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mavspeed · 4 years ago

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First Line Meme

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line, then tag 10 of your favorite authors!

Hey @applesfallingfromblondehair, thanks for the tag love!! likewise i dont usually do this but this feels interesting so lets see if my ass has improved over the last few stories lmfkjgjk

also this will prob be a mix of xmcu fic + kingsman fic bc i think i have a more or less equal number of fics written for both

The first time Charles meets Lucifer Morningstar, actual devil from hell, ruler of the underworld, fallen son of the lord above and god knows what else, it had been after Erik had been sentenced to life imprisonment in the highest security cell in the Pentagon.

- this is from a professor and a devil walk into a bar, which is kinda a crossover rarepair fic that rose out of me and mutuals on twitter discussing tom ellis and james mcavoy being roommates and kinda... devolved from there. i am proud of this one lmfnjgkj

“Are you okay, Professor?” Hank asks quietly.

Charles blinks. He supposes it’s a valid question. He’s been in a bit of a funk the past few days- scratch that actually, the past few years. He’s just lost so much- his father, and then his mother’s love, and then Raven and Erik and Sean and countless others. Building a school, gaining students he loved to teach and nurture hadn’t helped him in the slightest, and he’s as lost as he ever was, wandering the halls of a drafty mansion alone, feeling like he’s been stranded at sea even whilst surrounded by people.

- from in the belly of the beast, which again came out of me wondering what would have happened if fox had gone w their original plan and charles had been that last horseman instead of erik. this story will prob gain a sequel... sometime in the near future when im not too bogged down by current wips

The Xavier family hall of the deceased- because of course they’re weird enough to have a cemetery- is full of rows upon rows of holograms. Charles is four and gets bored of his father crying over his mother’s hologram, so he toddles over to the other rows. Unfamiliar names, all of them- Charles is young, and he doesn’t understand death. He doesn’t even know who his mother is, who’d died at childbirth and left him with a father still at a loss when it came to bringing up a kid.

- from tequila on a spaceship, the sequel to a fic that still has some people angry at me i think. this fic never did gain as much traction as the first one but im still proud of it esp since it discusses certain themes of reincarnation that ive always wanted to see explored for myself in reincarnation aus (and i only ever saw it in danveresque’s reincarnation au)

There are cork boards covering every inch of the wall. Red strings, photographs, conspiracy threads, everything. Raven takes it in, swallowing, noticing the picture in the middle.

It’s one of Charles, when he’d been in university. His final year- he'd just been done presenting his year- end project, his fringe a tumbled mess and a bright smile on his lips. Erik had taken the picture, Charles scurrying to his side once he’d been done and demanding to look at the image, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth. He looks like how Raven had always imagined him to be.

“He wouldn’t want this,” she finally says, turning to look at Erik.

- from tequila on a beach, the first fic to the fic above. this fic is v special to me because i actually wrote this on a spiral after having a very tough visit with one of my parents in the hospital after a surgery for organ removal to prevent the onset of cancer. its simpler than my other fics yet i think more powerful because of what happens. also i think the first time i killed charles off lol (spoiler alert). also idk if ppl were aware of this but this is called tequila on a beach precisely bc charles and erik were tipsy from tequila at a frat party and then went to a beach. its the way they first met (and will continue to meet for all their next lives)

Erik doesn’t know how it all started. Maybe it was when his insane sergeant had started rambling about imaginary cities, treasures of gold and cursed incantations. Maybe it was when trickles of rumours had started pouring down about the higher ups wanting to investigate unfound territory, disregard the Egyptian government’s feelings on the matter, and put a previously unfound myth on the map for all the world to see. Or maybe, Erik thinks, it was when archaeologist Klaus Schmidt put a bullet through his mother’s head and he ended up going to America armed with dual citizenship and the sole intent of wanting to drive a coin directly between Schmidt’s eyes, joining a division of the American military focused solely on guarding archaeological digs- more importantly, in Egypt, where Schmidt’s interest had shifted.

- from courting the end of the world, another one i’m just insanely proud of! this is the first time i’ve ever attempted a multichapter movie au and it actually managed to work pretty well, i at least haven’t run out of inspiration for it yet lmfjgjg. also erik as himbo rick connell... very rent free in my head

The day after they murder Shaw and leave his house of horrors, Erik crosses the Canadian border with Charles across his back. Charles had started getting tired while they’d been walking, stumbling and nearly tripping until Erik had forced him to get on his back, ignoring Charles’ protests.

The blood’s seeping out steadily from Charles’ nose, staining his shirt and soaking it through. It’s been leaking on and off, and the effects are already obvious in the dark circles beneath Charles’ eyes. Any more, and Erik knows they’ll have to find him a doctor. He hopes the nearest town in Canada has one that would be willing to treat them.

- from a world built for two. i actually dk where the inspiration for this came from, i think i was once again on a depressive spiral and wanted to break my comfort characters into pieces and put them together again. this also deals with codependency and unhealthy coping mechanisms as a result of trauma which i showed as sweet in the fic but i would def not recommend in real life. pls if u relate to either charles or erik in this go see a therapist

The call comes in the afternoon, an hour before Charles is supposed to teach his Intro to Genetics class. Frowning, Charles abandons the game of Candy Crush he’d admittedly been playing rather badly and picks it up. “Charles sp-”

“We need you, Prof,” Kitty says desperately into the phone. “He’s been in a temper all morning, and then Alex’s reports missed out a whole subsection, so he’s fired the entire marketing team! Please, Professor, you have to come immediately!”

- from and we can be pirates. i wrote this in like 4 seconds for my friend who wanted professor charles and ceo erik and actually did not expect this to gain the attention it did... its always the fics u write in like 4 seconds lmfjggj. a sequel for this Is coming too probably at some point in the very far future

Charles Xavier can admit as he sits across from Essex, hands cuffed to the desk, that in hindsight, this had perhaps not been one of his better ideas.

He refuses to admit it as he controls Erik’s mind, preventing him from lashing out and making him close his eyes to the nightmare unfolding in front of him. He refuses to admit it as he gets shoved into the back of a black pickup truck, and the butt of a gun is smashed across his forehead hard enough to knock him out cold for a few hours. He refuses to admit it when he wakes up what appears to be hours later in a cold interrogation room, hands cuffed to the table in front of him, with a suppression collar rendering his mind dark and almost achingly silent.

- from from the land of gods (bring me home). i’ve been struggling w this fic a lot (it didnt come as easily to me as the first one did) but its getting there. also i put charles through hell in this rip sorry mister xavier

In the aftermath, both of them stand at the border of the mansion. The air feels frigid, slicing into Raven’s lungs like a thousand paper cuts. “Charles, please,” she begs, heart in her throat and voice hoarse. “He wouldn’t want you to be like this. He wouldn’t want you to do this. It’s not too late, you can come back.”

Charles gazes back, a brick wall. He hasn’t even cleaned up, still in that damnable yellow and blue suit with blood drying in the corners of his mouth, the bridge of his nose. There’s nothing in his eyes- blank, almost see through. He looks as if he’s a mere shade, a ghost lounging about where he once was. Raven knows better.

“I will raze the world to the ground,” he finally says, his voice free of any inflection, “and when I’m done, no one will be left standing. Not you, and certainly not me.”

- from where all the poets went to die, a dark fic based on what would have happened if moira had killed erik with the bullets. its the first time ive written dark charles and it was v fun if im being honest

10.

Charles is a light sleeper. It’s a trait that stays with him- all the way from his father and the tests to taking care of his mother to Cain Marko and his fists to Cuba and then now, the dust of Washington settling over him and making the waking world lie an inch beyond his eyelids. It therefore stands to reason that the second the windowsill creaks he’s up in a shot, hoisting himself up and lashing out with his telepathy instantly.

That’s not a trait that had stayed with him. That’s a newly formed trait, bitter and bold, carved into existence by Cuba by his students disappearing one by one in Vietnam by the letters that announce Sean’s death in black unfriendly print by-

The tendrils of his telepathy forged cold and distant meet a barrier and recoil, stunned. He focuses his eyes and then widens them, staring at Erik who stares back, hidden beneath that infernal muddied magenta helmet of his. They stare at each other for a moment before Erik clears his throat.

- from in the valley of kings (you will come home). my first ever cherik fic! im actually also proud of this one even if i ended it horribly and half my mutuals refuse to read it bc of how it ended LMFJGJGJ. i cant believe this was supposed to be a funny and cute kid fic and then i turned it into an angst ridden mess. also leo is actually an oc whose adult version is fancasted as charlie rowe by me and another mutual on twitter and im v proud that readers are willing to die for the baby

11.

Mike has to google it, finding a crafts shop nestled into the corner of the street right smack in the middle of Louisiana, past a long and winding dirt road and the crumbling farmhouses relics of a time long past. The air is hot, humid, sticking to the back of his neck like an unwieldy parasite as he pushes the door of the shop open to the sound of the bell tinkling above.

He finds the origami paper quickly enough and has a momentary breakdown about what Bill’s favourite colour even is- he had never thought to ask him. Twenty seven years of following every single footstep of his like a dedicated, most definitely creepy stalker, three months of more than a few states traversed with Bill’s laughter now echoing in his ears like a shadow that trails after him, and this is what stumps him. It takes ten minutes, but he finally settles on light green.

- my first and last entry into the IT fandom bc i love these two but to be very fair there isn’t much content out there for him (and twitter content actually intimidates me lmfjgjjg) a thousand paper cranes never got much traction either but i suspect its bc i was horrible at promoting it. also i very much love this fic even if it never did that well bc ive always wanted to write a fic like this after watching the movie in cinemas in 2019

12.

ok nsfw i guess

Mornings start like this- Eggsy snuffling into David’s neck, attempting to work his way back up to wakefulness as David sleeps the sleep of the dead, the streams of morning sunlight gradually lightening up the room. It’s a while before he gets the energy to sit up, pushing an eager V off the bed- V for Vendetta, a kitten named after one of David’s favourite movies that they’d adopted about a month after moving in together- before stumbling to the loo. He’s already in the shower when David comes in, naked as the day he’s born with his arms entwining themselves around Eggsy’s waist as he murmurs a sleep-soft, “Good morning, love,” as he presses a kiss into the two-days-old hickey on Eggsy’s shoulder. His breath smells of toothpaste, the minty fresh kind he insists on buying from Target no matter how much Eggsy insists that the other brand is much better. Without fail, Eggsy always has a split second thought of thinking that he must truly be in heaven because no way can this be his reality, every single day, before sinking to his knees and allowing David’s cock to hit the back of his throat.

- from that’s the kind of love i’ve been dreaming of. i genuinely wish i had an opinion for this but i don’t remember writing this its been way too long

13.

The first time Eggsy sees her is in Trafalgar Square.

Trafalgar Square is uncomfortably packed on any normal day, but on New Year’s it is quite the hothouse. Sweating armpits and hot bodies plastered against each other, the twinkling lights overhead providing a flash of blue and green and yellow and red, screaming children and giggling teenagers shoving their way through- it’s a recipe for disaster. Eggsy doesn’t know how he ends up there. It happens sometimes- one second he blinks, sequestered in the comfort of his living room, and the next he’s somewhere else, as if he’s been teleported. “Life goes past you,” Tilde had said once, “and you don’t even notice.” Tilde would be right.

- this is a roxy and eggsy friendship centric fic that i abandoned bc i lost my ardor for this world about the same time i got into xmen lmfjgjg. all the king’s horses also had some great fancasts in it with dev patel fancasted too... rip ig

14.

once again, nsfw

Eggsy, truth be told, doesn’t actually like having sex in bathrooms. First of all, bathrooms generally have an unsanitary air about them. Besides that, the granite of the sinks always feel cold against his hips, there is the ever present fear of being walked in on and unlike what people might say, he actually really isn’t that much of an exhibitionist- and truth be told, he’s never liked the look of himself in the mirror mid coitus.

For David Budd, however, he suspects he might be up for anything.

- from do you ever dream of me. im actually proud of this fic and this series, i never usually write straight up porn or friends w benefits and i think it worked well in here. once again didnt get much traction but that was very of the norm for my kingsman fics lmfjgj

15.

It is on his fifth meeting with the therapist on site that she brings the issue up. The elephant in the room- or the bomb , David thinks morbidly. If asked, he can’t remember specifics about that day now. All he remembers is this- the burn of Julia’s picture in his wallet against his thigh, the Botticelli painting on the far wall and Miss Paulson’s face, severe and unsmiling.

