Wish Upon a Cloud by Neille Williams

Wish Upon a Cloud by Neille Williams

Presently, data management supervisor for Nova Enterprises, Demeter Brewster, had over two thousand client portfolios under his control. It was a relatively new position and he was keen to do well, even though his friends and colleagues had clearly been avoiding him since he had taken up the role. Demeter was normally one to seek the advice of those around him – he was neither a risk-taker nor a natural-born leader – but this opportunity had shaken him out of some kind of fugue state, had focused and sharpened his mind against the steely fingers of grief that still wrapped themselves around his mind whenever his thoughts meandered away from his busy work.

Nova Enterprises was a reputable company on the cutting edge of new technologies and, most importantly, they offered three tiers of bio-upload to their customers – Stratus, Nimbus, and the company’s premium offering – Cirrus. In the times before bio-upload, Nova excelled in all systems of cloud-based file management, and its customers numbered in the millions. It wasn’t long before the pressing needs of the many demanded a more efficient way of accessing their treasure-trove of digital keepsakes, photos, stories, threads, links, documents, graphs, records and videos – their life-logs. The solution, it seemed, was so very logical and efficient – instead of streaming all that extensive data back to the person when they required it, the data would remain exactly where it was and the person themselves would be transferred to that location.

Bio-transmogrification had been perfected by the turn of the century, with upload and linking to one’s life-log a hugely popular way to spend time. The cloud was literal, its bank of pulsating data so immense its gravity had begun to influence objects and pull people towards it. It eventually had to be freed from the confines of earth and was now a giant quivering mass above the sphere of the planet, locked in perpetual orbit by the twin forces of earth’s gravity and the momentum of its own launch into space. It was a speckled lake of particles pressed into sequences and binary digits through an elegant coupling of physics and computing. The reduction and bio-morphing of living tissue strands into condensed digitalised matter allowed life to be lived, experienced, remembered, through cloud-based interfaces without traditional physical sensory input. Binary language converted iterations of feelings, expression and memory seamlessly – and the human race seemed to embrace this as a sophisticated leap into the future. That was until the advent of Stratus, Nimbus and Cirrus though, a newer, more streamlined process which erased the glitches of the previous two versions. It had been widely celebrated as the greatest and most ecstatic experience that humankind had ever known. It was like an open vein into which the richest, purist, most glorious cocaine flowed.

Demeter had his head down, translating the complex figures before him into one neat and simple observation – people love this so much, they ‘re staying far longer than expected. It’s not like before where people chose to come and go – the experience is so ecstatic it’s become… addictive. An invitation. Another world that takes the place of the arduous world they know.

He suspected that this had been the reason so many of the people around him were cautiously avoiding him. Firstly, he felt he was a little inexperienced (although not under-qualified!) to take on the promotion – it seemed he had jumped ahead in the queue with no apparent explanation for it. The second reason related to all the projections and theories about this unchartered territory Nova was venturing into (a seamless bio-transmogrification experience?!) – there had been social chatter and more formal academic expositions dealing with the propensity of humans to succumb to desires so powerful they would bind their entire selves to them like slaves. Those in the know made ominous predictions. The digital bio-morphing experience to visit and enjoy one’s own life-log was designed to be beautiful, discomfort-less and ephemeral – a short trip to create memories within memories – an artificial existence wrapped in a cocoon of contentment and pleasurable moments. What could go wrong? Except humanity’s need to go further, higher, deeper, and to experience such ecstasy again and again.

His brother, Eli, had disappeared in the winter of the year before. Earth had been bitterly cold in one hemisphere and blisteringly hot in the other, and many doomsayers and other negative-minded folk were prophesising that the climate had started its irreversible slide into rendering the earth a savage wasteland. Demeter knew his brother had been worried about the precious gardens and flower-beds he tended but had never known him to seek refuge in anything but hard work and perseverance. The two of them had been close, but apparently not close enough for him to know that Eli had invested substantially in a bio-upload program offered through Nova. It wasn’t the more expensive Cirrus or Nimbus, but the basic tier – Stratus. He had never known what had happened to his little brother until he had used his new level of access to randomly enter Eli Brewster into the database at work – and found his file. The tall, gangly little brother he adored so much had uploaded five months ago, and – like many others – had decided not to come back.

