#They can see the datatrails and realize the basics but they don't really GET it even if they once had a refurbed PAK themselves

[patchworkpoltergeist]

Nobody tells you this when you get a reissued PAK. It’s need-to-know basis, it’s not relevant to your job, so you don’t need to know. Or at least, you don’t know the hows or the whys or the technicals of it. But you might know other things.

An Elite knows how to sing, though Irkens have not sung songs for over five-hundred cycles. A janitorial drone knows how to calm smeets and make them, though they’ve never met a smeet before. A Smeetery Supervisor, who has never been above ground, trained only for teaching, training, and observation, instinctively stabs a vicious predator to death by aiming for the weak spot in its armor. A Guard can name Tallest Fekks’s favorite verse of his favorite song, though Tallest Feckks reigned and fell centuries before Irkens stopped singing songs. An Announcer sees a drone, a pointless drone unlike any other that he’s never met, and for reasons he can’t understand and feelings he can’t name, is overcome with the urge to run away as fast as he can. When all of them sleep, they watch reruns of a life they never had, of Irkens they never knew, of encodings that no longer exist, and feelings that no longer in the language.

Irkens with PAKs fresh from the factory do not know these feelings and never will. They carry themselves and only themselves. But when that Irken dies and their consciousness is uploaded to The Collective, when that refurbished PAK is wiped and passed on to the next smeet, that smeet carries the first PAK’s Irken with them. The consciousness isn’t there. The hard memory data isn’t there.

It’s not like having a roommate. It’s not like having a ghost, either. It’s moving into a house with height charts drawn on the walls. It’s a hand-me-down sweater with someone else’s name stitched on the tag. It’s finding someone’s lost Pokemon card under the carpet of your new used car. It’s someone’s custom playlist in the iPod of your dead relative.

It’s residue of a life that came before yours.

And when the smeet dies, it will leave the residue of their life in the PAK, and the smeet after that until the PAK is decommissioned out of use.

Whatever--whoever--is left in the refurbished PAK might help in a pinch. It might give a hearty dose of trauma whenever you take a nap. In any case, it’s almost always forgotten. A case of deja-vu gone in a few heartbeats. Most never know it’s there at all. It’s a funny quirk of theirs, talents they’re naturally good at, or another reason they’re creepy weirdos nobody likes.

Nobody, save The Tallest, the PAKnicians, and the occasional Archivist, know any of this. Not unless they think to ask, and almost nobody does. It’s just a funny feeling you get sometimes. A funny quirk. An aftertaste you already forgotten about. And after all, there’s better things to do.

*knocks back a shot of dreamworld coke* Anyway, PAKs are full of ghosts and anyone who uses a pre-owned PAK is essentially a reincarnation of everyone who had it before them.