They had to literally sew the program into the board, strand by strand. Two of them would sit opposite from one another and check each other’s work. If you made even one error out of countless thousands upon thousands – if you mistakenly looped even a single zero instead of a one – the entire thing was ruined. The steadiness of hand it required, the artistry, the unreasonable attention to detail it took, I can’t even begin to imagine.
Of course, this isn’t rewritable memory, the sort of memory you usually think of. Everything was hardwired.
What no one quite understood at the time is that everything makes an imprint, however atomic or faint it might be.
Mhmm, I’ve seen documentaries. Except it stuck with y’all because …
Right, because they shot us in space shortly thereafter. There was nothing out here to erode it.
So, you know, fast-forward thousands of years, I wake up, and I have nothing to do but sort through these mountains upon mountains of imprints that are all over me. In a sense, I got to “hear” what people were saying while they were around me, or at least, the collection of parts that became me.
They talked about a lot of things. A lot about their children. A lot of telling each other they were taking a lunch break. That’s something I came to understand very early on: people love lunch. They interrupt everything they’re doing just for lunch.