Staring at the spreadsheet of data stretched out before him, Demeter read his brother’s name and dataset information again and again, as if it might magically alter itself if he willed it to. His digital presence had first rooted itself in a memory from 8 years ago – a video of a music concert by the adored rock band Go Phish, which Demeter knew his brother had attended and enjoyed tremendously. It was also where he had met his last girlfriend; suddenly Demeter wondered if his brother’s disappearing act was a response to him feeling disconsolate, broken-hearted at their break-up. Surely not! He typed in the name of Eli’s ex-girlfriend, Fontana Montgomery, along with her state ID and date-of-birth (which he could strangely recall), but the computer’s database gave him nothing in return. Of course, Fontana’s not here, mused Demeter bitterly, there’s not a chance that girl could afford any kind of bio-uploading. Demeter continued to scrutinise his brother’s digital track… eventually finding something so incredibly shocking he dropped the sheet in his hands and slunk down into his ergonomic padded chair.

It couldn’t be done…but somehow his non-technically minded brother had done it. Eli Brewster had ghosted himself within the cloud.

Nova Enterprises’ executive committee of ingenious minds, business moguls and lawyers, had installed a variety of checks and fail-safes within each level of their bio-upload programs. The first prohibited digital entities from invading each other’s designated spaces and territories, similar to the anti-virus firewalls and security programs that protected all the old earth-based hard drives from infiltration. Families and close parties could grant each other access, as Demeter and Eli had done for each other’s files, and Nova could intervene if there was a system failure, but all personal life-logs remained impenetrable to other entities. The second allowed digital entities to interact with their cloud-based data but not change it in any way, so that each file remained exactly the same at the start and end of each visit. The third fail-safe was mandated by a statute of rules drafted by lawyers who worked for the governments of each powerful first-world country; together they represented the Global United Peoples of Earth. This third fail-safe prevented digital entities from altering, copying or hiding their own digital forms within the cloud, so that each and every visitor would return to their biological forms unchanged and unharmed. It was this rule that Eli had contravened – but how he had achieved this was a complete mystery to Demeter, and would certainly send the entire corporation of Nova Enterprises into a calamitous state if they found out about it. Demeter was the tech-savvy whizz of their family; Eli knew only the basics of digital navigation. Demeter had theorised about ways one might ghost themselves (purely as an intellectual exercise!) but he was quite sure Eli was not even close to being capable of hacking the cloud’s impenetrable systems. How, in the name of the cloud-gods, had he done it? A fluke? An error? Or something more sinister…?

Leaning back in his chair, Demeter felt the moulded arch push against the small of his back to automatically give him more support. The pressure points were too low for him but it was still rather a pleasant sensation. There was a small hum as the nodes of the chair started vibrating and he could feel the gentle massage unwinding his shoulders and lower back muscles. There was an unassuming knock at the door and Demeter sprung up from his comfortable chair, thrusting the spreadsheet downwards on the desk so that his visitor could not see the contents.

“Morning, Demeter.”

A small man in a sharp suit had entered the room and Demeter forced his mouth into a polite smile.

“Good morning, Mr Carmody. What can I do for you today?”

Demeter understood his new bosses to be appraising his performance regularly but until this day he had not at all felt bothered by it. He glanced nervously at the overturned document, hoping Mr Carmody would not ask exactly what he was working on.

“And what are you working on today, Demeter?”

His boss blinked suddenly and out slipped the monocle that housed the tele-visual linking device that usually rested in his eye socket.

“Oh, ah, just perusing the user statistics from yesterday. Checking the analytics for spikes, trends, that sort of thing.”

Demeter was aware that his voice was several pitches higher than it usually sat. He coughed and cleared his throat.

“And…is there anything unusual with your clients?”

Demeter felt chest relax. His next sentence would not be a lie.

“Nothing unusual at all with my clients.”

Mr Carmody tilted his head towards Demeter and an awkward silence prevailed. His boss finally spoke, his voice punctured with the well-worn effects of propriety and a touch of arrogance.

“Very well, then. Let us know if we can assist you with your good work.

He placed the malfunctioning tele-linking device on the side of the desk and added  “Could you please re-boot this and re-align the framing vectors.”

Mr Carmondy then turned his back to Demeter and let himself out of the room.

In the next hours of his work day, Demeter worked tirelessly to track and analyse his lost brother’s movements within the cloud. Everything he had done was time-stamped to the second within specific dates, and the data was immense. He used a set of calculations to break it down into patterns and critical paths, then sat down with a cup of vita-tea to review the new data. Eli had visited special files containing images of places he had travelled to, songs he loved to listen to, chat-threads of funny conversations with friends, but most of all – (and Demeter stared and stared again, willing it not to be so) – most of all he had spent time with the digital imprints of him, of Demeter, of all the files that he himself had uploaded and could still access through good ol’ traditional wave-file transfer. This is where Eli  had planted himself, this is where he had stayed. With him. Or at least his digital imprints. Eli had viewed and enjoyed Demeter’s files millions of times, repeatedly and simultaneously (you didn’t need to sleep when you were in the cloud!) and Demeter sat there, shocked, aghast, wondering why Eli had chosen to spend time with his brother’s life-log and not his own. It didn’t make any sense.

