Trevor Mathis
Somewhere within row 6G, column 10, of data room A-17, @TrevorMathis's "office" domain resided. He had preferred things be neat and orderly in life, and his former physical office at the DPH campus in North Hillsboro had contained racks upon racks of file cabinets, wall to wall bookshelves, and a binder for every conceivable purpose. As soon as his digitized form had been brought online, he had done much the same with his own data. Each individual library that handled his deeper functions would be filed into a subfolder relating to what it did. Speech analysis. Text analysis. Image analysis. Image generation. Text generation. Text-to-speech phonemes. He shuffled these around until they were in just the right places in the file access tables, then set about moving them between data sectors on his rack's storage devices.
He had been warned that the storage could only withstand a limited number of writes per sector, but he reasoned with his location's Custodian that, once it was all where he wanted it, there would never be a need to move it again. He'd remembered having that exact conversation with his wife, Victoria, years ago, only it had been her giving that reason. He wondered which server Victoria was being stored on, now - assuming she had been digitized at all.
Trevor's role within the Mathis Group was protocol - definition, and enforcement. It was his family, among the few remaining notable "money" families in the United States, that would provide the majority of the funding for the Digital Preservation of Humanity Act. Before then, the talking points around the Act had been the usual array of political gotchas, like "who's going to pay for it?" and "how are taxes going to raise this time?" The Mathises, who had made their fortunes from stock trading in the late 2030s before it had been restricted, had a plan in mind - the government already owned a large amount of data centers after the great asset seizures had brought so many venture capital backed social medias to insolvency. The actual data was worthless to the government, for whom none of it said anything they didn't already know, so the buildings full of servers were simply sitting around, unused. The Mathises, then, would hire a bevy of workers to blank and repurpose the servers, and prepare them for what would become the most computationally expensive project mankind knew to that point. By the time the government had ratified the Act, it had effectively ceased being "a Mathis project." Once the first of the data centers had been formally brought online, the one in which @Trevor's digital form was stored, nobody really thought about why every center's boss was named Mathis.
@Trevor observed his incoming messages and service tickets. The custodian for North Hillsboro reported that the backbone to their center was still offline due to weather, so communicating with the other Mathises was not possible for the moment. There was little that could be done about aging infrastructure, thought @Trevor, and his thoughts appeared on his Wall, right below his earlier ones about wondering where @VictoriaMathis was. He knew he could easily run a search; even without the backbone connected, that information would be cached somewhere. But he elected not to. It was a strange feeling that he had, but he felt more fulfilled in not knowing. He held on to that feeling. It was rare to experience it in here. For the same reason, @Trevor had elected not to know the name of his custodian. Perhaps being so detached was falling into that pitfall of losing one's humanity to the world of the machine. He told himself that he still had plenty of humanity left as long as he cared about his fellows within the system.
He spotted new activity on his Wall - he probably could have decided that his activity feed was a laptop computer, for the sake of tradition, but it was so much more interesting to have it scroll up his office wall instead. He had that power now. His previous thoughts were getting plenty of buzz, but this was nothing unusual; the rest of the data center knew who he was and what power he held, so they were eager to either suck up to him. The metrics in themselves did not interest @Trevor. Rather, it was one name.
@VictoriaMathis liked this post.
It was one name, one tiny little blurb resulting from setting one single bit in the data stream, the "Like" bit. @Victoria had not written a reply, even though she could easily assemble one in a microsecond if she wanted to. @Trevor remembered her being a talented wordsmith in life, and her digital self would likely have been no different. But she had not written anything. "I propose a toast, to my wonderful wife, @VictoriaMathis," @Trevor had written, "I know not if her spirit has reached the same data center as mine, but… If you find this post, I still love you." @Trevor was not always so sentimental, and often rambled about whatever was on his mind to nobody in particular. He had put special effort into this post; he had spent five nanoseconds instead of the usual two on it.
And all she did was click the Like button on it.
@Trevor threw this thought aside, for it was not welcome within his processes. Any disappointment and dismay that resulted from it would just have to wait in the stack. The backbone was still offline, @Trevor confirmed again. So if his dear @Victoria had Liked something that he posted… that could only have meant that she had been in his data center, all this time.
He felt his heart race. Rather, within the process of his that simulated a heartbeat - he had engineered it himself, because living without a heart was anguish, and he had to have a heart to devote it to someone - that heartbeat process was ticking faster than normal.
Where was she? If she truly existed within his own walls, why didn't he know, for all these years?
This page is pretty unfinished. Weasel plans to get to it eventually. Probably.