“When you couldn’t reach Julia,” she says, after he finishes describing the feeling of running to Julia, the panic searing his chest as he’d prayed for his legs to work faster so he could do something, anything to reach her hand. “How did that make you feel?”

- from your haunted social scene. i genuinely... do not remember anything about this either helpfkjgjg,,, this has 55 comments tho which. Nice

16.

David brings her home on- in a move far too cliche for it to be reality- a stormy night. It’s in fact storming so hard the windowpanes shudder like leaves in the wind, droplets crashing against the glass in a cacophony so loud Eggsy more than once considers turning the radio all the way up to drown it out. He’d gone scrounging for David’s sweatshirts instead of his own halfway through, wincing intermittently at the flashes of thunder. At a particularly loud one JB had jumped up, squeaked in a very undoglike manner and skidded across the floor to cower beneath the sofa, only coming out when coaxed by Eggsy to do so. Officer Oatmeal had watched the proceedings from her regal place by the armchair, dozy eyed and blinking heavily.

- from a cat named lavender. from what i remember this was also my first try at bringing up trans eggsy

17.

He first appears at the black prince on a cold Monday evening, eyes like Frank Sinatra and lips arresting anyone’s gaze if they weren’t careful enough. He stood out too, clad in a respectable bomber jacket and boots that clicked against the tile rhythmically and loudly, a sort of organised, measured cacophony.

“Go and serve him,” Andrew said, fat and disinterested, seated behind the counter and idly flicking through bills, less than ten percent of which he pays Eggsy. “I’m busy.”

- from trust is left in lovers after all. i never continued this which is sad bc this did get a lot of attention... it was just v hard to keep the story going

18.

It usually rains cats and dogs in London but for some reason, the rain is heavier than usual today. The droplets splatter against the windows in a constant buzzing rhythm, the sound meshing together in a melody not altogether pleasant to the ears. It’s half past five and yet the light has to be kept on because that’s how dark the sky has gotten- thunder rolls like a loud crack, abrupt and deafening, causing Daisy to jump in her seat.

“Just a thunderstorm, flower,” Eggsy says. They’re seated at the dinner table, Eggsy going over her homework while David sits opposite them, hunched over his laptop as he attempts to finish a post mission report. Eggsy is half convinced he gave up ten minutes ago- he’s got his earbuds in and he hasn’t really typed anything in a while, eyes focused on the screen. His eyebrows are scrunched up in a glare that’s too adorable for his own good- and for Eggsy’s.

- from could feel like kryptonite. a lot of my kingsman fics are actually so much happier than my cherik ones... i should prob look into that rip

19.

“When you’re done lazing around you can come in, you dozy dog,” he tells Officer Oatmeal, who butts her nose into his knee. She’s the only one not on a diet in the house, Eggsy deeming her far too healthy and skinny to need one anyway. In fact, she’s under strict instructions by Eggsy to fatten up instead.

Once the animals are done feeding- Eggsy sporting a suspicious scratch on his left forearm- they settle down to eat their scrambled eggs and toast. David’s taken a large gulp of his scalding coffee when Eggsy says, all of a sudden, “So, I have a school reunion.”

- from gonna set this dance alight. don’t remember much about this either tbh

20. (the last one FINALLY)

It isn’t a big event or explosion that makes David realise he wants to see his father’s ring sitting pretty on Eggsy’s index finger. No teary confessions in the rain like in the rom coms Eggsy loves to rent out and sniffle his way through, or a fight that makes David see sense. In the end, it’s breakfast that cinches the deal for him.

The day had started out normally enough. David wakes up at eight like clockwork, the soft downy hair at the base of Eggsy’s neck tickling his nose with his arm locked tight around his waist. He’d yawned, exhausted- mostly because they’d stayed up very late into the night making good use of the bed- before standing up and shucking his shirt off to head for the shower. Eggsy had shifted in his sleep, mumbling something unintelligible, and the sight had been too endearing to resist so he’d bent down, pressing a kiss to his forehead and smiling when Eggsy groaned out loud.

- from lover boy rules. i actually started a lot of my kingsman fics in the same way which is rather awful of me. im glad thats changed with my xmen fics lmfjgjk. also this has 15 comments???? i dont even get that much attention with my xmcu fics these days... which is arguably a more active fandom... Hello

anyway that’s the end of it needless to say i do not know 10 other authors so im just gonna tag whoever i know rn: @hellfre , @queerneto, @ikeracity, @drinkingstars, @zebraljb

#whew this is super long i apologise #u can pinpoint the exact time i replaced taron with james as my number one boy #fic tag #fic meme

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drjackandmissjo · 5 years ago

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firewhisky on ice, sunset and vine

you’ve ruined my life by not being mine

Chapter 9— previous chapter — next chapter

Harry Potter fics Masterlist

His sleeping pattern had rarely been erratic. ‘Rule number nine: beauty sleep is important’ and he tried to maintain a schedule that allowed him the flexibility of pulling all-nighters to study for an exam or to enjoy a night out with his friends without getting dark circles. It was a bother to use a spell to make them disappear and muggle concealers never managed to get his shade properly, so he tried to avoid the problem altogether.

Yet for the past three days he couldn’t rest well: his nights were plagued by nightmares, darkness and guilt. During the day he tried to distract himself, diving headfirst into schoolwork. They had to write an essay on the Gargoyle Strike of 1911, which was a very easy and effortless thing, but Blaise couldn’t focus on it. His mind kept on wandering, to a light haired idiot with soft eyes and a crystalline laugh.

He hadn’t made a contact with Neville, who had also been distant and cold during their last Transfiguration class. Blaise had meant to wait a bit, to make peace and finally say those words that hitched at the back of his throat since he had first discovered them, but Neville had sprinted out of the class, running away as fast as he could. He had begun to actively look for him, waiting for him next to the greenhouses or outside of the Great Hall, roaming the Herbology section on the library, hoping to run into him, even sending him a note during supper.

Neville received that little piece of parchment that said only ‘look at me’, but he tore it down to pieces and left it next to his plate, in full display for Blaise to see and get the message.

He had hurt him, badly. And he didn’t know how to deal with his emotions and with the consequences of his actions. So he did what he did best in those type of situations: ignore the negative outcome and push forward pridefully, as if it didn’t bother him, while the pain was eating him from the inside.

The Slytherin common room was quiet, as it had been in the past couple of days after the Incident. Draco was back from the infirmary in the foulest mood ever and refused to speak about it all, so everyone kept mostly to themselves to avoid a meltdown. He and Theo were now talking back in their dormitory, With Crabble and Goyle guarding the perimeter and making sure no one interrupted them.

It was clear as day whose fault was the fight and for whom Draco worked, at least to those who cared about him and still had suspicions, but no one would snitch on them. They were Slytherins, after all.

Blaise was lounging in one of the couches near the hart, lazily reading to tempt his mind on finishing his work and be done with that bullshit before his headache grew three sizes bigger.

Suddenly, an unexpected weight landed on the other side of the couch, interrupting his train of thought. Pansy was staring expectantly at him, waiting for something as she sat with one leg over the other.

“Can I help you?” Blaise asked politely, listing in his mind every possible scenario where she would prop down in such an inelegant way.

“What happened with Schlongbottom?”

Out of all the possible things she might have said, that was the one Blaise had least considered. Sure, she might’ve realized that something was off, yet it was none of her business and she was usually non-invasive on her friends’ love lives, unless they came first to her.

“I have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about” he said calmly and impassively, turning a page of his copy of the ‘Major Riots of the Lesser Creatures in the XX° century’. He didn’t want to talk about it, although it logically meant finding a solution to his issue. But he was not a Ravenclaw and logic wasn’t his chosen and favourite way.

“Bullshit” she yelled, grabbing a pillow and resting it over her legs, ready to attack, “What did you do?” “Why do you assume I’m in the wrong here?” Blaise snapped, closing his book harshly and leaning forward to glare at her. “Cause otherwise he’ll be trying to get your attention and to make it up to you” she said with a very irritating and annoying smirk on her black painted lips. “I am not doing anything like that!” “Yeah, you’re totally right! You, sir, are moping down already defeated. That’s worse! You’re a proud Slytherin, you shouldn’t give up like this!”

Blaise sighed and rested his head on his open palms: “That is the problem. I’m too bloody prideful and I said some bullshit that I didn’t mean” he admitted, refusing to look up at her and see her reaction.

Unfortunately, Pansy pried his hands away and with a kindness he had rarely seen from her, she said “Tell me everything from the beginning.”

And so he did: he told her how he panicked and wanted only to be comforted; how he had stumbled to conclusions and had let his fear and pride run their mouths; how he somehow had rendered sweet and bright Neville into a sad shell, emotionless over a stupid fight that neither wanted to have; how he had fucked up royally and didn’t know how to fix it.

“I don’t know if I deserve him…” he was about to finish, words dying in his throat as tears raised up at his eyes. He blinked them away before anyone could see them, staring mindlessly at the raging fire next to them.

Pansy hit him up with the pillow she had on her legs, “Okay, mate. This pity party of yours ends now. You fucked up, but that’s nothing a good and well-meant apology can do!” she cheered him, trying to make the hopeless situation better, but failing terribly. He was not in the mood for her games. “He won’t even look at me!” he admitted, his heart tightening and threatening to burst out of him as sadness engulfed him. He had tried his best, border-lining making a fool of himself, yet there was no reaction. Blaise didn’t know what hurt more: the fact that he was losing his focus in class or the lack of Neville.

No, he knew what hurt more, yet couldn’t bring himself to admit it. “Which is why you desperately need my assistance. You’re lucky I am way too kind-hearted” the vixen said, smiling like a Cheshire Cat and promising trouble, “and that I absolutely hate seeing you like this!” she finished, softening and placing a hand on his knee. “I thought I was doing a decent job, concealing my emotions…” he sarcastically claimed, aware that he looked a mess, but conscious that he could be able to pull it off as a simple Slytherin worried about exams. “Not from me, snobby. Now, I’ll need you tomorrow before dinner in the Charms classroom, and you better be prepared to take your man back. Salazar knows that I’ll hex you into next month if you don’t.” “What’s with all this goodness, Parkinson? That’s not really your colour” he said, yet nodded along to her plan, curious and impressed and hopeful. She jumped on her feet then, “Fuck me for caring about my bloody best friend. Schlongbottom makes you the happiest I’ve ever seen you and I care about you. So you better make it right or I’ll make you regret it even more than you are doing right now.” She had determination written all over her face, a plan finishing to polish on her mind. “Now off you fucking go to bed, you need to be your best for tomorrow.”

He grabbed tighter his book and clutched it against his chest as he graciously rose up to his feet and began to wordlessly walk away as Pansy stared at the hart as if it held all the answers of the universe inside its fire. Then, before reaching the stairs that would lead him towards his room, he turned around, too curious to go to bed without an answer.

“Why the Charms classroom?”

“Flitwick owes me one” she only replied, as if it was an everyday business having a professor be in debt of a student.

“Do I want to know more?”

“I gave him a wardrobe makeover and he promised to do one thing without questions for me, as long as it was legal. Be glad I’m wasting it on you.”

He couldn’t explicitly thank her nor show her his appreciation, so he went with the next best thing: “Can I honestly admit that I’m terrified of you right now?” “As you should be, Zabini.”

***

Blaise had been pacing the length of the Charms classroom three times now, probably leaving his imprint on the floor.

He trusted Pansy, the devil always came up with the best plans, but his nerves wouldn’t calm down and his mind conjured up all the possible scenarios where Neville didn’t show up or didn’t listen to him, or, or, or.

She had tried to put him at ease, to calm him down, cause ‘It’s not the end of the world!’ But it was, at least for Blaise.

He had fucked up and was ready to amend, if only Neville let him. And that scared him more than anything.

As if on cue, the door to the classroom opened, the light from the outside corridor’s flames illuminating the floor and contouring a tall figure he knew way too well. He hid in the dark, waiting for the door to lock behind the Gryffindor as Pansy had instructed. She had enchanted it to remain locked until Blaise released the spell once they were done, and he hoped and prayed that for once in his life everything would go according to plan.

But, when he was with Neville, nothing usually did, which was why Blaise had become so fascinated to begin with. The more he got to know Neville, the harder he fell.

“Professor Flitwick?” Neville asked, caution on his voice as he moved into the classroom and the door slammed shut on its own will behind him. Blaise raised his wand and lit the flames in the room, lightening up Neville’s surprised face that mutated immediately in a pissed one.