When it was time to finish, Demeter logged off and shut down his system. He felt confused, tired, distraught at the information he had discovered. He walked home amongst the roaring jumble of speeding micro-jets and turbo vehicles that moved the populous city from one place to another in the blink of an eye, without the traffic jams or accidents of the past. The geometry of the city was designed around the concept of hexagonal packing theory – urban nodes that stacked together efficiently to control and micro-manage resources and people as they moved from site to site. It was a beautiful city, he had to admit, but it was still nothing like the cloud, where every treasured piece of one’s self was archived in a place only a click away, an anesthetic to real life, and even a substitute for some.

The morning rushed in with a bright sunburst, dazzling and impatient. Demeter rolled over in his bed until the ache of his clicking left ankle roused him more fully. He had been taping it more recently and cursed the arthritic joint that was apparently a family legacy. His brother had just started to complain about the same condition before his disappearance, and Demeter wished he had had the chance to pay for a proper medical examination and treatment for his brother now he realised how painful the condition actually was. Curses!  He stood upon it, gingerly at first, until it bore the full weight of him with a creak and a grimace. To the kitchenette he trundled, until the lustrous aroma of coffee from the espresso machine – cleverly programmed to roar into life ten minutes before he awoke – prevailed upon his senses to greet the day with much more enthusiasm.

7.55am… in the blink of an eye, the surreal and strange dream-sequences that planted themselves in his head from the night before shook away, like wisps of smoky air. All around him seemed suddenly peculiar, and the day beckoned with threads of hope, whispers of discovery. Onwards, to work. Up the stairs to his desk. Sit and think, upload, download, record and analyse. And perhaps to solve a mystery which weighed so heavily upon him.

My clients in the cloud. My brother…oh my brother…!

Within an hour, Demeter had reconfigured, into a concise series of histograms and area graphs, everything there was about his brother’s movements within the cloud – before he had ghosted himself. It wasn’t easy to figure out how he had disappeared, but Demeter had a government-stamped qualification in cyber-communications – he could clearly see when it had happened. Three months ago, Eli had stopped at a large file – and then all trace of him had vanished. Inspecting the file, Demeter was aghast to find he was unauthorised to proceed any further. The file, it seemed, had been locked down while being in use. In use! It was highly irregular to lock down a general user’s files (locked down!) and, in the handful of times it had been permitted, it had been implemented externally, from Nova’s earth-bound headquarters. And Demeter was certain this procedure had never been applied while the user was still active within the file. Running his hand through his hair, Demeter slid back into the embrace of his seat, thinking about the monstrous consequence of such an action.  He held his breath, unblinking, suddenly understanding that his brother hadn’t ghosted himself after accessing the file. There was no trace of him after that event because he was still there. Eli Brewster had never left the building. Somebody, (somebody here!), had trapped Eli inside the file – but why? Why?

The next hours of the day twisted and turned, then flipped around like a strange Escher puzzle a person could never find their way out of. Nothing made sense to him anymore and the reasoning of the Nova executives in giving him a fancy new position, far away from the data he was now tasked to manage, felt calculated, ominous. He had been removed from the insidious truth, distracted by a new and shinier mantle with busy work and fussy reports that left questions without answers dangling from jagged cliffs. He was not meant to find this information, he knew, but now it was impossible to stop running after it. Demeter knew he needed to break open the file, needed to know why his brother had been shut down – and he needed to know what terrible plot his Nova Enterprises had orchestrated.

Within a heartbeat, it was home time. He had stared at the huge wall-mounted monitor for hours, it seemed, and was no closer to finding a way into the file. The cup with his vita-tea sat half-drunk upon his desk, and he yearned for a cup of slick strong-brewed coffee, something to kick-start his synapses, to grasp at whisper-thin ideas that might translate into some slender stick of epiphany.

Eli. Just a guy who liked energetic rock music, preferred his eggs over easy, and could spend an entire weekend patiently solving number puzzles or trimming a hydrangea shrub. The little brother he had intermittently wrestled and played with until he grew too tall and gangly to be overpowered, the gentle and kind-hearted guy who would never have willingly entered into a dangerous game of politics and treachery. The only living relative he had left, the brother who would never have left him alone in this world. There were tears in Demeter’s eyes now, heavy tears that slid down his cheeks like furious torrents. He had never let them flow like this before, and now Demeter knew he would not rest until he found a way to unlock the file and allow his brother to come home.

