Memory Clouds (The Circuit Book 1) Read online

  Memory Clouds

  TONY MOYLE

  Books by Tony Moyle

  ‘The Circuit’ Series

  MEMORY CLOUDS

  MEMORY HUNTERS

  (Pre-Order now – Release Date Nov 2020)

  ‘Ally Oldfield’ Series

  THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH

  LAST OF THE MOUNTAIN MEN

  ‘How to Survive the Afterlife’ Series

  THE LIMPET SYNDROME

  SOUL CATCHERS

  DEAD ENDS

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  www.tonymoyle.com/contact

  Copyright © 2020 by Tony Moyle

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First published: July 2020

  ISBN

  Limbo Publishing, a brand of In-Sell Ltd

  www.tonymoyle.com

  Cover design by Damonza

  In memory of…

  Brian ‘Sleepy’ Nelson

  “I heard the storm from far away

  The days grew dark I heard them say

  The lightning flashed, screamed for blood,

  Came the thunder, came the flood.”

  From the song ‘I Saw the Storm’ – Brian Nelson

  It’s a state of mind.

  - Chapter 1 -

  Ascension Eve

  Almost everyone in the world received the letter. The only one you’d ever see, and it always arrived on Ascension Eve, the occasion of your eighteenth birthday. Over the last three decades those in the West who’d already passed the milestone knew its contents only too well. If you were younger, then you’d spent years anticipating its delivery and were in no doubt of its significance on the next chapter of your life.

  The rest of your life.

  The letter wouldn’t be dropped on your doorstep. It wasn’t left carefully under your porch, sheltered from the somewhat erratic weather patterns only too common in the middle of the twenty-first century. Neither was it posted through your letter box, a device long since removed from the collective memories of door designers. Without fail, and always promptly at nine o’clock in the morning, it would arrive in the hanging basket of an automated delivery drone, which would hover impatiently outside your door until you accepted it. Rumours persisted that if you left it waiting too long the drones were fully equipped and instructed to blow your home’s front door off.

  No one risked it, not in the age of the Circuit.

  In the West, where he lived, every letter looked the same. It was identical irrespective of which country, city or street you lived in. Was it the same for the people of the East? Few on this side of the divide really knew for sure. No regular citizen had travelled that way in decades. The ‘Proclamation of Distrust’ made sure no one wanted to. Here in his half of the world there was no such doubt over the momentous occasion of your own Ascension Eve.

  Even those who hadn’t received their letter yet certainly knew what it looked like. It had a distinctive envelope, crisp white paper with black and gold parallelograms along the edge. There was no address listed on the front, just the recipient’s name, on this occasion one Jake Montana. In the top right corner, where the older generation would recall a thing called a stamp once lived, a familiar embossed emblem shouted for attention.

  The Circuit.

  Although its branding was predominantly gold it possessed a reflective quality that tricked the eye into believing there was more to it. The logo had an elaborate modern font which was both iconic and unavoidable. It was emblazoned everywhere these days. Plastered on the sides of public transport vehicles, liberally splashed within the frequent broadcasts from political parties of all ideologies, laser-etched on the side of fruit and vegetables in a way that meant they were still safe to eat, projected on the side of every tall building in the city and, most importantly, inside your own mind.

  No one needed the branding to know who the letter came from. Apart from their own, the Circuit abolished this type of correspondence years ago. It wasn’t the only method of communication that had disappeared. Email, the internet, mobile phone networks and video conferencing had all been consigned, like the humble homing pigeon before them, to the historical dustbin, only to be worshipped in museums. Not that there were any of those left anymore either. Initially no one bemoaned the loss of emails or text messages. When you had access to the Memory Cloud they were as redundant as writing letters. The Memory Cloud facilitated the collection, delivery and receipt of every thought, message, emotion or memory to anyone, anywhere in the West of Earth and you didn’t need to lift a finger. That’s how the vast majority of people communicated with each other in the year twenty fifty-four and it was only possible because of the Circuit.

  Over the last thirty years every aspect of modern life had been affected by their presence. Simple acts, like how people entered into a contract, had changed immeasurably. You could pay for goods and services, enter agreements and sign your life away with a single simple thought, and once you’d done so there was no going back. Thinking was legally binding, and nobody got away with arguing they’d been a little bit drunk at the time, so it didn’t really count. Not these days. Arguing was pointless and incredibly dangerous. In the early years of the Memory Cloud swathes of people mistakenly purchased expensive sports cars they couldn’t afford, offered proposals of marriage to perfect strangers, and falsely volunteered for excruciating plasma grafts all because they were unable to control their own enhanced minds. Their ineptitude prompted the original system developers to reconfigure the rules.

  Rules that were designed to protect and govern the actions of the collective and the individual.

  Rules that were presented to you on Ascension Eve.