“What do you want?” he asked, showing no emotion other than anger as he crossed his arms over his chest and walked to where Blaise stood still as rock, as if he had been petrified. Which, to be fair, he felt like he had the second Neville’s eyes locked on him and put him on the spot.

Suddenly, his great and meticulously rehearsed speech died on his lips, his mind blanked and his heart began to race. ‘Composure be damned’ he told himself as he tried to gather up his scattered brain into coherent sentences, frantically running a hand over his short hair as he maintained the other boy’s look. Neville waited, patiently yet angrily, for him to explain, but Blaise could not speak. Shame burned down his entire body as he blinked away frustration and agony.

“I’m sorry” he eventually blurted out, not by the least satisfied with his poor choice of words.

Neville wasn’t impressed either: “I told you to leave me the fuck alone” he said, rage and hurt written all over his face. Blaise never knew when to shut up when he was afraid, but it had not troubled him much during the previous years. Truth to be told, he hadn’t been as terrified as he had recently in a very long time and, amongst the Slytherins, it was a common trait, the inability to hold certain emotions in.

“Rule number twenty-three: be cold as ice when the situation demands it, but let your fire out when you’re safe.”

And that had been the problem: he had never felt happier and safer in his entire stay at Hogwarts as when he was with Neville; they talked about everything and were comfortable with each other, and of course Blaise had to run his mouth and ruin everything.

“Neville, please I…” he said, growing more desperate by the moment. He needed to be heard, at the very least, he needed to explain that he was a mess and that he didn’t mean his words and that he felt empty without the Gryffindor.

“Do I look like I want your apologies?”

That struck Blaise up like lightening and everything clicked into place. Neville didn’t want an apology. He was upset, as he should’ve been and deserved to be, and by apologizing, that would mean that his pain and anger wasn’t seen. What Neville wanted and deserved was an explanation to Blaise’s irrational behaviour. “Please…” he started, walking closer and closer to the Gryffindor and stopping just outside of grasp, ready to close in at any second by jumping into Neville’s arms but giving him the space he needed. “What do you want, Zabini? To insult me some more?” Neville asked bitterly, freezing the blood in Blaise’s veins as he swallowed down hurt and terror. ‘Fair’ he thought, straightening his shoulders and standing his ground. “I didn’t mean it, not a word and you know it.” Neville laughed resentfully, but still he didn’t walk away and that sprung hope in Blaise’s heart, “No, I actually don’t. Now open this bloody door or I’ll kick it down” he said, a flash of anger making his way across his eyes but disappearing quickly. “Pansy enchanted it. Wouldn’t know how to open it.” That was a lie, and a bad one per se, but Blaise couldn’t let this moment go. “Bloody perfect!” “Please, listen to me” he tried once more, letting all his emotions in his voice, breaking down the walls that he always had up. Always, except when he was with the damned plant-head that had weaselled his way into Blaise’s heart. “Why should I?”

“Because you are right to be upset about how I reacted. Because I was wrong, stupid and an asshole.” The sides of Neville’s mouth quirked up, although he tried to refrain himself from smiling. Scoffing, he moved to sit on a nearby desk, motioning for Blaise to continue, “You have five sentences, then you’ll open this bloody door.”

Usually, this version of Neville, the direct and effective and authoritative mask he used during their tutoring sessions, made Blaise lose his mind and slip into indecent thoughts, that lately had been acted upon, but now he couldn’t afford to wander off path. “…Fine, you’re right. Porca puttana, I don’t even know how to start” he lamented, trying to sort through his thoughts to gather the necessary words to express his internal turmoil. Should he grovel, begging for forgiveness, or should he carefully construct a situation where forgiveness was not necessary and they simply skipped the entire speech to snog in that very same classroom? “That’s two” Neville said, smirking and wetting his lips, sending a direct rush of blood away from Blaise’s brain. “You little… Those don’t count and you know it!” It almost felt like nothing had happened between them: Neville’s quick and snarky comments always got to him and managed to light up his days, especially when he then moved to bite his bottom lip to refrain his eruptive laugh. Blaise could die listening to Neville laugh and nothing else would’ve mattered.

But something had happened and wrongs needed to be righted, otherwise they’d each carry the burden of their illogical fight, which would become heavier. “Rule number fourteen: if you care about someone, don’t let anger simmer.”

Tentatively, Blaise walked to sit on the desk near Neville, still maintaining his personal space open to let the other boy walk away, if he truly wanted to. “Alright, Imma start now” he cleared his throat, counting to ten and reminding himself that if he had managed to talk Goyle out of breaking every single bone in Professor Biggs’ body, who lacked bones but that had been a debate for another day, for giving Crabble a Troll and failing him on their Fourth year, that would mean that Blaise was able to talk himself in and out of every situation.

“I hate so much that I had a brilliant speech ready and you just swooped in and my mind went completely blank, it’s so awful.”

“You sure this is the direction you wanna go with your apology?” Neville huffed out a laugh, loosening a little his arms and visibly relaxing.

‘Yes’ Blaise’s mind said, since things seemed to move already in his direction, but instead he remained on his unintentional path, truthful and honest: “NO! But I don’t know which direction I want my apology to go to, cause you’re actually here and I don’t know what to say and this only happens when I’m with you and I’m sorry I was such a moron, I was worried for Draco and lashed out, cause that’s the only thing I know how to do and you shouldn’t deal with my bullshit but please deal with me, cause it’s been three days and I haven’t slept cause I miss you and I love you and Sweet Suffering Bloody Baron I’m rambling, am I not? Okay, I’ll stop now.”

What followed was a very hard second where Blaise had to restrain himself from casting Obliviate and start all over while staring intensely at the wall in front of them purposefully avoiding Neville’s look.

“Say something, please?” “You’re cute when you ramble.” Blaise whipped his head around to look at Neville, who was shaking with silent giggles and looked like a ray of Lumos Maxima had just erupted in the room. He couldn’t believe that idiot sitting next to him! Rambling and generally speaking without a thorough thinking process behind the words wasn’t cute, it was unacceptable!

“I beg your pardon” he asked, disbelieving the entire situation. “On your knees then.” [ic1] “NEVILLE[ic2] !”

The Gryffindor couldn’t hold it anymore: he doubled down on himself, laughing to his heart content. It was joyous and contagious and it made Blaise follow suit, although in a less explosive way.

“I gotta apologize too” Neville said once they were gaining their breath. Blaise was confused: he had messed up with his words, Neville had just patiently waited for him to get back to his usual state and then lost his nerve, which was incredibly understandable. “What for?”

Neville sighed deeply and stood up in front of Blaise, looking at him with gravity in his eyes and sorrow in his face. “I ran away” he simply admitted, as if that had been the worst thing he had ever done, “I know that sometimes your head runs too fast and that you might say something you don’t mean, but when we ended up talking about that curse, I just couldn’t.” He shook his head as tears began to swirl in his eyes, but he blinked them away and kept on focusing on Blaise, who grabbed both of his hands and held them tightly. “You don’t have to explain…” he began, but Neville simply cut him off. “No, but I want to. Remember that Fake Moody showed us the Unforgivable Curses and that he did that one in front of me?” “Yes” Blaise said simply, rage sweeping his bones. He remembered how Draco, Crabble and Goyle had laughed at Neville’s discomfort, the panicked and almost ready to break down expression the Gryffindor wore on his face. Granger had screamt at the professor to stop, but Blaise saw the flash of pleasure that sick bastard had taken from Neville’s pain.

It had been a mercy, to leave him with the Dementors, for if he was still around, Blaise wouldn’t have stopped at anything to give him what he deserved. Even if they were not dating, that monstrous behaviour deserved to be punished severely.

He simply held Neville’s hands tighter, bringing him closer so that the Gryffindor was now standing in between Blaise’s legs and silently rubbed circles on his hand with his thumb, encouragingly and comfortingly.

“My parents…” Neville began, voice shaking as he kept on blinking away his tears, focusing on Blaise’s Slytherin tie, “They’re at Saint Mungo’s because of that. That monster, along with Draco’s aunt and two others, used the Cruciatus Curse on them and shattered their minds. That’s why he asked me of all people if I knew an Unforgivable Curse.” He gave out a huffed chuck, humourlessly and grimly. “They rendered them insane with their torture. It was right after You-Know-Who fell, because of… They thought my parents were somehow responsible or had answers or I don’t even know what went down in their sick minds. They broke them and that’s why I had to go live with Grandma.”

Blaise was speechless. Horror crept down his spine as his mind blanked. Neville had never told him specifically how he had come to move with his stern Grandmother, nor he ever talked about his parents, but he would’ve never imagined the reality to be so horrific. Of course Neville was guarded against Slytherins, of course he got easily upset whenever the conversation moved to particular spells, of course he had walked away from his awful and blind conclusions.

“And now, Draco was using it on Harry and I just...” he continued, unable to hold the tears any longer. Blaise stood up and wrapped his arms around his torso, bringing him down and holding him tightly. Neville’s hands fisted Blaise’s shirt as his head dropped on his shoulder and he began to sob, his entire body shaking. Blaise could feel his own eyes start to tear up and he didn’t try to stop himself.

He understood perfectly now, and Neville didn’t have to apologize for anything. If anything, this entire situation meant that Blaise was a shitty boyfriend, which he already knew.

After a few minutes, Neville untangled himself from Blaise, stepping back and drying his face with his hands. “Sorry, I got your shirt messed up” he joked, voice cracking.

“Don’t worry about it, Nev.” Blaise raised up his hands, bringing Neville’s along and placed a gentle kiss on both his knuckles, “Thank you for telling me” he said, voice barely above a whisper as he leant closer and placed his forehead against the Gryffindor’s.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry I reacted like that”

That forced Blaise to untangle himself from Neville and to pointily look at his boyfriend’s eyes, trying to convey all his emotion in a single glare: “Are you kidding me? You should’ve murdered me on the spot, or at least punched me. I was being an asshole” he reasoned calmly. “Yes, agreed,” Neville laughed, bright and crystalline, before he continued down his own personal rabbit hole: “but you didn’t know…” “Ignorance doesn’t justify anything” he finalized, signalling the end of this discussion. Neville could apologize to inanimate objects at the minimal occasion, as he had several times; the first time Blaise had seen him say he was sorry to a table he had accidentally walked into, he had doubled himself over with laughter and their tutoring session had begun ten minutes later, when he had finally regained control over his breathing. “Now say you’re sorry one more time, I dare you!” he laughed, aware that, as a Gryffindor, one of his traits was the inability of letting go of a bet.

During their Second Year, before the Basilisk attacks had begun, Marcus Flint, then captain of their Quidditch team, had dared Gryffindor’s Oliver Wood to a race down the Astronomy Tower, betting their next match over it: whoever lost, had to forfeit the match upfront. He had been joking, pulling an aimless prank, yet Wood was already racing down the side of the tower with his broom, almost close to hit the ground, when Flint called off the bet and Professor Sinistra fainted. In the end, Flint had to forfeit, for he made the bet in the first place and didn’t even participate to it.

As predicted, Neville wasn’t able to hold the dare: outraged, he opened his mouth, yelling “But I am sorry!” but Blaise had been faster, leaning forward and capturing Neville’s lips in his before he had even managed to finish his sentence.

As if on cue, the door unlocked, still remaining closed, as Neville plunged his hands on Blaise’s back, driving him closer and adjusting their bodies so they were touching everywhere.

Suddenly, Blaise’s brain screamt that Professor Flitwick might’ve come around at any moment, which made him lean away from Neville’s hot kisses. The Gryffindor voiced his complaints, brain already fogged by their heat.

“Wanna go somewhere else?” Blaise asked, voice low and conspiratorially as he jumped off the desk and held tight Neville’s hand. “Lead the way quickly” was the only reply, betraying an eagerness that Blaise felt in his own bones.

“Rule number thirty: Hogwarts’ best place to snog privately is the empty cupboard closet near the Defence Against Dark Arts Classroom that Apollyon Pringle used to store his romance novels and that nobody uses since.”

BTW the bit about Oliver Wood and Flint is a Headcanon of mine. But I can 100% guarantee that the bet shit is true: as a Gryffindor myself, I cannot resist a bet or a dare for the life of me

GLOSSARY:

'Porca puttana' literally means filthy whore, but in this case (AND ALSO GENERALLY SPEAKING DURING REAL LIFE CONVERSATIONS) is somewhere along the lines of 'Holy Shit'

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rason-rodd · 7 years ago

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Red Hood And The Outlaws: Loyalty (Chapter 12)

[Read on AO3] [Previous Chapter]

Chapter 12: Who’s the Wolf?