Later, as the milky moonlight cast strange shadows against the walls of his home, and the tick-tick-tick of the metronomic clock drew him into an odd trance, Demeter realised what he had to do. He had to steal the master password, held in strict confidence by the executives at Nova Enterprises. The password could edit, unlock or lock any file within the cloud, and was normally employed to install updates within the cloud infrastructure and to occasionally smooth out any user interface glitches quickly and securely. He had to learn what the master password was, and then – suddenly, ecstatically, – he knew how he could do it.

At his desk the next morning, Demeter waited for the punctual and efficient Mr Carmody to check in on him. He had surrounded himself with a plethora of graphs and busy-looking print-outs but had actually spent most of the morning doing something entirely different.

“Good morning, Demeter.” His well-dressed supervisor flashed him a courteous smile and nodded towards the desk. “Good to see you applying yourself diligently, young man.”

Demeter returned the smile and handed Mr Carmody his tele-linking device.

“Here it is, Sir, fixed to your specifications.” And a few other tweaks, thought Demeter to himself.

“Ah,” replied Mr Carmody graciously, “thankyou indeed.” He popped the monocle back into his eye socket and switched it on. “Perfect.” He turned on his heel with another polite nod and left the room. Demeter felt the breath he had been holding seep out of him like a deflating balloon. The game was afoot!

In silence, Demeter re-booted his computer and logged into the surreptitious feed now available to him via Mr Carmody’s monocle. All he needed was his supervisor’s password – (just one little password!) – and he could unlock the file which held Eli hostage. And why? Half-formed answers furiously swirled in his mind but none made sense to him. Nothing could explain why a gentle flower-loving sudoku enthusiast had been trapped in the cloud by his employers. It was absolute madness.

Just before 1pm, Demeter watched, heart galloping, as his supervisor approached the main terminal on the desk in his executive suite. Quick fingers typed and Demeter watched as the password ‘DEWPOINT’ unlocked the screen and a series of logs and file-feeds rushed into view.

Dewpoint?

Demeter seemed to recall it was the temperature in which air became saturated with water vapour. He remembered that below this dewpoint, water would start to condense on solid surfaces or around solid particles to form clouds.

Clouds! But of course, the password would be something to do with the cloud – the cloud was Nova’s premium offering to the world, everything at Nova revolved around it, serviced it, fed into it. The cloud was the future of humanity, some said; there were even churches who viewed it as God’s endowment upon the world. Perhaps even a rite of passage, perhaps even… salvation. Demeter snorted and a pang of despair hit him like a punch to the gut.

This kind of future? He didn’t want it.

No bio-upload to the cloud, no digital collections and memories carefully maintained as a life-log. Demeter wanted real human interaction. And someone to fix that infernal ankle of his. And, most of all, he wanted to wrap his arms around Eli again and never let him slip away.

The whirr of electronic devices seemed maddeningly loud and the too-low massage nodes on his chair began to press, annoyingly, into the wrong section of his spine. He pushed aside the vita-tea machine and poured himself a strong cup of coffee, steaming and magnificent. Years ago, he used to tow the company line, do what he was told – he used to drink their flavourless vita-tea (it’s the superior beverage for the enlightened few!) and not ask any questions.  Now he was a born-again coffee drinker – and he was about to well and truly shake things up at the establishment.

Demeter bought up the tracks of his brother’s bio-route until the last registered location came into view. He clicked on the file and it flashed insolently that it was locked, until Demeter typed in the password ‘DEWPOINT’ and the file sprang open. It contained a special memento – a folio of photos from their days as energetic young boys with their parents smiling down at them. He remembered uploading the photos to his life-log after his parents had passed away, he and Eli carefully selecting each photograph and sending it away to this special place of safe-keeping. Bio-transmogrification had just been commercialised, but even then, Demeter wasn’t certain it would be an experience he would try until it was perfected. He just needed to know that the photos were there, tucked safely away from this world which would someday cease to exist, and that escape was possible if things became too much to bear down here on earth.

It took a little less than one minute to pour over the file and discover the next wham-bam shocking truth.

Eli wasn’t there.

