Ladybug

Sci-fi | Literary | Fictional memoir

This story was featured in Top in Fiction

Hello Story Voyagers, today’s edition brings you a short story about the memories we leave behind when uploading our minds to the digital realm.

All the fiction on Story Voyager is free to read for one month. Paid subscribers have access to a growing catalogue of short stories and serialised fiction.

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Mini-series announcement 📣

The next installment in our cli-fi series There Is Hope will be published as a seasonal mini-series in October.

This time, our journey on the Dust Road takes us to the Siberian Cooperatives, where we will learn more about the taiga, the last forest on earth.

If you’re new to Story Voyager, you can start reading the series here.

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Ladybug

A yellow sundress with a ladybug. A slap across the face. My mother’s body slams onto the bed. ‘Not in front of the children,‘ she says. I’m screaming my head out.

The kind face of Sayuri Santos looks at me on the screen.

‚Maybe we leave this one out,‘ she says.

I nod, wiping the tears from my wrinkled face. I do this a lot in the following weeks as I dive into the art of memory curating. I’ve signed a contract for five entries embedded in the Museum of Life. It’s a long and tedious process. Do I want just a visual rendering of the memory or also a scan of my brain activity remembering those moments? Should we include a blueprint of the chemicals switching my synapses? How much of myself do I keep, and how much do I toss away in this new existence?

A late December night in a desperately cold and lonely capsule apartment, lying in bed at my father’s and brother’s feet. ‘You ratted me out! Told them I beat her!‘ he says, kicking my nine-year-old body curled under the blankets like a rabid rabbit.

‚Maybe we leave this one out too,‘ Sayuri says.

I nod, looking at my hands, at the pink nail polish peeling off the edges of my clipped fingernails. I’m desperately trying to find those happy moments, I know that they are there, small and insignificant, scattered in the corners of my memories like sun rays in a haunted house.

The sweet wrinkly smile of my great-grandmother patting my four-year-old head, picking white mulberries from her hunchback mulberry tree, the soft down of a black-and-gold baby chick in the cusp of my hand, the memory of my mother’s voice, the smell of my father’s oil paint colors, my baby brother’s white-blond hair styled in a bowl cut jumping up and down as we ride our black and white toy dogs like horses.

‘These are beautiful, Luna! We can create a fully immersive sensory experience with these, people will love them.’

I’m floating on a deep, dark swamp, desperately trying to keep my head above the water. I cannot see or hear my brother, but I know he is there, floating next to me, desperately trying to keep his head above the water. It’s the nights I fear the most. The alcohol-induced beatings, but of other women. The screams. The sound of shattered glass. The sight of blood splattered on the bedsheets. The tendrils of darkness reach out for me from the murky waters, wanting to drag me beneath. I keep my body still, holding my breath. Silence. I drift away, plunging into the clear blue sky above, an endless river of water floating above the world, above distant lands where people live other lives. Silence. A ladybug lands on my finger, folding her delicate wings. Her beautiful dotted red shell glitters in the sun.

In those initial weeks, I ride the rollercoaster of the first eighteen years of my life and come out with a new version of myself. A narrative ready to be presented to the world. It’s all in the curation. In letting go of the wounds I harbored for so many years in my heart, those treasured monsters of the past haunting me on long sleepless nights, those loyal but untrue friends. For a long time, I feared that I was nothing without them.

Years later, I saw my mother’s bones lying at the bottom of a casket. After that, I left home. I left everything behind. Chasing the sun rays. Maybe this is the secret to a happy life.

‘What should we call the first entry?’

‘Ladybug.’

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These are uncut archive notes from the memory logs of Luna, the famous composer known as Ladybug, as recorded and curated by the directors of the Museum of Life, Deya and Sayuri Santos. Luna’s music inspired the creation of the immersive sound experiences in the Museum of Life. She was a close friend of our mother, Shia Santos. When Shia Santos started this museum, she wished to preserve the human minds that cross in and out of existence. I hope that you’ll enjoy our curated collection of lives.

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Author’s notes

I’m sharpening my pencil for a new series called Life and Death on the Dust Road, a companion to my cli-fi novel There Is Hope. This series will include fifteen memory logs from the Museum of Life curated by Deya and Sayuri Santos, the daughters of Shia Santos, a character who interlinks the stories in There Is Hope.

There’s a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about uploading the human mind to the digital realm. While this is a distant dream in real life, I chose to use this technology as a central aspect of my worldbuilding.

A human mind or consciousness contains a lot of data. When we think about uploading it to a digital format, many questions arise. What do we upload and why? Who has access to the data points, and how? What version of ourselves do we want to immortalize?

I hope that you found this short story intriguing. Let me know in the comments how you would feel about being uploaded to the cloud. Would you do it? What would you upload, and what would you leave out?

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