“ So let me sum up. You think that Black Mask has somehow put his hand on a biotechnological virus capable of controlling the mind of anyone infected and that he used it on the mayor so that he would be able to redefine Gotham the way he wants.” “ It’s a techno-organic virus actually but basically yeah” [Y/N] remained silent for a while, sitting on the desk of Jason’s personal hideout as he was working on his blocking capacities using an old wooden dummy. “You don’t think that’s possible?” “ Honestly Jay, I believe anything can happen in Gotham. Black Mask always had his filthy hands on everything as far as I remember so it is highly probable that he’s behind this … It’s just … Why does he need Bizarro? … And why does he need you?” “ I’m wondering the same thing” “ But do you believe in his ‘I need an heir’ crap?” “ I don’t know, babe. Every time I think I’ve finally figured the guy out, he is proving he is way ahead of me” He stopped punching, a bit out of breath and took a towel to sponge down the sweat on his face and on his bare chest. “What?” He asked her with a chuckle as she was smiling at him. “Babe?” She repeated with a questioning amused look. “ I didn’t say that.” “ Yeah you did” “ So even if I did, I often call Artemis princess.” “ Liar! You would be dead by now if you were doing that.” “ It’s just a way to …” He marked a pause to look for the right word that could get him out of this awkward situation, a bit too humiliating to his taste. “ show affection?” She suggested with a mocking smile “ No … Enhance my male side.” He stuck out his chest in an attempt to make her smile which was an eventual success. “ Seriously stop it. It’s funny but you’re embarrassing yourself … babe”

She winked and he threw his towel at her with a fake angry look. She threw it back shortly after she caught it, the reek of his sweat being rather displeasing and aggressive to her wolf smell. “I think you’ve enhanced your male side enough for today. You stink.” “ Look at that fastidious young lady repelled by this wonderful essence of virility” Jason said with an exaggerated distinguished tone. “ The hormone of virility, which would be the testosterone, doesn’t come from sweat but from gonads in case you didn’t know” He crossed his arms above his bare chest, nodding at her with a weird pout. “Sexual glands” she clarified as she believed he didn’t know what they were “The only thing that can be associated to virility in sweat is the presence of a low percentage of pheromones” Jason was listening to her carefully but there was this sparkle of mischief in his eyes “But you already knew all that, didn’t you?” He laughed. Of course he knew, he had studied the human body from every conceivable angle. After all he had to as Batman’s perfect little soldier. “ Is your meta-side able to smell all these things?” “ Smelling is a capability among so many though it used to drive me nuts at the beginning. It is the wolf’s most developed sense. It permits to identify and locate things or persons and even tell about their mood or health.”

When he felt like she was ready to tell her more about herself, about her life, her history, Jason went to sit by her side in silence. “When I was a “wolf-cub” I used to have no control over all this. I could smell everything: all my surroundings, every people’s emotions. It felt as if my mind was invaded. I didn’t know who I was anymore, I couldn’t tell my feelings apart from all the others I could sense. It was awful.” “ How did you learn to control it?” “ I tried to isolate myself from as many people as possible. I thought that I should learn to channel few things first before trying to face a crowd of emotions. But that wasn’t what my mentor thought I should do. One morning, he woke me up, put spitting cobra venom in my eyes to render me temporarily blind and left me in the middle of a giant crowded market place and asked me to come back home. The first day I spent hours sobbing, looking for my way back, terrified. The second I cried. I was lost. The third I fell on my knees and screamed like crazy hoping he would come back to bring me back home. After four days I understood I could only count on myself so I got up and I pulled myself out of this mess. But of course I wasn’t welcomed back with a loving embrace ”

‘Eth Alth’Eban – Few years ago

Even though she could perceive some shades of blue and gold everything around her was still blurry. But she knew she was back. She knew it the moment she felt the humid air getting fresher as she was walking up the mosaic stairs, so cold under her wounded bare feet grazed by the days of walking. She knew it the second she smelled his distinct powerful animalistic odour. “ Four days” He just said with that disappointment in his voice “It took you four days.” She looked down with tears in her reddened blind eyes. But there weren’t tears of sadness. She had shed enough tears of sadness. Those were tears of anger. “I don’t know what I saw in you. You’re not that exceptional after all. Just another fragile little child from Gotham City who has lost mama and papa.” She tried to remain calm but she could feel her nails piercing her palms as she clenched her fists. “You’re not fit to be one of us and surely you don’t deserve your gift” A gift? What gift? To her it was more of a curse, a permanent affliction, an incurable disease, something she will carry like a burden for the rest of her life. “What? Did the trauma render you deaf? Mute?” She didn’t answer. She only gritted her teeth. She sensed him getting closer. His odour was more and more distinguishable as it was slowly invading her nostrils like a thick smoke. But there was something else, another smell, acrid and sour. She had smelled it before. She knew what it was. And she knew where it came from “Whatever. As long as you’re still capable of spreading your legs when I want, you may still have some use to me.”

Her hand slapped his face, scratching his cheek deep in the process. The force of the slap almost sent him flying. He tumbled, astonished, and caught hold of the table to cushion his fall. “You sick bastard. Have you any idea what you put me through? Can’t you even imagine for a second the pain I felt?” “ Am I supposed to feel guilty?” He tried to stand up she kicked him violently in the chest to keep him down on the floor. “ No because to feel guilty you must have a heart and we both know you don’t have one. You don’t care about anyone but yourself.” Her voice was a real growl, powerful and full of rage. It was coming from her entire body, making it shiver. However, he remained calm and emotionless as if her anger was leaving him indifferent. “ Affection makes one weak. It only ties your hands and feet. If you hadn’t waited for me you would have come back here on day one. You know I’m right. After all, isn’t the moment you realised I wouldn’t come what finally got you back on your feet and made you think rationally and not like a sad lost puppy?” With a simple yet powerful move she pushed the table away from him and right against a pillar. The impact broke it in pieces, reducing it to mere firewood. “Of course I was sad and lost. You abandoned me, blind and with nothing to defend myself!” She didn’t want him to get up. She sat on him and grabbed him by his clothes. “Perhaps I should do the same to you”

She smelled it again, so close from her. She could hear it even, this murky poisonous liquid swaying in his phial, the very same he used on her to deprive her of her eyesight. Though she could not truly see it, she grabbed it without any difficulty and uncorked it. Those days lost in the crime-infested and filthy market had taught her how to rely on her other senses. She then approached the liquid from her mentor’s face, ready to pour it down right in his eyes, as he had done to her. “ Put the phial down, [Y/N]. That’s a good girl.” He was not begging. It sounded as he was trying to control her and she hated it. “ Why? Do you want me to pity you? Spare you? Sorry but I’m a fast learner. Affection makes one weak. It only ties your hands and feet. And right now I don’t feel anything for you except a devouring hatred” “You won’t do it.” But she did, without any hesitation. She poured it entirely. He didn’t scream. He wasn’t that kind of man. Instead he just gritted his teeth to muffle the pain. And she enjoyed it, so much she let herself smile of satisfaction. But the satisfaction was brief as he suddenly started laughing. “ Finally. I knew you had it still in you, that awful beast, that monster lying in you” No he couldn’t appreciate this. He couldn’t be proud of this. She was hurting him. He was supposed to feel only pain. “Shut up!!!” She yelled as she threw him through the room only to rush towards him again. She pounced on him and started hit him hard again and again, screaming and shouting at him like a wild animal, until another smell, this time rather metallic and salted, came to her nose. He was bleeding and she had his blood on her hands. But she didn’t stopped. She continued. And he tried to defend himself but the rage was making her too strong “ Okay, [Y/N]. That’s enough. Calm down now.” He managed to say between two punches and he actually begged this time for that he knew what she was capable of when her eyes were starting to glow yellow. “ Calm down? No I won’t calm down. You brought this upon yourself. If you want to blame someone for it, blame yourself.” “ Stop it. You know what anger does to you.” Flashes of a terrible night came back to her. So much blood. Those screams. Those growls. “ Yes, I do. But I don’t care. Because right now all I want to do is kill you.” “ If you do it, we both know you’ll regret it.” Those voices … The poor girl is orphan now… I think trauma turned her mad… Perhaps we should send her to Arkham. Arkham. Arkham. Arkham. That word was echoing in her head. “Don’t let your anger control you. You control the demon inside of you not the other way around.” And she released him. Slowly. And she started crying as she cried that night, the night when it all began, the night when it all changed. “That’s it” He whispered to her ear, caressing her messy white hair.

“ So it wasn’t without any surprise that the next step of my training was to work on my anger issues.” She said to conclude her story though she had omitted to talk about her weird flashbacks and the voices in her head. Jason remained quiet even after that, with pity and sadness in his eyes. Who would have thought that a girl as young as her could have been through such a terrible ordeal. And how could a man torture a fifteen years old girl? Or abuse her like that? He was no mentor. He was a tyrant as well as a paedophile. The thought of his filthy hands on her body sickened him and made him want to find the bastard and fill his body with bullets. “ Why didn’t you kill him?” He asked as his eyes were suddenly darkened by anger “ Because, as crazy as it sounds, I have respect for the man. He was harsh but he pulled me out of the gutter when I needed help and he made me tougher. He taught me how to fight and to survive.”

The outlaw cooled down as he remembered the night he met Batman when he was just a street rat named Jason Todd, how he moved from Ma Gunn’s school for wayward boys to Wayne Manor, how he swapped an old red sweater for a green, red and yellow uniform, how he went from being a wheels thief to the sidekick of the world greatest detective, a man he respected and dared considered like a father even though his life with him wasn’t always easy. Strange how his story wasn’t so different from hers. “ It’s surprising how much we are alike you and I.” He confessed as he stared at her right in her greyish green eyes. “ I told you, Jason. We have more than one thing in common.” Without looking away from her, Jason slowly cupped her soft cheek. She let go under his caress, enjoying his tenderness as she closed briefly her eyes. He slightly smiled at her sudden docility and welcomed her in his arms before planting a kiss in her silky hair with a delicacy that agreeably surprised her. But she couldn’t allow herself to feel that good nor could she let herself grow fond of him. She had a mission. A mission she could not fail if she aimed to survive.

“You still smell, you know?” She said to voluntarily ruin the moment even though she didn’t want it to. By chance it only made him laugh. “I’m going to take a shower then” He slowly let go of her before kissing her again, this time close to the corner of her lips. She stood still for a brief moment, a bit confused by his gesture. He noticed it but he decided to use this moment to go. “You know, [Y/N].” He stopped on his way to the bathroom “You mentor was wrong. You are exceptional.” He declared with another sweet and sincere smile. Damn you, Jason Todd. Why do you have to make things so difficult? She thought as she dreamily touched the bit of skin next to her mouth where he had kissed her.

#red hood and the outlaws: loyalty

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neilchax · 7 years ago

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TRUTH OF FEELING

When my daughter Nicole was an infant, I read an essay suggesting that it might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because speech recognition and synthesis would soon render those abilities superfluous. My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter’s skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy.

It turned out that we and the essayist were both half correct: now that she’s an adult, Nicole can read as well as I can. But there is a sense in which she has lost the ability to write. She doesn’t dictate her messages and ask a virtual secretary to read back to her what she last said, the way that essayist predicted; Nicole subvocalizes, her retinal projector displays the words in her field of vision, and she makes revisions using a combination of gestures and eye movements. For all practical purposes, she can write. But take away the assistive software and give her nothing but a keyboard like the one I remain faithful to, and she’d have difficulty spelling out many of the words in this very sentence. Under those specific circumstances, English becomes a bit like a second language to her, one that she can speak fluently but can only barely write.

It may sound like I’m disappointed in Nicole’s intellectual achievements, but that’s absolutely not the case. She’s smart and dedicated to her job at an art museum when she could be earning more money elsewhere, and I’ve always been proud of her accomplishments. But there is still the past me who would have been appalled to see his daughter lose her ability to spell, and I can’t deny that I am continuous with him.

It’s been more than twenty years since I read that essay, and in that period our lives have undergone countless changes that I couldn’t have predicted. The most catastrophic one was when Nicole’s mother Angela declared that she deserved a more interesting life than the one we were giving her, and spent the next decade criss-crossing the globe. But the changes leading to Nicole’s current form of literacy were more ordinary and gradual: a succession of software gadgets that not only promised but in fact delivered utility and convenience, and I didn’t object to any of them at the times of their introduction.

