Deprecation by Spencer Merrell

I held my mother’s hand as I stood over her grave. Her fingers drifted against mine, half-intangible in neon; the admins hadn’t synced her Sensiform matrices in over a year. Other pale forms wandered nearby, flitting between the graves; other, more solid figures, like me, stood near them, regretting.

She gave my hand a squeeze. “I am so glad,” she said, her voice locked into one of the twelve presets we could afford at the time. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” I said, not daring to look at her.

Not her. A mere fragment.

Instead, I looked up at the winking lattice of skywork diodes that passed for stars in this iteration of the Infinitude. They had looked so good sixty years ago when she’d first arrived.

“Johnny,” she said, “do you remember-ber–”

She flickered, then winked out, leaving me once more in the dark of the repository. I waited. This version was old enough that the ground hummed as the system corrected itself.

After three minutes, her verdant silhouette reappeared at the base of her gravestone. She looked in several directions before recognizing me, rushing to my side, reaching for my hand.

“Johnny!” she said, hugging me. “You came! After so long–”

Then she vanished. Again.

I left before she could come back, ducking into the simulated suburbia we’d once enjoyed together. My sisters and I had uploaded her to keep her from a prolonged death. But now–

A signal flashed across my vision. Visiting hours had ended for the night. I hooked myself up to the interstitials and watched the old repository dissolve around me.

It gave way to a world of virtual light, built atop the bones of forgotten corners, locked closets, censored mortuaries. Would my virtual paradise one day lead me into an eternal darkness? Would I find myself locked into endless, pointless static?

I pulled out my pad. Opened my list of repositories. Hers was draped in red, flagged for data corruption.

Settings. Would I delete access? My finger hovered over the button.

Then–with effort–I backed out.

I would return to her. I would hold her illusory hand again, feeling it, hating it for what it had become. I could not refuse her my company. It was all she had left. All she could ever have.

Somewhere in that old database, she hid in the shadows, waiting for her children to return.