But…how…what… His tracks had stopped right here, within this file, and there was no exit script or base-code marking his departure. Frowning, Demeter went over the data again. Had Eli ghosted himself, as Demeter’s original impressions had been? In a flash, Demeter realised the executive password would also give him permission to activate all the sub-programs, including ‘SPECTRO’, an application designed to unveil all activity, deleted or shrouded, within a section of the cloud. He sucked in his breath, found the SPECTRO sub-program on his boss’ hard drive, downloaded it to his own computer then ran it through the file he had broken into.

A new pathway appeared, tracing an exit from the file straight back to the master entry/exit portal within the cloud. Aghast, Demeter realised that his brother had returned to his physical form on earth. But then somebody, somebody at Nova had deleted all traces of his exit from the cloud. That same someone had locked down the last file destination and ghosted Eli’s tracks to mask the fact that he had returned. His mind racing, scrambling to understand what had happened, one glaring revelatory thought trumped them all – Eli was here! On earth! But where, in the name of the cloud-gods, was he now? And why hadn’t he made contact with his own brother who he loved?

Contemplating the various reasons,, Demeter sipped his coffee slowly, leaning back in the massage chair as the world rushed by outside, micro-jets soaring past his small window like magnificent winged birds. All around, the hum of machines duetted with the peal of human chatter and discourse, everyone on tangents far removed from his own. Demeter had long felt the strings of loneliness, isolation and grief tug at him, pulling him away from kind-hearted people who might have offered advice and warm solace. But here, right now, he sat alone, wrapped in a mystery of unbearable sadness, the cloak of it so leaden he felt he might suffocate in it if he fell asleep. One more micro-jet arced through the sun-stroked sky and Demeter sprang to life. There was a special facility at the edge of Nova’s expansive headquarters – the commercial portal for all bio-morphers. Demeter left his office to go there immediately.

The bio-transmogrification pods were lined up in the thousands against the wall, for those customers who purchased the Stratus tier of Nova’s bio-morphing package. The higher levels had their pods installed at home for further convenience, and the premium Cirrus offering had a fully customised pod and monitored digital feed flowing back to Nova’s on-call in-house technical team. It was one of the Cirrus customers who had first capitalised on the legal miscalculation by Nova’s legal team – he had over-stayed his welcome by a month and a half after bio-morphing for the twentieth time.  It was duly discovered that there was no legal way to bring him back to earth from the cloud as the first enforceable fail-safe meant that the Nova technical crew could not end a participant’s route externally by entering personal files and executing an exit program to re-route them back to the entrance portal. They were only authorised to intervene if there was a system error – not a human one.

Demeter scanned in and nodded politely to one of the technicians, who was adjusting the bio-feeder mechanisms attached to one of the pods. There was a slow hiss as the gas was transferred via cabling to facilitate the bio-transmogrification process, and Demeter watched through the glass paneling as the participant petrified before his eyes and was spat out through the bio-feeder, using flow cytometry laser analysis and conversion, as a digitalised silver stream suspended in a buffered saline solution. With the flick of a switch, the technician transported him to the cloud, where he would enjoy the digital sandpit of his life-log, a custom-built playground that served him and him alone, and might, in due course, seem like a wonderful place to spend eternity.

At the far end of the wall, Demeter could see the sleek portal housing all the login/logout data for each traveler’s profile. He approached it warily, steadying his hand against the wall and willing himself to breathe comfortably, slowly. No-one stopped him for enquiry, and he was glad. His voice might well have betrayed him, his sweat-drenched brow might also have given the game away. He punched in Eli’s name and state ID and the monitor displayed the number of the pod he had used to access the cloud. Demeter found it, amongst all the rows of immaculate humming little cocoons and placed his hand on the sensor at the top. It beeped that it was in use; in fact, Demeter could clearly see a silhouette through the glass panel. The occupant lay shrouded in a mist of swirling gas and Demeter felt his throat constrict, heart thudding so hard he could feel its staccato riff bounce right up to his skull. Was this Eli? Had something gone horribly wrong in the download function and Eli’s bio-morphed self couldn’t properly revert to its human form?

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a lab-coated technician watching him, frowning. The man suddenly left his position and moved towards Demeter. Willing himself to keep calm, Demeter kept his eyes downward, tracing his fingers over the connective tubing, pretending to scrutinise the outer layer of the pod with a supervisor’s clinical gaze.

“Sir, can I help you?”

The technician offered him a slender smile that seemed watchful, suspicious. He glanced at Demeter’s jacket with its shiny name-badge and pin and added “It’s not often we see you execs down here at the bio-facility.”

Demeter paused, remembering that his new position was quite high in the chain of command.

“Yes, I felt that I needed a more thorough understanding of the bio-morphing procedure for our lower-tier clients and thought I’d start here, at the physical facility.”