So it hasn’t been my habit to engage in doomsaying whenever a new product is announced; I’ve welcomed new technology as much as anyone. But when Whetstone released its new search tool Remem, it raised concerns for me in a way none of its predecessors did.

Millions of people, some my age but most younger, have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”

Remem monitors your conversation for references to past events, and then displays video of that event in the lower left corner of your field of vision. If you say “remember dancing the conga at that wedding?”, Remem will bring up the video. If the person you’re talking to says “the last time we were at the beach,” Remem will bring up the video. And it’s not only for use when speaking with someone else; Remem also monitors your subvocalizations. If you read the words “the first Szechuan restaurant you ate at,” your vocal cords will move as if you’re reading aloud, and Remem will bring up the relevant video.

There’s no denying the usefulness of software that can actually answer the question “where did I put my keys?” But Whetstone is positioning Remem as more than a handy virtual assistant: they want it to take the place of your natural memory.

It was the summer of Jijingi’s thirteenth year when a European came to live in the village. The dusty harmattan winds had just begun blowing from the north when Sabe, the elder who was regarded as chief by all the local families, made the announcement.

Everyone’s initial reaction was alarm, of course. “What have we done wrong?” Jijingi’s father asked Sabe.

Europeans had first come to Tivland many years ago, and while some elders said one day they’d leave and life would return to the ways of the past, until that day arrived it was necessary for the Tiv to get along with them. This had meant many changes in the way the Tiv did things, but it had never meant Europeans living among them before. The usual reason for Europeans to come to the village was to collect taxes for the roads they had built; they visited some clans more often because the people refused to pay taxes, but that hadn’t happened in the Shangev clan. Sabe and the other clan elders had agreed that paying the taxes was the best strategy.

Sabe told everyone not to worry. “This European is a missionary; that means all he does is pray. He has no authority to punish us, but our making him welcome will please the men in the administration.”

He ordered two huts built for the missionary, a sleeping hut and a reception hut. Over the course of the next several days everyone took time off from harvesting the guinea-corn to help lay bricks, sink posts into the ground, weave grass into thatch for the roof. It was during the final step, pounding the floor, that the missionary arrived. His porters appeared first, the boxes they carried visible from a distance as they threaded their way between the cassava fields; the missionary himself was the last to appear, apparently exhausted even though he carried nothing. His name was Moseby, and he thanked everyone who had worked on the huts. He tried to help, but it quickly became clear that he didn’t know how to do anything, so eventually he just sat in the shade of a locust bean tree and wiped his head with a piece of cloth.

Jijingi watched the missionary with curiosity. The man opened one of his boxes and took out what at first looked like a block of wood, but then he split it open and Jijingi realized it was a tightly bound sheaf of papers. Jijingi had seen paper before; when the Europeans collected taxes, they gave paper in return so that the village had proof of what they’d paid. But the paper that the missionary was looking at was obviously of a different sort, and must have had some other purpose.

The man noticed Jijingi looking at him, and invited him to come closer. “My name is Moseby,” he said. “What is your name?”

“I am Jijingi, and my father is Orga of the Shangev clan.”

Moseby spread open the sheaf of paper and gestured toward it. “Have you heard the story of Adam?” he asked. “Adam was the first man. We are all children of Adam.”

“Here we are descendants of Shangev,” said Jijingi. “And everyone in Tivland is a descendant of Tiv.”

“Yes, but your ancestor Tiv was descended from Adam, just as my ancestors were. We are all brothers. Do you understand?”

The missionary spoke as if his tongue were too large for his mouth, but Jijingi could tell what he was saying. “Yes, I understand.”

Moseby smiled, and pointed at the paper. “This paper tells the story of Adam.”

“How can paper tell a story?”

“It is an art that we Europeans know. When a man speaks, we make marks on the paper. When another man looks at the paper later, he sees the marks and knows what sounds the first man made. In that way the second man can hear what the first man said.”

Jijingi remembered something his father had told him about old Gbegba, who was the most skilled in bushcraft. “Where you or I would see nothing but some disturbed grass, he can see that a leopard had killed a cane rat at that spot and carried it off,” his father said. Gbegba was able to look at the ground and know what had happened even though he had not been present. This art of the Europeans must be similar: those who were skilled in interpreting the marks could hear a story even if they hadn’t been there when it was told.

“Tell me the story that the paper tells,” he said.

Moseby told him a story about Adam and his wife being tricked by a snake. Then he asked Jijingi, “How do you like it?”

“You’re a poor storyteller, but the story was interesting enough.”

Moseby laughed. “You are right, I am not good at the Tiv language. But this is a good story. It is the oldest story we have. It was first told long before your ancestor Tiv was born.”

Jijingi was dubious. “That paper can’t be so old.”

“No, this paper is not. But the marks on it were copied from older paper. And those marks were copied from older paper. And so forth many times.”

That would be impressive, if true. Jijingi liked stories, and older stories were often the best. “How many stories do you have there?”

“Very many.” Moseby flipped through the sheaf of papers, and Jijingi could see each sheet was covered with marks from edge to edge; there must be many, many stories there.

“This art you spoke of, interpreting marks on paper; is it only for Europeans?”

“No, I can teach it to you. Would you like that?”

Cautiously, Jijingi nodded.

As a journalist, I have long appreciated the usefulness of lifelogging for determining the facts of the matter. There is scarcely a legal proceeding, criminal or civil, that doesn’t make use of someone’s lifelog, and rightly so. When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.

However, I’ve been much more skeptical about the use of lifelogging in purely personal situations. When lifelogging first became popular, there were couples who thought they could use it to settle arguments over who had actually said what, using the video record to prove they were right. But finding the right clip of video often wasn’t easy, and all but the most determined gave up on doing so. The inconvenience acted as a barrier, limiting the searching of lifelogs to those situations in which effort was warranted, namely situations in which justice was the motivating factor.

Now with Remem, finding the exact moment has become easy, and lifelogs that previously lay all but ignored are now being scrutinized as if they were crime scenes, thickly strewn with evidence for use in domestic squabbles.

I typically write for the news section, but I’ve written feature stories as well, and so when I pitched an article about the potential downsides of Remem to my managing editor, he gave me the go-ahead. My first interview was with a married couple whom I’ll call Joel and Deirdre, an architect and a painter, respectively. It wasn’t hard to get them talking about Remem.

“Joel is always saying that he knew it all along,” said Deirdre, “even when he didn’t. It used to drive me crazy, because I couldn’t get him to admit he used to believe something else. Now I can. For example, recently we were talking about the McKittridge kidnapping case.”

She sent me the video of one argument she had with Joel. My retinal projector displayed footage of a cocktail party; it’s from Deirdre’s point of view, and Joel is telling a number of people, “It was pretty clear that he was guilty from the day he was arrested.”

Deirdre’s voice: “You didn’t always think that. For months you argued that he was innocent.”

Joel shakes his head. “No, you’re misremembering. I said that even people who are obviously guilty deserve a fair trial.”

“That’s not what you said. You said he was being railroaded.”

“You’re thinking of someone else; that wasn’t me.”

“No, it was you. Look.” A separate video window opened up, an excerpt of her lifelog that she looked up and broadcast to the people they’ve been talking with. Within the nested video, Joel and Deirdre are sitting in a café, and Joel is saying, “He’s a scapegoat. The police needed to reassure the public, so they arrested a convenient suspect. Now he’s done for.” Deidre replies, “You don’t think there’s any chance of him being acquitted?” and Joel answers, “Not unless he can afford a high-powered defense team, and I’ll bet you he can’t. People in his position will never get a fair trial.”

I closed both windows, and Deirdre said, “Without Remem, I’d never be able to convince him that he changed his position. Now I have proof.”

“Fine, you were right that time,” said Joel. “But you didn’t have to do that in front of our friends.”

“You correct me in front of our friends all the time. You’re telling me I can’t do the same?”

Here was the line at which the pursuit of truth ceased to be an intrinsic good. When the only persons affected have a personal relationship with each other, other priorities are often more important, and a forensic pursuit of the truth could be harmful. Did it really matter whose idea it was to take the vacation that turned out so disastrously? Did you need to know which partner was more forgetful about completing errands the other person asked of them? I was no expert on marriage, but I knew what marriage counselors said: pinpointing blame wasn’t the answer. Instead, couples needed to acknowledge each other’s feelings and address their problems as a team.

Next I spoke with a spokesperson from Whetstone, Erica Meyers. For a while she gave me a typically corporate spiel about the benefits of Remem. “Making information more accessible is an intrinsic good,” she says. “Ubiquitous video has revolutionized law enforcement. Businesses become more effective when they adopt good record-keeping practices. The same thing happens to us as individuals when our memories become more accurate: we get better, not just at doing our jobs, but at living our lives.”

When I asked her about couples like Joel and Deirdre, she said, “If your marriage is solid, Remem isn’t going to hurt it. But if you’re the type of person who’s constantly trying to prove that you’re right and your spouse is wrong, then your marriage is going to be in trouble whether you use Remem or not.”

I conceded that she may have had a point in this particular case. But, I asked her, didn’t she think Remem created greater opportunities for those types of arguments to arise, even in solid marriages, by making it easier for people to keep score?

“Not at all,” she said. “Remem didn’t give them a scorekeeping mentality; they developed that on their own. Another couple could just as easily use Remem to realize that they’ve both misremembered things, and become more forgiving when that sort of mistake happens. I predict the latter scenario will be the more common one with our customers as a whole.”

I wished I could share Erica Meyers’ optimism, but I knew that new technology didn’t always bring out the best in people. Who hasn’t wished they could prove that their version of events was the correct one? I could easily see myself using Remem the way Deirdre did, and I wasn’t at all certain that doing so would be good for me. Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.

Moseby gave a sermon every seven days, on the day devoted to resting and brewing and drinking beer. He seemed to disapprove of the beer drinking, but he didn’t want to speak on one of the days of work, so the day of beer brewing was the only one left. He talked about the European god, and told people that following his rules would improve their lives, but his explanations of how that would do so weren’t particularly persuasive.

But Moseby also had some skill at dispensing medicine, and he was willing to learn how to work in the fields, so gradually people grew more accepting of him, and Jijingi’s father let him visit Moseby occasionally to learn the art of writing. Moseby offered to teach the other children as well, and for a time Jijingi’s age-mates came along, mostly to prove to each other that they weren’t afraid of being near a European. Before long the other boys grew bored and left, but because Jijingi remained interested in writing and his father thought it would keep the Europeans happy, he was eventually permitted to go every day.

Moseby explained to Jijingi how each sound a person spoke could be indicated with different marks on the paper. The marks were arranged in rows like plants in a field; you looked at the marks as if you were walking down a row, made the sound each mark indicated, and you would find yourself speaking what the original person had said. Moseby showed him how to make each of the different marks on a sheet of paper, using a tiny wooden rod that had a core of soot.

In a typical lesson, Moseby would speak, and then write what he had said: “When night comes I shall sleep.” Tugh mba a ile yo me yav. “There are two persons.” Ioruv mban mba uhar. Jijingi carefully copied the writing on his sheet of paper, and when he was done, Moseby would look at it.

“Very good. But you need to leave spaces when you write.”

“I have.” Jijingi pointed at the gap between each row.

“No, that is not what I mean. Do you see the spaces within each line?” He pointed at his own paper.

Jijingi understood. “Your marks are clumped together, while mine are arranged evenly.”

“These are not just clumps of marks. They are… I do not know what you call them.” He picked up a thin sheaf of paper from his table and flipped through it. “I do not see it here. Where I come from, we call them ‘words.’ When we write, we leave spaces between the words.”

“But what are words?”

“How can I explain it?” He thought a moment. “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. That’s why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused:Anyom a ou kuma a me?

“But you speak slowly because you’re a foreigner. I’m Tiv, so I don’t pause when I speak. Shouldn’t my writing be the same?”

“It does not matter how fast you speak. Words are the same whether you speak quickly or slowly.”

“Then why did you say you pause after each word?”

“That is the easiest way to find them. Try saying this very slowly.” He pointed at what he’d just written.

Jijingi spoke very slowly, the way a man might when trying to hide his drunkenness. “Why is there no space in between an and yom?”

“Anyom is one word. You do not pause in the middle of it.”

“But I wouldn’t pause after anyom either.”

Moseby sighed. “I will think more about how to explain what I mean. For now, just leave spaces in the places where I leave spaces.”

What a strange art writing was. When sowing a field, it was best to have the seed yams spaced evenly; Jijingi’s father would have beaten him if he’d clumped the yams the way the Moseby clumped his marks on paper. But he had resolved to learn this art as best he could, and if that meant clumping his marks, he would do so.