  The Circuit’s letter contained your future life rules. The process wasn’t random. It was based on a complete assessment of the candidate’s past memories and emotions, collected and stored permanently in their Memory Cloud throughout their developmental years. The rules strictly enforced your future path, selected for you from your own innermost desires. Every letter contained the same basic information each time, yet the details were unique to the person it was addressed to.

  Today Jake would learn his fate.

  Ascension Eve was quite simply the biggest moment of your life and no amount of reassurance prepared you for it. It was a rite of passage that more than ninety-nine percent of humans had to navigate and, in the eyes of the authorities, it marked your transition from childhood to adulthood. If you were a Circuit subscriber there was no alternative and no appeal, if you didn’t like the outcome you only had yourself to blame. After all, the decisions were generated from your own cloud.

  People trusted the Circuit to interpret their desires correctly, but that didn’t quell the anxiety of the moment. There were so many unknowns that you couldn’t predict until you saw it in black and gold. The rules assigned you a life partner, a job within the system, the country where you’d spend the rest of your life and the role you’d play within society. It even determined how you’d spend your free time, the small amount that you were allowed at least. After all of these choices there was still one revelation that raised your pulse rate the most. The letter stated, rather than predicted, how important you were in the eyes of the Circuit.

  Your importance factor.

  In the middle of the twenty-first century this rating mattered far more than your position in any class system or demographic. After your eighteenth birthday it didn’t matter where you were born, who your parents were, what colour your skin was or how affluent
you were. In future your standing in the system was tied to one of five ascending levels of importance. From the minority who occupied the top level of vital, through essential, and then necessary. The final two levels were the ones nobody wanted to see written on the page. Trivial and the fifth level, superfluous. Once you were appointed to a level you were stuck there indefinitely, and people associated themselves with their importance factor as much as they did their own name. They’d include it, often spontaneously, when introducing themselves for the first time. This was particularly true if you occupied the top levels.

  “Hi, Peter Harris, essential, and you are?”

  “Brian.”

  “Yes, but what’s your importance factor?”

  “Um…”

  Allocation to one of the bottom levels was an instant passport to social isolation from those above. No one wanted to be seen fraternising with a superfluous. Where was the value in it for someone of a higher rank? What would be gained and, more importantly, how would it make you look to others if you did? The Circuit had already judged you, so why wouldn’t everyone else?

  According to Jake’s Circology teacher, not even the importance factor was random. The permanent and immovable prognosis of your relevance to others was also down to the individual. You’d made the choices for yourself, even if you weren’t completely aware of it. The selection was reached by studying your deepest fears, personality type, intelligence, creativity, ambition and achievements since birth. All easily accessed by the Circuit by mining your Memory Cloud. To ensure balance, your profile would be benchmarked against the vast wealth of data generated by others. The system had been designed on the basis of fairness and equality, but there had to be limits. Not everyone could be vital and not everyone should be superfluous. Everyone had to compete for their place. The final decision was based on a robust formula from the billions who’d gone before you.

  The Memory Cloud made a decision that you would be too selfish to make. A choice that combined your potential and the necessity of the West.

  Since building the Memory Cloud, the Circuit had been responsible for collecting, analysing and deciphering every memory since subscribers were born. They knew more about people’s lives than they did. They knew what was good for each individual, and everyone else who’d subscribed to their world. The Memory Cloud was a masterpiece, a brilliant piece of innovation created by an influential global software conglomerate to solve one of modern life’s biggest problems.

  Capacity.

  Since the turn of the millennium humans had exceeded their natural age limits and their brains had been exposed to an ever-increasing volume of data. Yet physical capacity for data evolved slower than their desire to consume it. The Memory Cloud solved the problem. Rather than wait for physiological development to catch up, technology enabled subscribers to upload their thoughts, knowledge, memories and emotions to a secure cloud-based application free of charge. In turn, humans liberated large portions of their brainpower, safe in the knowledge that if they needed to retrieve the past a backup file could be accessed at any time and in any place. Memories were never forgotten, and knowledge would never be lost because they would always be there. Long after your body failed you.

  But the Memory Cloud was more than a storage facility.

  The Circuit presided over a priceless database of human opinion that it quickly used to reshape the world. If you held the collective thoughts of seven billion people, then you understood exactly what they wanted. In turn, if you knew their innermost frailties and fears you could use it to help them achieve their goals by making their decisions for them. Thinking on behalf of subscribers was one of the additional benefits of membership. A function that began as an optional extra gradually, and almost unnoticeably, became mandatory.

  Procrastination is a very human instinct. Rarely do people have a clear picture of what path to take, influenced as we are by the media, our peers and our own assessment of logical information and illogical feelings. Often emotions and facts clash, confusing us to make a biased decision that actually damages our physical, mental, financial or emotional well-being. That’s where the Circuit steps in. It modelled the various options from the data available and made a decision that was in your best interest. The choice would be validated against millions of other people who’d been in a similar situation. After the event the outcome would be thoroughly analysed for its relative success and the data submitted to the control group to constantly improve the accuracy of the system.