He forced himself to smile back. “It seems I’ve been staring at lines of code for far too long – this seems much more interesting!” The technician relaxed his stance and gestured towards the pod before them.

“Well, you picked quite an unusual example here, for sure.”

Demeter felt his pulse quicken, dread trickling all the way down his spine.

“Oh yeah? What’s with this one?”

“Well,” the technician started, rapping his knuckle on the top of the chamber as if the petrified occupant might just open up and invite him to stay for a cup of vita-tea and some chit-chat, “this here is one of those who just refuse to come back. Just prefers it in the cloud, you see, like quite a few of them now. Don’t know what the hell Nova’s gonna do about it, since it doesn’t contravene any of those three golden rules the lawyers like to quack on about.”

“I see,” replied Demeter, carefully. “And… how long’s he been up there now?”

“Hmmm,” the technician punched something into the chamber’s control panel and inspected the data. “About three weeks, it seems. And they’re only supposed to spend one week max up there.”

Three weeks? Demeter knew it couldn’t be Eli. But he had to make sure.

“What’s the name of this fellow?”

The technician punched the keys of the control panel again and replied “Banks. Daniel Banks. Some low-level guy at the synthetics lab over on the other side of town. Recently divorced so I guess up there in his life-log it’s like they never split up. He’s probably walking her down the aisle all over again, holding her hand and talking about having kids.” The technician paused, finally adding, in softer tones “I can understand, I guess, why he’d rather not come down and deal with the harsh reality of it. Must be hard for some.”

Demeter met his gaze gently, and asked “Are… are the families informed? Who down here on earth knows if something’s gone wrong with the client?” He hoped the technician couldn’t hear the quaver in his voice, the trepidation that seemed to underline each and every word he’d said.

“Oh well, Nova’s head honcho, Mr Britt, does the right thing, of course. Lets everyone know what happened so they don’t worry. Says they’re working on a solution to coax them back and assures the family that there’s no risk of physical injury or suffering. They’re just living a better life for a while.” The technician stopped and Demeter swallowed awkwardly.

“Well, thank you so much for the information. I wonder…” – Demeter forced himself to look the helpful technician squarely in the eye – “I wonder if you could look up one of my clients for me? It’d save me a bit of bother having to go back to my office and do it … I’m sure it would only take a minute or two.” Demeter had taken a large amount of risks so far; there was no other way but to push his luck a little bit further.

“Sure. What’s the name?”

The man gestured for Demeter to follow him to the main terminal. He recited his brother’s full details and, with a flurry of fingers, the technician brought up his brother’s user activity log. Demeter tried valiantly to see the screen but the man’s broad shoulders obscured most of the information.

“Well, it seems this client of yours had a pleasant little stay about five months ago. First time up in the cloud and it looks like he qualified for a discount on the Stratus experience since he’s got a relative who works here – or did.”

Demeter stiffened, eyes widening.

“Seems this guy’s mourning a dead brother. Poor sod.”

Dead brother? Demeter’s mind recoiled. I’m not dead! What the hell’s going on here?

“Um, pardon, did you say…?

“Hang on a minute…” The technician whirled around and stared at him. “Are you related to him? You guys sure look a lot alike! And he’s got the same surname as you – Brewster.”

“Look, um…”

The technician’s eyes grew wider and wider. He yelled something into the comms-device strapped to his wrist; in a flash, there were five patrol guards striding stiffly towards them. Panicked, Demeter looked around for a way to retreat.

From behind him, Demeter heard a familiar baritone voice.

“Cancel that. There’s no need for security at this time.”

Demeter spun around, finding himself face to face with his boss, Mr Carmody.

 “Come with me, Demeter. I feel that it’s time to have a forthright chat about what’s happened with your brother.”

Stunned, Demeter stood rooted to the spot, mouth agape, He closed his eyes and when he opened them, he had no sense of how much time had transpired; the technician and patrol guards had disappeared and only the face of Mr Carmody beheld him, patient, strangely compassionate. With a sigh, Demeter stepped forward and followed Mr Carmody out of the facility.

Following his superior into the plush top-floor suite he had only glimpsed once, this morning in fact, through the feed from Mr Carmody’s monocle, Demeter was surprised to see a panel of executives seated around a table, including the big boss, Mr Bianco Britt. They appraised him with something unreadable, and Demeter could not, in any recess of his mind, fathom what they had gathered here to tell him. They offered him a seat at the end of the table and he took it. He had never sat in a chair as magnificently comfortable as this one. It was the nicest thing he had felt all day.