It was only many lessons later that Jijingi finally understood where he should leave spaces, and what Moseby meant when he said “word.” You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.

Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person’s mouth hadn’t changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn’t known it until now.

The ease of searching that Remem provides is impressive enough, but that merely scratches the surface of what Whetstone sees as the product’s potential. When Deirdre fact-checked her husband’s previous statements, she was posing explicit queries to Remem. But Whetstone expects that, as people become accustomed to their product, queries will take the place of ordinary acts of recall, and Remem will be integrated into their very thought processes. Once that happens, we will become cognitive cyborgs, effectively incapable of misremembering anything; digital video stored on error-corrected silicon will take over the role once filled by our fallible temporal lobes.

What might it be like to have a perfect memory? Arguably the individual with the best memory ever documented was Solomon Shereshevskii, who lived in Russia during the first half of the twentieth century. The psychologists who tested him found that he could hear a series of words or numbers once and remember it months or even years later. With no knowledge of Italian, Shereshevskii was able to quote stanzas of The Divine Comedy that had been read to him fifteen years earlier.

But having a perfect memory wasn’t the blessing one might imagine it to be. Reading a passage of text evoked so many images in Shereshevskii’s mind that he often couldn’t focus on what it actually said, and his awareness of innumerable specific examples made it difficult for him to understand abstract concepts. At times, he tried to deliberately forget things. He wrote down numbers he no longer wanted to remember on slips of paper and then burnt them, a kind of slash-and-burn approach to clearing out the undergrowth of his mind, but to no avail.

When I raised the possibility that a perfect memory might be a handicap to Whetstone’s spokesperson, Erica Meyers, she had a ready reply. “This is no different from the concerns people used to have about retinal projectors,” she said. “They worried that seeing updates constantly would be distracting or overwhelming, but we’ve all adapted to them.”

I didn’t mention that not everyone considered that a positive development.

“And Remem is entirely customizable,” she continued. “If at any time you find it’s doing too many searches for your needs, you can decrease its level of responsiveness. But according to our customer analytics, our users haven’t been doing that. As they become more comfortable with it, they’re finding that Remem becomes more helpful the more responsive it is.”

But even if Remem wasn’t constantly crowding your field of vision with unwanted imagery of the past, I wondered if there weren’t issues raised simply by having that imagery be perfect.

“Forgive and forget” goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that was all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions wasn’t so straightforward. In most cases we had to forget a little bit before we could forgive; when we no longer experienced the pain as fresh, the insult was easier to forgive, which in turn made it less memorable, and so on. It was this psychological feedback loop that made initially infuriating offences seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.

What I feared was that Remem would make it impossible for this feedback loop to get rolling. By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that’s needed for forgiveness to begin. I thought back to what Erica Meyers said about Remem’s inability to hurt solid marriages. Implicit in that assertion was a claim about what qualified as a solid marriage. If someone’s marriage was built on—as ironic as it might sound—a cornerstone of forgetfulness, what right did Whetstone have to shatter that?

The issue wasn’t confined to marriages; all sorts of relationships rely on forgiving and forgetting. My daughter Nicole has always been strong-willed; rambunctious when she was a child, openly defiant as an adolescent. She and I had many furious arguments during her teen years, arguments that we have mostly been able to put behind us, and now our relationship is pretty good. If we’d had Remem, would we still be speaking to each other?

I don’t mean to say that forgetting is the only way to mend relationships. While I can no longer recall most of the arguments Nicole and I had—and I’m grateful that I can’t—one of the arguments I remember clearly is one that spurred me to be a better father.

It was when Nicole was sixteen, a junior in high school. It had been two years since her mother Angela had left, probably the two hardest years of both our lives. I don’t remember what started the argument—something trivial, no doubt—but it escalated and before long Nicole was taking her anger at Angela out on me.

“You’re the reason she left! You drove her away! You can leave too, for all I care. I sure as hell would be better off without you.” And to demonstrate her point, she stormed out of the house.

I knew it wasn’t premeditated malice on her part—I don’t think she engaged in much premeditation in anything during that phase of her life—but she couldn’t have come up with a more hurtful accusation if she’d tried. I’d been devastated by Angela’s departure, and I was constantly wondering what I could have done differently to keep her.

Nicole didn’t come back until the next day, and that night was one of soul searching for me. While I didn’t believe I was responsible for her mother leaving us, Nicole’s accusation still served as a wake-up call. I hadn’t been conscious of it, but I realized that I had been thinking of myself as the greatest victim of Angela’s departure, wallowing in self-pity over just how unreasonable my situation was. It hadn’t even been my idea to have children; it was Angela who’d wanted to be a parent, and now she had left me holding the bag. What sane world would leave me with sole responsibility for raising an adolescent girl? How could a job that was so difficult be entrusted to someone with no experience whatsoever?

Nicole’s accusation made me realize her predicament was worse than mine. At least I had volunteered for this duty, albeit long ago and without full appreciation for what I was getting into. Nicole had been drafted into her role, with no say whatsoever. If there was anyone who had a right to be resentful, it was her. And while I thought I’d been doing a good job of being a father, obviously I needed to do better.

I turned myself around. Our relationship didn’t improve overnight, but over the years I was able to work myself back into Nicole’s good graces. I remember the way she hugged me at her college graduation, and I realized my years of effort had paid off.

Would those years of repair have been possible with Remem? Even if each of us could have refrained from throwing the other’s bad behavior in their faces, the opportunity to privately rewatch video of our arguments seems like it could be pernicious. Vivid reminders of the way she and I yelled at each other in the past might have kept our anger fresh, and prevented us from rebuilding our relationship.

Jijingi wanted to write down some of the stories of where the Tiv people came from, but the storytellers spoke rapidly, and he wasn’t able to write fast enough to keep up with them. Moseby said he would get better with practice, but Jijingi despaired that he’d ever become fast enough.

Then, one summer a European woman named Reiss came to visit the village. Moseby said she was “a person who learns about other people” but could not explain what that meant, only that she wanted to learn about Tivland. She asked questions of everyone, not just the elders but young men, too, even women and children, and she wrote down everything they told her. She didn’t try to get anyone to adopt European practices; where Moseby had insisted that there were no such thing as curses and that everything was God’s will, Reiss asked about how curses worked, and listened attentively to explanations of how your kin on your father’s side could curse you while your kin on your mother’s side could protect you from curses.

One evening Kokwa, the best storyteller in the village, told the story of how the Tiv people split into different lineages, and Reiss had written it down exactly as he told it. Later she had recopied the story using a machine she poked at noisily with her fingers, so that she had a copy that was clean and easy to read. When Jijingi asked if she would make another copy for him, she agreed, much to his excitement.

The paper version of the story was curiously disappointing. Jijingi remembered that when he had first learned about writing, he’d imagined it would enable him to see a storytelling performance as vividly as if he were there. But writing didn’t do that. When Kokwa told the story, he didn’t merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.

Jijingi was still glad to have the paper version, and would read it from time to time. It was a good story, worthy of being recorded on paper. Not everything written on paper was so worthy. During his sermons Moseby would read aloud stories from his book, and they were often good stories, but he also read aloud words he had written down just a few days before, and those were often not stories at all, merely claims that learning more about the European god would improve the lives of the Tiv people.

One day, when Moseby had been eloquent, Jijingi complimented him. “I know you think highly of all your sermons, but today’s sermon was a good one.”

“Thank you,” said Moseby, smiling. After a moment, he asked, “Why do you say I think highly of all my sermons?”

“Because you expect that people will want to read them many years from now.”

“I don’t expect that. What makes you think that?”

“You write them all down before you even deliver them. Before even one person has heard a sermon, you have written it down for future generations.”

Moseby laughed. “No, that is not why I write them down.”

“Why, then?” He knew it wasn’t for people far away to read them, because sometimes messengers came to the village to deliver paper to Moseby, and he never sent his sermons back with them.

“I write the words down so I do not forget what I want to say when I give the sermon.”

‘How could you forget what you want to say? You and I are speaking right now, and neither of us needs paper to do so.”

“A sermon is different from conversation.” Moseby paused to consider. “I want to be sure I give my sermons as well as possible. I won’t forget what I want to say, but I might forget the best way to say it. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry. But writing the words down does more than help me remember. It helps me think.”

“How does writing help you think?”

“That is a good question,” he said. “It is strange, isn’t it? I do not know how to explain it, but writing helps me decide what I want to say. Where I come from, there’s a very old proverb: verba volant, scripta manent. In Tiv you would say, ‘spoken words fly away, written words remain.’ Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Jijingi said, just to be polite; it made no sense at all. The missionary wasn’t old enough to be senile, but his memory must be terrible and he didn’t want to admit it. Jijingi told his age-mates about this, and they joked about it amongst themselves for days. Whenever they exchanged gossip, they would add, “Will you remember that? This will help you,” and mimic Moseby writing at his table.

On an evening the following year, Kokwa announced he would tell the story of how the Tiv split into different lineages. Jijingi brought out the paper version he had, so he could read the story at the same time Kokwa told it. Sometimes he could follow along, but it was often confusing because Kokwa’s words didn’t match what was written on the paper. After Kokwa was finished, Jijingi said to him, “You didn’t tell the story the same way you told it last year.”

“Nonsense,” said Kokwa. “When I tell a story it doesn’t change, no matter how much time passes. Ask me to tell it twenty years from today, and I will tell it exactly the same.”

Jijingi pointed at the paper he held. “This paper is the story you told last year, and there were many differences.” He picked one he remembered. “Last time you said, ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves.’ This time you said, ‘they made slaves of the women, but they did not stop there: they even made slaves of the children.’”

“That’s the same.”

“It is the same story, but you’ve changed the way you tell it.”

“No,” said Kokwa, “I told it just as I told it before.”

Jijingi didn’t want to try to explain what words were. Instead he said, “If you told it as you did before, you would say ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves’ every time.”

For a moment Kokwa stared at him, and then he laughed. “Is this what you think is important, now that you’ve learned the art of writing?”

Sabe, who had been listening to them, chided Kokwa. “It’s not your place to judge Jijingi. The hare favors one food, the hippo favors another. Let each spend his time as he pleases.”

“Of course, Sabe, of course,” said Kokwa, but he threw a derisive glance at Jijingi.

Afterwards, Jijingi remembered the proverb Moseby had mentioned. Even though Kokwa was telling the same story, he might arrange the words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible, but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words. Once he found the one he wanted, he could hold on to it for as long as he needed.

Out of curiosity, Jijingi tried imagining he had to deliver a sermon, and began writing down what he would say. Seated on the root of a mango tree with the notebook Moseby had given him, he composed a sermon on tsav, the quality that enabled some men to have power over others, and a subject which Moseby hadn’t understood and had dismissed as foolishness. He read his first attempt to one of his age-mates, who pronounced it terrible, leading them to have a brief shoving match, but afterwards Jijingi had to admit his age-mate was right. He tried writing out his sermon a second time and then a third before he became tired of it and moved on to other topics.

As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant; writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.

Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory—knowledge of general facts—and episodic memory—recollection of personal experiences. We’ve been using technological supplements for semantic memory ever since the invention of writing: first books, then search engines. By contrast, we’ve historically resisted such aids when it comes to episodic memory; few people have ever kept as many diaries or photo albums as they did ordinary books. The obvious reason is convenience; if we wanted a book on the birds of North America, we could consult one that an ornithologist has written, but if we wanted a daily diary, we had to write it for ourselves. But I also wonder if another reason is that, subconsciously, we regarded our episodic memories as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them, to relegate them to books on a shelf or files on a computer.

That may be about to change. For years parents have been recording their children’s every moment, so even if children weren’t wearing personal cams, their lifelogs were effectively already being compiled. Now parents are having their children wear retinal projectors at younger and younger ages so they can reap the benefits of assistive software agents sooner. Imagine what will happen if children begin using Remem to access those lifelogs: their mode of cognition will diverge from ours because the act of recall will be different. Rather than thinking of an event from her past and seeing it with her mind’s eye, a child will subvocalize a reference to it and watch video footage with her physical eyes. Episodic memory will become entirely technologically mediated.

An obvious drawback to such reliance is the possibility that people might become virtual amnesiacs whenever the software crashes. But just as worrying to me as the prospect of technological failure was that of technological success: how will it change a person’s conception of herself when she’s only seen her past through the unblinking eye of a video camera? Just as there’s a feedback loop in softening harsh memories, there’s also one at work in the romanticization of childhood memories, and disrupting that process will have consequences.

