What’s in your algorithm?
A sci-fi short story
No need for the Sirens, there were notifications. Constant blips and bleeps let you know what was coming. It was 2044 and the terms and conditions of life were improved if not perfected. Whatever decision you made considering life -whether it be a small or a big one- it required no convincing, thanks to the algorithm the governmental entity run by, you were given the full support. You even had the option of euthanasia. You no longer had to suffer from a terminal disease and the excruciating pain it caused in order to justify your departure. The wheel of life, that slippery thing, believe it or not, was fully under your command including the moment when you needed to pull up.
Since the time the human nurses were replaced by the AI ones, the demand on assisted dying was soaring. It had been merely about three years and the news portals confidently announced that the number of people who went for it multiplied from ten thousand to twenty-thousand. It was the sole free service provided in hospitals as long as you did not require a religious funeral afterwards –this had to be funded by your own resources.
It was the second year of Esme’s retirement and she was five days into becoming seventy. As she was in a constant bombardment of algorithm with the content of euthanasia, and allured by the sense of humour each reel showcased, it was impossible for her to resist scrolling on and on to see more of them. Her retirement made her feel as though she had all the time in the world. There came one of them, for instance, one man ready to depart was sitting and resting in an armchair. Balloons and flowers all around. A smile partly-lit with sunshine beamed on his face. Dressed in his finest attire, his torso stood confident and daring. He summoned his AI nurse to pour his medicine in a wine glass to raise it in a toast. “Pour the elixir please, here, into my glass,” said the man jokingly, stressing each word to make himself understood. You could see that it was a request the AI nurse was never prepared for so each time the man uttered the same command it had to shut itself down and restart. To Esme, particularly the beeping sound coming out from the AI nurse during the shut-down was hilarious and she watched it again and again, she didn’t know why, but she was laughing out loud.
On the following days, her feed was made of similar stories. Human beings were making their exits with their humorous yet euphuistic last words reciting poems, sharing memories with irony. “To be or not to be,” said one and was gone. “Catch me if you can,” said the other and bit the dust.
As she went on her scrolling “Are you opting for euthanasia?” it asked on a pop-up window one day. It didn’t surprise her. That was exactly what she had been expecting.
She tapped “Yes.”
Next came a form of personal details to fill in. She typed her date and place of birth, including her address, contact numbers, etc. That tedious formality itself took quite a while and when she was finally done, she was taken to another pop-up window full of tiny letters like knots of people stuck in a gateway, mourning, screaming, praying for an escape. She had to adjust her reading lenses with an app she kept handy on her smart phone. She could make it out now, and start skimming. She realised that it was a procedural one in order to talk her out of it. Apparently, being put to sleep was not as fuss-free as it was trumpeted. She was informed that instead of euthanasia she could opt for cleansing her memory. She wasn’t totally clueless about this particular treatment. She’d heard of it but somehow, she had never given it a thought. Could it be better for her? Life itself was a long journey, and as a matter of fact, she had many lives, loads of befores and afters, and she knew exactly which one was heavy with misery.
The AI asked her if she needed to switch into another language. “Recent researches have proven that most applicants find it more convenient to convey their thoughts and feelings in their mother tongue,” it wrote in italics. It might be true, she said to herself but opted out of it. She could feel a wave of nausea approaching to engulf her. She took the scarf off her neck and stood up to get the air purifier plugged in. When she was back reading, she was asked to put on her ear pods. The application required her to type down a summary of a memory so that it could scan and detect her brain to let the system have access to specific points at her hippocampus, amygdala and neocortex. She was also warned that once her feeding was over it was necessary to tap “agree to proceed” on her screen, otherwise the whole process of memory cleansing would have had to be resumed.
Within a few kilometres of their shelter in a refugee camp in Rafah, they could hear it, the carpet-bombing hailing down from the sky. She was with her teenage daughter Shayda, sharing a tent with another family of four –Ahmed and Fatma and their four-year-old twins, who they met on the way fleeing from Gaza. Her husband had been killed on duty during a surgery in Al-Shifa Hospital there, one of the first hospitals Israel brutally bombed killing both incubated newborns and their mothers. She could not tell this to her daughter Shayda because she knew that she would have never left her father behind. The only way to survive was to run away so she told her that her father was waiting for them to reunite in Rafah, from there they’d cross the border as a family.
On their first days in Rafah, the twins seemed to be alright, almost happy to be on a plain of sand, in the middle of a desert. Probably it reminded them of the playground they used to play back home. They were cheering, and somersaulting and drawing imaginary homes in the sand, large ones filled with friends, teachers, surrounded with schools, groceries and candy shops. And Shayda was watching them. It didn’t last long. They got wise to the fact that desert winds and cold nights pinched their skin. They also familiarized themselves with the fact that the camp was running out of food, each day what they could find to eat was getting scarce. One day, all they gleaned from the local trucks was a few pieces of lavash and a litre of water. The twins wouldn’t stop crying. And Shayda was watching them. They were starving, they hadn’t been eating much for days. And all the others were trying. Trying to find something to eat, trying to find a way to live in this goddamn life. Until they didn’t.
“You won’t get it!” yelled Esme, caughing. She tossed the smartphone across the room. She was mad. Tapping harshly, she let the purifier rip. She could barely breathe now.
“Once and for all,” she said, “my husband’s body was not a memory. It was blood. You could touch it.”
The AI started beeping.
“The twin’s starving was not a memory. You could hear it.”
“Blip.”
“The carpet bombing was not a memory. You could see it. In terror. None of these was mine. I have nothing to cleanse. No. No. No. None of these could be deleted.”
“Blip and bleep.”
“Damn! They belong here, to the earth, to the sky, and to the water. To this thing you call civilization! To be retold. ”
“Beeeeep.”
“Now, tell your motherboard to process it. Remembrance. There is no hope without remembrance.”
There it appeared again. Blinking on the screen. “Are you opting for euthanasia?”