“Mr Brewster,” began Mr Britt hesitantly, and Demeter’s stomach did a series of flip-flops. He had never met the CEO before and it was well known that Bianco Britt did not intervene in the affairs of the ordinary workers unless something had gone catastrophically wrong.

“Young man,” the CEO gestured towards a magnificent bloom of flowers in an ornate vase in the corner of the room, “do you know what type of flowers they are?”

Demeter’s brow furrowed and he studied the flowers. “Well sir,” he said tentatively, “I believe they’re black orchids – La Masdevallia Rolfeana – incredibly rare and native to the old country known as Costa Rica, I believe.”

Mr Britt nodded in affirmation. “Very good, but they are not actually black, are they?”

“No sir,” replied Demeter, “they are a dark shade of garnet red. I am aware of this misnomer.”

“But of course, you are.” There was a pause and Demeter felt every pair of eyes boring into him. What was this about? Surely not flowers…

“Mr Brewster,” continued Mr Britt, and sat a little more upright in his massive chair, “I know that you know this information – my question is … how do you know it?”

“Because…” Demeter faltered. He actually didn’t know how he could identify such a rare flower.

“I’ll tell you why. When Eli Brewster uploaded to the cloud, we discovered something extraordinary. Most people spend time with their own life-logs, within their own files, accessing the special memories and knowledge built up in their own life. But Eli, he did something different. He accessed everything uploaded by his brother, Demeter Brewster, reading and re-reading his data, enjoying videos and photographs, studying the course content from his college degree, living his life again and again through his life-log. All he did was absorb everything that was Demeter Brewster. And when he came back…” Mr Britt paused. “Well, when he came back… he was changed by it… he wasn’t Eli anymore.”

A fountain of confusion had sprung up inside Demeter. He felt himself falling apart, a tsunami of emotions surging over him; he felt like he was drowning.

“There was no Eli anymore. He went to mourn and grieve his brother who had passed away unexpectedly and he … became him. He became Demeter. You are not Demeter Brewster – you are… Eli.”

The air grew silent, still, and the room suddenly seemed claustrophobic. Heavy tears spilled down his face and he brushed them aside so he could stare at his bosses. This was madness – and yet, it made perfect, awful sense. The decrepit ankle, the too-short nodes on his massage chair, the knowledge of Fontana’s state ID number and personal details, and, (holy cloud-gods!), even his new love of coffee. And the dreams – oh, the nightly dreams nesting somewhere between ambient slumber and strange lucidity that punctuated his mind with images of a life that seemed light-years away – of flowers with delicate petals and swirling numbers that arranged themselves into clever patterns on pages. Demeter wept and wept until somebody strode up behind him and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. It was Mr Carmody.

“We knew something was wrong straight away when Eli reported here for work the next day. He insisted on being let into his office to complete his final calculations on the Louviere algorithm – but of course, when Demeter had passed away, we had allocated his position to another employee. I’m sure you remember the day – I met you myself and listened to you expound the intricacies of finishing this essential equation in time for the department audit. It was outstanding to me that you had acquired this knowledge so quickly and comprehensively – all from bio-morphing into the cloud. And only at the Stratus level. I left you with a cup of vita-tea and reported this immediately to my colleagues; we, of course, imagined the possibilities. We gave you a new position in which you have excelled, and kept you away from those who might call your identity into question. We also deleted the last data from your visit to the cloud and locked down the final file you accessed as a precaution. We never imagined you might look up your own name and grieve for yourself. I guess we are all still learning about the complexities this has created.”

Tears welling in his eyes, Demeter stared at his bosses, incredulous.

“What… what will you do with me now?”

He lowered his head, numbness crawling over him like foraging insects. Bianco Britt answered, his voice dispassionate and grim.

 “We cannot let this information be revealed just yet, Demeter. Ah, can we still call you by that name?”

Demeter looked up. He honestly didn’t know what answer to give.

“Well, Demeter, let us proceed using this name for now. The idea of absorbing another person’s knowledge, their identity, by immersion in the cloud is a new and exciting concept for us. We have been studying you and you do appear, for all intents and purposes, to be well-adjusted and happy in your new … er… persona.”

 Demeter felt his stomach drop; he wanted to leap across the table and grab the man by the throat. Mr Bianco continued with his spiel.

“I feel that we must make the best of things and maximise this incredible serendipitous event. There’s no reason to halt your impressive progress and acquisition of knowledge in this new position and I do feel that your own skill-set, combined with your brother’s, gives you an impressive insight into the mathematical framework that governs the larger infrastructure of the cloud. We’re happy for you to continue as you are, as our finest example so far, of cloud-based technology as therapy for the human condition. It is a rapidly progressing field, as I’m sure you are aware.”