The earliest birthday I remember is my fourth; I remember blowing out the candles on my cake, the thrill of tearing the wrapping paper off the presents. There’s no video of the event, but there are snapshots in the family album, and they are consistent with what I remember. In fact, I suspect I no longer remember the day itself. It’s more likely that I manufactured the memory when I was first shown the snapshots and over time, I’ve imbued it with the emotion I imagine I felt that day. Little by little, over repeated instances of recall, I’ve created a happy memory for myself.

Another of my earliest memories is of playing on the living room rug, pushing toy cars around, while my grandmother worked at her sewing machine; she would occasionally turn and smile warmly at me. There are no photos of that moment, so I know the recollection is mine and mine alone. It is a lovely, idyllic memory. Would I want to be presented with actual footage of that afternoon? No; absolutely not.

Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, “On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.” Our memories are private autobiographies, and that afternoon with my grandmother features prominently in mine because of the feelings associated with it. What if video footage revealed that my grandmother’s smile was in fact perfunctory, that she was actually frustrated because her sewing wasn’t going well? What’s important to me about that memory is the happiness I associated with it, and I wouldn’t want that jeopardized.

It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn’t capture the emotional dimension of events. As far as the camera was concerned, that afternoon with my grandmother would be indistinguishable from a hundred others. And if I’d grown up with access to all the video footage, there’d have been no way for me to assign more emotional weight to any particular day, no nucleus around which nostalgia could accrete.

And what will the consequences be when people can claim to remember their infancy? I could readily imagine a situation where, if you ask a young person what her earliest memory is, she will simply look baffled; after all, she has video dating back to the day of her birth. The inability to remember the first few years of one’s life—what psychologists call childhood amnesia—might soon be a thing of the past. No more would parents tell their children anecdotes beginning with the words “You don’t remember this because you were just a toddler when it happened.” It’ll be as if childhood amnesia is a characteristic of humanity’s childhood, and in ouroboric fashion, our youth will vanish from our memories.

Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children’s ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do of my imperfect, organic memories.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.

But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of selves? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

When Jijingi was twenty, an officer from the administration came to the village to speak with Sabe. He had brought with him a young Tiv man who had attended the mission school in Katsina-Ala. The administration wanted to have a written record of all the disputes brought before the tribal courts, so they were assigning each chief one of these youths to act as a scribe. Sabe had Jijingi come forward, and to the officer he said, “I know you don’t have enough scribes for all of Tivland. Jijingi here has learned to write; he can act as our scribe, and you can send your boy to another village.” The officer tested Jijingi’s ability to write, but Moseby had taught him well, and eventually the officer agreed to have him be Sabe’s scribe.

After the officer had left, Jijingi asked Sabe why he hadn’t wanted the boy from Katsina-Ala to be his scribe.

“No one who comes from the mission school can be trusted,” said Sabe.

“Why not? Did the Europeans make them liars?”

“They’re partly to blame, but so are we. When the Europeans collected boys for the mission school years ago, most elders gave them the ones they wanted to get rid of, the layabouts and malcontents. Now those boys have returned, and they feel no kinship with anyone. They wield their knowledge of writing like a long gun; they demand their chiefs find them wives, or else they’ll write lies about them and have the Europeans depose them.”

Jijingi knew a boy who was always complaining and looking for ways to avoid work; it would be a disaster if someone like him had power over Sabe. “Can’t you tell the Europeans about this?”

“Many have,” Sabe answered. “It was Maisho of the Kwande clan who warned me about the scribes; they were installed in Kwande villages first. Maisho was fortunate that the Europeans believed him instead of his scribe’s lies, but he knows of other chiefs who were not so lucky; the Europeans often believe paper over people. I don’t wish to take the chance.” He looked at Jijingi seriously. “You are my kin, Jijingi, and kin to everyone in this village. I trust you to write down what I say.”

“Yes, Sabe.”

Tribal court was held every month, from morning until late afternoon for three days in a row, and it always attracted an audience, sometimes one so large that Sabe had to demand everyone sit to allow the breeze to reach the center of the circle. Jijingi sat next to Sabe and recorded the details of each dispute in a book the officer had left. It was a good job; he was paid out of the fees collected from the disputants, and he was given not just a chair but a small table too, which he could use for writing even when court wasn’t in session. The complaints Sabe heard were varied—one might be about a stolen bicycle, another might be about whether a man was responsible for his neighbor’s crops failing—but most had to do with wives. For one such dispute, Jijingi wrote down the following:

Umem’s wife Girgi has run away from home and gone back to her kin. Her kinsman Anongo has tried to convince her to stay with her husband, but Girgi refuses, and there is no more Anongo can do. Umem demands the return of the £11 he paid as bridewealth. Anongo says he has no money at the moment, and moreover that he was only paid £6.

Sabe requested witnesses for both sides. Anongo says he has witnesses, but they have gone on a trip. Umem produces a witness, who is sworn in. He testifies that he himself counted the £11 that Umem paid to Anongo.

Sabe asks Girgi to return to her husband and be a good wife, but she says she has had all that she can stand of him. Sabe instructs Anongo to repay Umem £11, the first payment to be in three months when his crops are saleable. Anongo agrees.

It was the final dispute of the day, by which time Sabe was clearly tired. “Selling vegetables to pay back bridewealth,” he said afterwards, shaking his head. “This wouldn’t have happened when I was a boy.”

Jijingi knew what he meant. In the past, the elders said, you conducted exchanges with similar items: if you wanted a goat, you could trade chickens for it; if you wanted to marry a woman, you promised one of your kinswomen to her family. Then the Europeans said they would no longer accept vegetables as payment for taxes, insisting that it be paid in coin. Before long, everything could be exchanged for money; you could use it to buy everything from a calabash to a wife. The elders considered it absurd.

“The old ways are vanishing,” agreed Jijingi. He didn’t say that young people preferred things this way, because the Europeans had also decreed that bridewealth could only be paid if the woman consented to the marriage. In the past, a young woman might be promised to an old man with leprous hands and rotting teeth, and have no choice but to marry him. Now a woman could marry the man she favored, as long as he could afford to pay the bridewealth. Jijingi himself was saving money to marry.

Moseby came to watch sometimes, but he found the proceedings confusing, and often asked Jijingi questions afterwards.

“For example, there was the dispute between Umem and Anongo over how much bridewealth was owed. Why was only the witness sworn in?” asked Moseby.

“To ensure that he said precisely what happened.”

“But if Umem and Anongo were sworn in, that would have ensured they said precisely what happened too. Anongo was able to lie because he was not sworn in.”

Anongo didn’t lie,” said Jijingi. “He said what he considered right, just as Umem did.”

“But what Anongo said wasn’t the same as what the witness said.”

“But that doesn’t mean he was lying.” Then Jijingi remembered something about the European language, and understood Moseby’s confusion. “Our language has two words for what in your language is called ‘true.’ There is what’s right, mimi, and what’s precise, vough. In a dispute the principals say what they consider right; they speak mimi. The witnesses, however, are sworn to say precisely what happened; they speak vough. When Sabe has heard what happened can he decide what action is mimi for everyone. But it’s not lying if the principals don’t speak vough, as long as they speakmimi.”

Moseby clearly disapproved. “In the land I come from, everyone who testifies in court must swear to speak vough, even the principals.”

Jijingi didn’t see the point of that, but all he said was, “Every tribe has its own customs.”

“Yes, customs may vary, but the truth is the truth; it doesn’t change from one person to another. And remember what the Bible says: the truth shall set you free.”

“I remember,” said Jijingi. Moseby had said that it was knowing God’s truth that had made the Europeans so successful. There was no denying their wealth or power, but who knew what was the cause?

In order to write about Remem, it was only fair that I try it out myself. The problem was that I didn’t have a lifelog for it to index; typically I only activated my personal cam when I was conducting an interview or covering an event. But I’ve certainly spent time in the presence of people who kept lifelogs, and I could make use of what they’d recorded. While all lifelogging software has privacy controls in place, most people also grant basic sharing rights: if your actions were recorded in their lifelog, you have access to the footage in which you’re present. So I launched an agent to assemble a partial lifelog from the footage others had recorded, using my GPS history as the basis for the query. Over the course of a week, my request propagated through social networks and public video archives, and I was rewarded with snippets of video ranging from a few seconds in length to a few hours: not just security-cam footage but excerpts from the lifelogs of friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers.

The resulting lifelog was of course highly fragmentary compared to what I would have had if I’d been recording video myself, and the footage was all from a third-person perspective rather than the first-person that most lifelogs have, but Remem was able to work with that. I expected that coverage would be thickest in the later years, simply due to the increasing popularity of lifelogs. It was somewhat to my surprise, then, that when I looked at a graph of the coverage, I found a bump in the coverage over a decade ago. Nicole had been keeping a lifelog since she was a teenager, so an unexpectedly large segment of my domestic life was present.

I was initially a bit uncertain of how to test Remem, since I obviously couldn’t ask it to bring up video of an event I didn’t remember. I figured I’d start out with something I did remember. I subvocalized, “The time Vince told me about his trip to Palau.”

My retinal projector displayed a window in the lower left corner of my field of vision: I’m having lunch with my friends Vincent and Jeremy. Vincent didn’t maintain a lifelog either, so the footage was from Jeremy’s point of view. I listened to Vincent rave about scuba diving for a minute.

Next I tried something that I only vaguely remembered. “The dinner banquet when I sat between Deborah and Lyle.” I didn’t remember who else was sitting at the table, and wondered if Remem could help me identify them.

Sure enough, Deborah had been recording that evening, and with her video I was able to use a recognition agent to identity everyone sitting across from us.

After those initial successes, I had a run of failures; not surprising, considering the gaps in the lifelog. But over the course of an hour-long trip survey of past events, Remem’s performance was generally impressive.

Finally it seemed time for me to try Remem on some memories that were more emotionally freighted. My relationship with Nicole felt strong enough now for me to safely revisit the fights we’d had when she was young. I figured I’d start with the argument I remembered clearly, and work backwards from there.

I subvocalized, “The time Nicole yelled at me ‘you’re the reason she left.’”

The window displays the kitchen of the house we lived in when Nicole was growing up. The footage is from Nicole’s point of view, and I’m standing in front of the stove. It’s obvious we’re fighting.

“You’re the reason she left. You can leave too, for all I care. I sure as hell would be better off without you.”

The words were just as I remembered them, but it wasn’t Nicole saying them.

It was me.

My first thought was that it must be a fake, that Nicole had edited the video to put her words into my mouth. She must have noticed my request for access to her lifelog footage, and concocted this to teach me a lesson. Or perhaps it was a film she had created to show her friends, to reinforce the stories she told about me. But why was she still so angry at me, that she would do such a thing? Hadn’t we gotten past this?

I started skimming through the video, looking for inconsistencies that would indicate where the edited footage had been spliced in. The subsequent footage showed Nicole running out of the house, just as I remembered, so there wouldn’t be signs of inconsistency there. I rewound the video and started watching the preceding argument.

Initially I was angry as I watched, angry at Nicole for going to such lengths to create this lie, because the preceding footage was all consistent with me being the one who yelled at her. Then some of what I was saying in the video began to sound queasily familiar: complaining about being called to her school again because she’d gotten into trouble, accusing her of spending time with the wrong crowd. But this wasn’t the context in which I’d said those things, was it? I had been voicing my concern, not berating her. Nicole must have adapted things I’d said elsewhere to make her slanderous video more plausible. That was the only explanation, right?

I asked Remem to examine the video’s watermark, and it reported the video was unmodified. I saw that Remem had suggested a correction in my search terms: where I had said “the time Nicole yelled at me,” it offered “the time I yelled at Nicole.” The correction must have been displayed at the same time as the initial search result, but I hadn’t noticed. I shut down Remem in disgust, furious at the product. I was about to search for information on forging a digital watermark to prove this video was faked, but I stopped myself, recognizing it as an act of desperation.

I would have testified, hand on a stack of Bibles or using any oath required of me, that it was Nicole who’d accused me of being the reason her mother left us. My recollection of that argument was as clear as any memory I had, but that wasn’t the only reason I found the video hard to believe; it was also my knowledge that—whatever my faults or imperfections—I was never the kind of father who could say such a thing to his child.

Yet here was digital video proving that I had been exactly that kind of father. And while I wasn’t that man anymore, I couldn’t deny that I was continuous with him.

