex is glitching with false memories imprinted in her storage; she