Demeter stared, stony-faced. Finally, he responded.

“I just want my brother back.”

“Ah, but he is here with you. You did get, in fact, exactly what you wanted when you immersed yourself in his life-log. A communion with your brother. An everlasting one.” The CEO shuffled in his chair and added “At least we do hope you’ll see it that way. We’ve no way to take it back, you see.”

“Oh, but there is, there most definitely is.” Demeter spoke, his voice as hard as granite. “Upload me to the cloud then I’ll delete the last 5 months of my data stream from my digital self with a bio-morphed virus targeting my time-stamped bio-markers. Everything that’s digital can be classified and displayed from oldest to newest – I’ll splice off the tail then return as Eli.”

The huddle of Nova’s finest stared at him, outwardly cool, with just the faintest traces of something else simmering at the surface.

“We can’t do that,” answered the CEO tautly, “it would contravene fail-safe number three – that no digital entity can alter, copy or hide themselves within the cloud.”

“But we can do it for him”, interjected Mr Carmody, “we can do it from down here on earth. We’re not digital entities and it’s this man’s right to choose. It’s not our decision, even though we’ve granted ourselves the power to make it if we really wanted to. But we shouldn’t. And this time – we won’t.”

Three years later, Alban Carmody stopped to chat to his gardener, a tall man with a strapped ankle who was patiently pruning the magnificent rhododendron hedge that encircled his private courtyard on the outskirts of the seventh hexagonal district of the city. The man was doing a wonderful job, reverently snipping at the outrageously vibrant flowers as he went. He placed several of the spent flowers on the pathway so that the wind could sweep up and scatter the lovely petals as it saw fit. Looking up, he saw Alban standing over him and smiled. The recently retired Nova executive smiled back; he had gotten to know the gardener very well and was always very pleased to enter into a conversation with him.

“Lovely day for it, Eli.”

“Always, sir. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

He nodded towards the withering flowers scattered across the driveway.

“I hope you don’t mind, sir. I always like to see what the wind does with them.”

“But, of course. My lovely Bettina likes to watch them from the window as they float and fall as well.”

His smile dimmed, reflecting on the failing constitution of his dear wife. They had been married for thirty-seven years and watching the disease plunder her in such a merciless way had taken its toll on him. It had also decided his exit from the long-standing and highly respected executive position he’d held at Nova Enterprises, not that he could truthfully say he missed it very much at all.

“The flowers are here for such a short time but they do make an exquisite impression, don’t you think?” he said to the kneeling gardener.

“Why, Mr Carmody,” responded the gardener thoughtfully, “yes, they do. And I also think of my brother, Demeter, when I’m gardening.”

“You do?” Alban Carmody cocked his head. He thought he might know the reason why.

“Yes, Sir. He was gone much too soon but he bloomed so large and bright. He taught me that the love you give people grows them in exactly the right way and helps them become like a big beautiful flower. And you can never look back. Every snip and sprinkle of water keeps them growing ever upward, the way we should all do. When they stop growing, they stop becoming, then the life force seeps out of them until they are no more.”

Alban smiled softly, regarding his gardener with affection and wonder. It had taken the Nova executive team another year after Demeter/Eli’s return visit to the cloud to fully acknowledge the inherent addictions and risks of bio-morphing to humankind. To wholly understand that dipping one’s toes into the pond of a life-log was markedly different from diving in, holding a breath and staying underwater until you could no longer breathe. The past was a place to visit but not to curl up in – and for humans to have a future, it meant that people needed to keep imagining what lay ahead of them, not just remembering what had transpired before. Having perfected the physical components of bio-transmogrification, science was still eons away from demystifying the psychological and emotional aspects of the user-experience, as well as mitigating the risks of it with the necessary fail-safes. It was a work in progress and the Stratus, Nimbus and Cirrus programs had been shelved indefinitely while the lawyers argued with the conscientious objectors and tried to reach a consensus about ways bio-morphing could be safe and ethical. But for now, Alban Carmody watched the old rhododendron flowers – still beautiful but so fragile – he watched as a gust of wind gathered them up and offered them to the universe, to spend an eternity – or even just a second – feeling like they could fly, believing that they could float above the treetops, ride the breeze and glimpse what lay beyond the sweet, mysterious and milky sunbeams that fell, like a veil, over the blue and cloudless sky.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Neille Williams 2025

Image Source: CDD20 from Pixabay