“Apple’s augmented device records your memories” from the AppleStories front page, 30 May, 2034. Article by Darius Hofer.
Shortly after Tim Cook’s retirement, Apple’s new CEO is teasing a brand new way for interfacing with human memories using the fMRI feature coming in their augmented reality device this fall. Daisy Huang let it slip during the earnings call to an investor’s question about privacy. The investor asked what steps Apple was taking to prevent videos taken by the permanently recording device, including sexual activities, from becoming public. Huang’s exact words are reprinted below. Tap to hear the recording. Meanwhile, Samsung is still working out a critical bug in their wireless whole home charger, after yet another person was rushed to hospital after standing too close to the coil. A spokesperson reminded people that even if electricity is invisible, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Amsterdam is famous for a number of things. The red light district, which was eventually shut down in the early part of the century, was a massive tourist attraction that celebrated the sex trade. There are coffee shops where you can acquire marijuana-based products, and cafés where you can acquire coffee-based products. Magic mushrooms are found at smart shops, as long as they are called truffles. The government has turned a blind eye to a lot of activities that would be considered illicit in other nations and city-states. So long as the government gets their cut, almost anything is possible.
Amsterdam, then, seemed a logical place to create the foundation for a new movement, the next step up from social media. Its creator wanted to call the concept LifeTerm and even trademarked it in over 60 countries, but a random person live-streaming their coffee shop visit called them “suicide trees” and the name stuck.
In Canada it was called MAID, or medical assistance in dying. When someone wanted to terminate their life on their own terms, doctors would sign off on their mental capacity, and it was all very formal, very clinical. Once the person’s life was terminated, their loved ones arranged a funeral, memorial or wake, depending on their faith.
LifeTerm wanted to give someone an opportunity to celebrate their life in a public space, using holograms to reproduce their favourite memories, and share them with passers-by as they moved through the streets and canals of the famous Dutch city.
Once you elected to end your life, you were set up with a pod for up to a two-week period, that could produce three-dimensional images and video, and play audio. Spectators were sometimes invited to interact with the person and ask them questions about their lives.
On the final day, doctors would terminate the person’s life in full view of the public, offering a little privacy in the last minutes, and any donations were given to the person’s surviving family.
—
B turned her face away from the bad news, the blood now pulsing audibly in her ears, barely enough to drown out the empty apologies and expected sympathetic noises.
Cancer. It wasn’t a nice word. It wasn’t a nice word growing up and it wasn’t a nice word now. And the type the doctor had described was aggressive, fast, and fatal. B had months left, if that. Time enough to wrap up her affairs and leave T with the baby. Oh God, the baby. Little Z, who would have no memory of a mother living her best life.
She heard herself speaking aloud, and found herself talking to the doctor. “I want to do it. The thing I saw on the news. MAID. I want to end my life on my terms.”
T’s hand, which had been gently holding hers, now squeezed. B looked over at her best friend on the planet and saw tears like T had never wept before, and a questioning look that begged her to change her mind, to fight this wicked disease.
—
That night, at home in their comfortable two-bed apartment, Z was finally asleep after taking longer than usual to settle down, B sat next to T and cried quietly. T stared out of the dark window into the night sky, thinking of their first date.
—
“Hi, I’m T.”
“You’re late.”
“Yeah, sorry about that, I couldn’t find parking. I texted you though. Did you get it?”
“Yeah, I got it. I’m only messing with you. The last person I tried dating didn’t show up so I thought I was cursed. But you’re here now and that’s all that matters. I’m B.”
And they spoke for hours, T talking about the theatre and B talking about medical school, and neither of them realizing that this was going to be over in 23 months.
—
“T, come in here.”
“What is it, B? Is everything ok?” And then T saw the pee stick and suddenly two would be three.
“My mother is never going to believe this. She said we’d never conceive with my radiation therapy. I’m so happy for you, B. I’m happy for us. I want to call the baby something starting with Z.”
“I love you, T.”
“I love you, B. I love you for always.”
—
“I can’t believe you don’t fit in this dress. Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”
“Mom, stop. I’m sure I’m just bloated. Anyway, T has been feeding me all the recipes from that book we picked up in Amsterdam.” Then under her breath. “We even smuggled out some coffee beans.”
B’s mother was aghast. “That stuff will kill you! If you were pregnant, it could harm the baby. Caffeine is so bad for you, hon.”
“Mom, I’m fine. Besides, they used to drink coffee every day in the old days. They had coffee shops. I was reading that you could drink up to three cups a day!”
“B, stop that kind of talk. It’s not good to talk about those days. We have moved on.”
“Mom, I’m pregnant.”
G carried on adjusting the waist of the dress, as if she hadn’t heard.
“Mom? I said I’m pregnant. Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.” G’s voice was soft, almost inaudible. “I thought you said T couldn’t have kids because of the radiation therapy.”
“The doctors told us there was a slim chance it was still possible. I’m going to be a mother and this is going to be the shortest pregnancy in our family history because I’m already three months along.”
G looked at her daughter, her only child, who admitted to illicit coffee mischief and getting pregnant by T who was not… “Are you sure it’s T’s baby?”
“Mom, seriously? You can’t let that one go, can you? I fooled around with J once during the break, but the timing doesn’t work out. Besides, J doesn’t have a penis.”
“Young lady, there’s no need for that kind of talk.”
B laughed so hard she threw back her head, her mother nonplussed.