  Its impact swept through every aspect of society like wildfire spreads through dry grass. In the early days, even the political elites contracted the Circuit to help them. Here was a tool that could identify policy decisions that appealed to a majority of voters. It didn’t take long before the Circuit was more instrumental in people’s lives than the politicians themselves. By the twenty-forties governments were no more than proxy management teams for a new global power and voting became just another decision that was taken on people’s behalf. If the masses desired change then there was no dispute. The Circuit’s influence was unavoidable, and in time uploading to the Memory Cloud became law. The punishment for non-subscribers or rule-breakers was severe. But even then, the brave new world didn’t appeal to everyone and when freedoms are suppressed there will always be outliers.

  A minority refused to comply with authorities. There was no single reason for their defiance. Across a spectrum of motives that unified their position, some disagreed ethically, frightened that their data would be misused. Some refused, or were physically unable, to wear the technology that enabled access to the cloud. Some simply had no desire to utilise the benefits of membership. These non-conformers were colloquially referred to as speccies and most were forced into hiding to remain unmarked and untracked. But it didn’t end there. Pursuing a policy of universal coverage, the Circuit recruited teams called ‘Archivists’ to patrol, locate and convert them, although not even their vast knowledge knew how many speccies existed in the world.

  None of them would ever receive a letter.

  For everyone else approaching their eighteenth birthday its arrival meant two things.

  Firstly, you no longer had control over your future aspirations. Your only hope rested on the Circuit making a fair assessment of your own desires and accurately choosing a life you wanted. For the vast majority of people this turned out to be the case. An analysis of satisfaction on the subject, measured through the memories stored in the cloud and having a one hundred percent response rate, gave an average score of six-point-nine-nine ‘light bulbs’ out of seven. No one seemed overly concerned with the zero-point-zero-one who were less than satisfied. That’s the problem with statistics. People focus on the majority and ignore the minority. Every year millions of letters were sent out and the statistically small fraction of people given lives they hated equated to tens of thousands. Not quite so insignificant.

  It didn’t bother the Circuit. The figures were used to prove the system worked and to subdue potential disquiet. Every day a stream of propaganda was drip-fed into memory feeds and delivered to people’s subconscious whilst they slept. Sleep was prime time in the cloud. Advertisers paid aggressive sums to promote products at a time when the masses weren’t able to switch them off. A five-second night slot to a defined target group sold for tens of millions of credits.

  The second realisation that accompanied the arrival of your letter was the knowledge that departure for your new life, if you were male, happened one day later.

  Ascension Day.

  But you wouldn’t be leaving alone.

  Every eighteen-year-old was gifted two guides.

  They weren’t just responsible for escorting you to your new life, which might just be thousands of miles away, they became temporary caseworkers keeping a virtual eye on you while you integrated into your new lifestyle and surroundings. For most users they were helpful, a value-added feature of membership. For a minority they felt like a sinister extension to the constant surveillance ov
er their lives. It was one final surprise on Ascension Eve.

  Jake Montana was about to find out what it was like. His letter was due this morning. Its arrival would be disappointing even if it wasn’t a surprise. He’d been receiving regular alerts through his cranial implant for a month. Each internal ‘ping’ sent a shiver through his body like the harbinger of doom.

  Jake loved life how it was. He liked living with his parents, Kyle and Deborah Montana. He liked his younger sister, Tyra, at least when she wasn’t goading him about his impending misery. He liked his sleepy little New Hampshire town nestled on the coast and near his beach. He liked his local hovercraft softball team, the ‘Dream Centre’ down the road where you could plug yourself into the very latest in virtual technology, and all the natural delights of the American East Coast.

  Most of all, though, he loved Christie Tucci, his childhood sweetheart.

  Whatever his destiny was, Christie wouldn’t be part of it. She couldn’t be. It was a few months before she reached her own Ascension Eve, which meant her destiny had yet to be determined. How could his letter include her, if Christie hadn’t received the news herself yet? That wasn’t how the Circuit worked. The process started during the ‘Great Segregation’ of the twenty-twenties, when protectionism forced people to exist in small circles of society. Back then it was impossible to know who your best match was across seven billion people because everyone lived in enclosed sects. Not so now.

  Now there were no limits.

  They were doing Jake a favour.

  Based on their profiling of him, somewhere out there was a more suitable match than Christie. The same was true for her, and every other eighteen-year-old. But there was more to it than matching someone to your own preference. The survival of the human race relied on couples who’d produce genetically superior and resilient offspring, less susceptible to modern disease and capable of surviving on an increasingly inhospitable planet.