Rewire

"Vivian is dancing on a waxed mahogany floor. This memory is not her memory, but she follows the motions anyway. Rock step, triple step, triple step. Her soles bounce on the barren concrete. Her limbs don't match the memory-body's proportions. She's too tall, too clumsy. She executes a spin as if her body stood a foot shorter. She stumbles."

"Her roommate - the one so far along the process she needs reminding why she's here - got a memory of her son's third birthday party. The roommate doesn't have a child. She doesn't know where the boy came from or where he's gone, but she knows she loves him in a deep, crushing, hard-to-breathe way. The leftover edges of Vivian's memory, the original memory, still linger in her head."

Vivian undergoes a procedure that replaces or overlays her original traumatic memory with mismatched, borrowed pasts. The borrowed memories create sensorimotor dissonance: dance steps that do not fit her body and physical awkwardness on unsuitable surfaces. Emotional residue from the erased violent encounter persists as nausea, weight, and uncertainty about intent. A roommate receives an unrelated parental memory and experiences intense, misplaced love. Technological memory rehabilitation functions through curated selection or random shuffle, producing ethical tension around punishment, identity alteration, and the persistence of fragments from erased actions.

Read at Nature