—
The radiation therapy had been from a tumour years before. T had it surgically removed aged 17, but it came back again, and surgery wasn’t the recommended method anymore, so they elected to use the radiation knife to kill it. The problem was the blast that caused the tumour to stop growing, passed right through the all-important baby-making equipment. So this pregnancy was considered a miracle.
No one said anything for the first trimester, but they had to bring the marriage date up a few months. There were tests and more tests to make sure that radiation hadn’t caused defects, but baby Z was perfect, and right on time. B got the sunroof option, because while Z was the perfect size, the head was a little too big for B’s birth canal.
Z was perfect, and yet B started feeling down almost immediately. And almost immediately, postpartum depression was ruled out. There was something wrong with her, and B went to see the doctor. And now she was dying of an aggressive thing that was eating her from the inside.
T couldn’t understand why B didn’t want to fight. This was a cancer survivor home. Twice! But B was adamant. And in fairness, it was a mean and nasty form of the illness, so B started recording her memories. The old ones were fuzzy, so she had a lot of calls with family to help bring them into an audible shape.
Memories are extremely subjective, but the device could figure out based on advanced machine learning algorithms and a few creative embellishments what happened. More recent memories, especially those recorded externally by the wearer’s device, were saved in 8K quality with Dolby surround sound. If two or more wearers were paired together, it was a consensual party. Who needed a writers guild now? The Netflix OnlyFans merger was a predictable step, and they were making a play for Disney.
—
“I want to do it with LifeTerm”, B had said early on. She wanted to see Amsterdam one last time. LifeTerm was headquartered there, and the suicide tourism industry was starting to take off. The trees were hard to come by, booked months in advance, and the government was making a killing on the tourist trade.
People camped out at Dam square to see the AI-generated flicker of film quality memories, because suicide trees weren’t streamed or recorded. The appeal was knowing that these people who had elected to die, who shared their memories, were doing so with the implicit trust that it was a one-off live event. It was a public square where you literally had your final say, in a safe space.
—
The trees themselves were so named because of the general shape of the older models. The new ones were more pod-like: a box with flat edges and rounded corners, glass on three sides, with a solid white roof, held the LifeTerm patient, who would be able to sit, lie, or stand as people came to talk to them, so the patient could share their most precious memories. At the back of the pod was a white wall which held up the roof. Along the edges of the back wall and the roof were glass fibre that carried the images to each wall.
Squinting your eyes, you might see just the narrow back wall and the roof, the lighting from the optical fibre forming the shape of a postmodern tree. That’s how they used to look: with the wires running across the top like branches, holding the clear displays for hologram projection, they could be the fake plastic trees from the song.
The memory display itself emanated from the sides of the pod, in the glass itself. If the patient needed some privacy, the pod could seal and the glass could become opaque. Meals, ablutions, and intimate moments with loved ones could be performed privately or in the open. This was Amsterdam, after all. Besides, many of the memories broadcast from the pod were intimate in nature.
A pod was available to rent for two weeks maximum. The average period was three days. Once you reached the end of your rental period, the medical personnel would come into the booth, seal the sides, and engage the privacy screen. They might be called suicide trees, but the last moments of human life should have some dignity.
B was in a lot of pain as T helped her off the tram. Z was back home with B’s mother, who had refused to be a part of this. She had agreed to organize the funeral and burial, but anything before that was against her religion.
Booth number 89 was open, and ready for B to take occupancy for the planned 6 hours. With the cancer so far along, it was a matter of weeks now, if not days, and B was ready. T helped her into an overly sterile white plastic seat, wondering whether this spectacle was worth it, and sealed the walls. A white shimmer transformed it into a private pod for their second last conversation.
“Sure you want to do this?”
“T, I’m sure. Z will have access to my memories when I’m gone, and I’ve selected the ones I want to let these people see. I am ready. I want you to stay.” Stay and watch, she wanted to finish, but couldn’t.
T had been arguing over this particular point for over two months. “I don’t want to watch you die. I’ve been watching you get worse and I don’t think I want to be here when you— when they—”
The tears came. B squeezed T’s hand. “I know how much this hurts. But my love, we had a lovely day today. We made some more beautiful memories that will be added to our shared album. This is what I want, to let people see me at my best, before I get to a point where no one wants to see me at all, including you.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Come on. You know what people are like. I don’t want to be gross, and I don’t want you to remember me that way. You are going to raise Z right, because I know how much you care about doing the right thing. Now help me plug in this thumb drive.”
T reached over to the touch screen inside the booth, and chose “PLAYBACK”. There was a prompt to log into iCloud or use an external drive. While Apple strongly didn’t approve of this use of their technology, they couldn’t stop consenting users from signing into an iCloud account to access their content, now could they?
B slowly handed over the drive to T, her hand lingering briefly before putting it down again.
“I get to share thousands of my best memories with those people outside, and the reason I have thousands is standing here with me. Now, give me a kiss, and go get yourself a comfortable seat. I think you’ll like what I have planned.”
—
It was getting dark in Dam square, but the city lit up as it always does, and the 120 suicide trees were telling tens of thousands of stories to the hundreds of people there to pay tribute to their occupants. B and T looked at each other as the final hour approached, both barely able to see each other clearly through the tears, mostly of happiness.
At 11pm, a tiny orange light flicked on and three doctors made their way to pod 89. T stood up, but B shook her head almost imperceptibly. T sat.
When it was done and the booth was empty, T was standing at the information desk, signing the papers for B’s remains. T looked over at the booth that was empty, and saw a vestigial image on one side, a freeze frame from a software glitch. T recognized that it must have been from their wedding, her mother helping her with the dress, and B looked like she was laughing her head off.