Even more telling was the fact that for many years I had successfully hidden the truth from myself. Earlier I said that the details we choose to remember are a reflection of our personalities. What did it say about me that I put those words in Nicole’s mouth instead of mine?

I remembered that argument as being a turning point for me. I had imagined a narrative of redemption and self-improvement in which I was the heroic single father, rising to meet the challenge. But the reality was…what? How much of what had happened since then could I take credit for?

I restarted Remem and began looking at video of Nicole’s graduation from college. That was an event I had recorded myself, so I had footage of Nicole’s face, and she seemed genuinely happy in my presence. Was she hiding her true feelings so well that I couldn’t detect them? Or, if our relationship had actually improved, how had that happened? I had obviously been a much worse father fourteen years ago than I’d thought; it would be tempting to conclude I had come farther to reach where I currently was, but I couldn’t trust my perceptions anymore. Did Nicole even have positive feelings about me now?

I wasn’t going to try using Remem to answer this question; I needed to go to the source. I called Nicole and left a message saying I wanted to talk to her, and asking if I could come over to her apartment that evening.

It was a few years later that Sabe began attending a series of meetings of all the chiefs in the Shangev clan. He explained to Jijingi that the Europeans no longer wished to deal with so many chiefs, and were demanding that all of Tivland be divided into eight groups they called ‘septs.’ As a result, Sabe and the other chiefs had to discuss who the Shangev clan would join with. Although there was no need for a scribe, Jijingi was curious to hear the deliberations and asked Sabe if he might accompany him, and Sabe agreed.

Jijingi had never seen so many elders in one place before; some were even-tempered and dignified like Sabe, while others were loud and full of bluster. They argued for hours on end.

In the evening after Jijingi had returned, Moseby asked him what it had been like. Jijingi sighed. “Even if they’re not yelling, they’re fighting like wildcats.”

“Who does Sabe think you should join?”

“We should join with the clans that we’re most closely related to; that’s the Tiv way. And since Shangev was the son of Kwande, our clan should join with the Kwande clan, who live to the south.”

“That makes sense,” said Moseby. “So why is there disagreement?”

“The members of the Shangev clan don’t all live next to each other. Some live on the farmland in the west, near the Jechira clan, and the elders there are friendly with the Jechira elders. They’d like the Shangev clan to join the Jechira clan, because then they’d have more influence in the resulting sept.”

“I see.” Moseby thought for a moment. “Could the western Shangev join a different sept from the southern Shangev?”

Jijingi shook his head. “We Shangev all have one father, so we should all remain together. All the elders agree on that.”

“But if lineage is so important, how can the elders from the west argue that the Shangev clan ought to join with the Jechira clan?”

“That’s what the disagreement was about. The elders from the west are claiming Shangev was the son of Jechira.”

“Wait, you don’t know who Shangev’s parents were?”

“Of course we know! Sabe can recite his ancestors all the way back to Tiv himself. The elders from the west are merely pretending that Shangev was Jechira’s son because they’d benefit from joining with the Jechira clan.”

“But if the Shangev clan joined with the Kwande clan, wouldn’t your elders benefit?”

“Yes, but Shangev was Kwande’s son.” Then Jijingi realized what Moseby was implying. “You think our elders are the ones pretending!”

“No, not at all. It just sounds like both sides have equally good claims, and there’s no way to tell who’s right.”

“Sabe’s right.”

“Of course,” said Moseby. “But how can you get the others to admit that? In the land I come from, many people write down their lineage on paper. That way we can trace our ancestry precisely, even many generations in the past.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the lineages in your Bible, tracing Abraham back to Adam.”

“Of course. But even apart from the Bible, people have recorded their lineages. When people want to find out who they’re descended from, they can consult paper. If you had paper, the other elders would have to admit that Sabe was right.”

That was a good point, Jijingi admitted. If only the Shangev clan had been using paper long ago. Then something occurred to him. “How long ago did the Europeans first come to Tivland?”

“I’m not sure. At least forty years ago, I think.”

“Do you think they might have written down anything about the Shangev clan’s lineage when they first arrived?”

Moseby looked thoughtful. “Perhaps. The administration definitely keeps a lot of records. If there are any, they’d be stored at the government station in Katsina-Ala.”

A truck carried goods along the motor road into Katsina-Ala every fifth day, when the market was being held, and the next market would be the day after tomorrow. If he left tomorrow morning, he could reach the motor road in time to get a ride. “Do you think they would let me see them?”

“It might be easier if you have a European with you,” said Moseby, smiling. “Shall we take a trip?”

Nicole opened the door to her apartment and invited me in. She was obviously curious about why I’d come. “So what did you want to talk about?”

I wasn’t sure how to begin. “This is going to sound strange.”

“Okay,” she said.

I told her about viewing my partial lifelog using Remem, and seeing the argument we’d had when she was sixteen that ended with me yelling at her and her leaving the house. “Do you remember that day?”

“Of course I do.” She looked uncomfortable, uncertain of where I was going with this.

“I remembered it too, or at least I thought I did. But I remembered it differently. The way I remembered it, it was you who said it to me.”

“Me who said what?”

“I remembered you telling me that I could leave for all you cared, and that you’d be better off without me.”

Nicole stared at me for a long time. “All these years, that’s how you’ve remembered that day?”

“Yes, until today.”

“That’d almost be funny if it weren’t so sad.”

I felt sick to my stomach. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Sorry you said it, or sorry that you imagined me saying it?”

“Both.”

“Well you should be! You know how that made me feel?”

“I can’t imagine. I know I felt terrible when I thought you had said it to me.”

“Except that was just something you made up. It actually happened to me.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Fucking typical.”

That hurt to hear. “Is it? Really?”

“Sure,” she said. “You’re always acting like you’re the victim, like you’re the good guy who deserves to be treated better than you are.”

“You make me sound like I’m delusional.”

“Not delusional. Just blind and self-absorbed.”

I bristled a little. “I’m trying to apologize here.”

“Right, right. This is about you.”

“No, you’re right, I’m sorry.” I waited until Nicole gestured for me to go on. “I guess I am…blind and self-absorbed. The reason it’s hard for me to admit that is that I thought I had opened my eyes and gotten over that.”

She frowned. “What?”

I told her how I felt like I had turned around as a father and rebuilt our relationship, culminating in a moment of bonding at her college graduation. Nicole wasn’t openly derisive, but her expression caused me to stop talking; it was obvious I was embarrassing myself.

“Did you still hate me at graduation?” I asked. “Was I completely making it up that you and I got along then?”

“No, we did get along at graduation. But it wasn’t because you had magically become a good father.”

“What was it, then?”

She paused, took a deep breath, and then said, “I started seeing a therapist when I went to college.” She paused again. “She pretty much saved my life.”

My first thought was, why would Nicole need a therapist? I pushed that down and said, “I didn’t know you were in therapy.”

“Of course you didn’t; you were the last person I would have told. Anyway, by the time I was a senior, she had convinced me that I was better off not staying angry at you. That’s why you and I got along so well at graduation.”

So I had indeed fabricated a narrative that bore little resemblance to reality. Nicole had done all the work, and I had done none.

“I guess I don’t really know you.”

She shrugged. “You know me as well as you need to.”

That hurt, too, but I could hardly complain. “You deserve better,” I said.

Nicole gave a brief, rueful laugh. “You know, when I was younger, I used to daydream about you saying that. But now…well, it’s not as if it fixes everything, is it?”

I realized that I’d been hoping she would forgive me then and there, and then everything would be good. But it would take more than my saying sorry to repair our relationship.

Something occurred to me. “I can’t change the things I did, but at least I can stop pretending I didn’t do them. I’m going to use Remem to get a honest picture at myself, take a kind of personal inventory.”

Nicole looked at me, gauging my sincerity. “Fine,” she said. “But let’s be clear: you don’t come running to me every time you feel guilty over treating me like crap. I worked hard to put that behind me, and I’m not going to relive it just so you can feel better about yourself.”

“Of course.” I saw that she was tearing up. “And I’ve upset you again by bringing all this up. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Dad. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. Just…let’s not do it again for a while, okay?”

“Right.” I moved toward the door to leave, and then stopped. “I just wanted to ask…if it’s possible, if there’s anything I can do to make amends…”

“Make amends?” She looked incredulous. “I don’t know. Just be more considerate, will you?”

And that what I’m trying to do.

At the government station there was indeed paper from forty years ago, what the Europeans called “assessment reports,” and Moseby’s presence was sufficient to grant them access. They were written in the European language, which Jijingi couldn’t read, but they included diagrams of the ancestry of the various clans, and he could identify the Tiv names in those diagrams easily enough, and Moseby had confirmed that his interpretation was correct. The elders in the western farms were right, and Sabe was wrong: Shangev was not Kwande’s son, he was Jechira’s.

One of the men at the government station had agreed to type up a copy of the relevant page so Jijingi could take it with him. Moseby decided to stay in Katsina-Ala to visit with the missionaries there, but Jijingi came home right away. He felt like an impatient child on the return trip, wishing he could ride the truck all the way back instead of having to walk from the motor road. As soon as he had arrived at the village, Jijingi looked for Sabe.

He found him on the path leading to a neighboring farm; some neighbors had stopped Sabe to have him settle a dispute over how a nanny goat’s kids should be distributed. Finally, they were satisfied, and Sabe resumed his walk. Jijingi walked beside him.

“Welcome back,” said Sabe.

“Sabe, I’ve been to Katsina-Ala.”

“Ah. Why did you go there?”

Jijingi showed him the paper. “This was written long ago, when the Europeans first came here. They spoke to the elders of the Shangev clan then, and when the elders told them the history of the Shangev clan, they said that Shangev was the son of Jechira.”

Sabe’s reaction was mild. “Whom did the Europeans ask?”

Jijingi looked at the paper. “Batur and Iorkyaha.”

“I remember them,” he said, nodding. “They were wise men. They would not have said such a thing.”

Jijingi pointed at the words on the page. “But they did!”

“Perhaps you are reading it wrong.”

“I am not! I know how to read.”

Sabe shrugged. “Why did you bring this paper back here?”

“What it says is important. It means we should rightfully be joined with the Jechira clan.”

“You think the clan should trust your decision on this matter?”

“I’m not asking the clan to trust me. I’m asking them to trust the men who were elders when you were young.”

“And so they should. But those men aren’t here. All you have is paper.”

“The paper tells us what they would say if they were here.”

“Does it? A man doesn’t speak only one thing. If Batur and Iorkyaha were here, they would agree with me that we should join with the Kwande clan.”

“How could they, when Shangev was the son of Jechira?” He pointed at the sheet of paper. “The Jechira are our closer kin.”

Sabe stopped walking and turned to face Jijingi. “Questions of kinship cannot be resolved by paper. You’re a scribe because Maisho of the Kwande clan warned me about the boys from the mission school. Maisho wouldn’t have looked out for us if we didn’t share the same father. Your position is proof of how close our clans are, but you forget that. You look to paper to tell you what you should already know, here.” Sabe tapped him on his chest. “Have you studied paper so much that you’ve forgotten what it is to be Tiv?”

Jijingi opened his mouth to protest when he realized that Sabe was right. All the time he’d spent studying writing had made him think like a European. He had come to trust what was written on paper over what was said by people, and that wasn’t the Tiv way.

The assessment report of the Europeans was vough; it was exact and precise, but that wasn’t enough to settle the question. The choice of which clan to join with had to be right for the community; it had to be mimi. Only the elders could determine what was mimi; it was their responsibility to decide what was best for the Shangev clan. Asking Sabe to defer to the paper was asking him to act against what he considered right.

“You’re right, Sabe,” he said. “Forgive me. You’re my elder, and it was wrong of me to suggest that paper could know more than you.”

Sabe nodded and resumed walking. “You are free to do as you wish, but I believe it will do more harm than good to show that paper to others.”

Jijingi considered it. The elders from the western farms would undoubtedly argue that the assessment report supported their position, prolonging a debate that had already gone too long. But more than that, it would move the Tiv down the path of regarding paper as the source of truth; it would be another stream in which the old ways were washing away, and he could see no benefit in it.

“I agree,” said Jijingi. “I won’t show this to anyone else.”

Sabe nodded.

Jijingi walked back to his hut, reflecting on what had happened. Even without attending a mission school, he had begun thinking like a European; his practice of writing in his notebooks had led him to disrespect his elders without him even being aware of it. Writing helped him think more clearly, he couldn’t deny that; but that wasn’t good enough reason to trust paper over people.

As a scribe, he had to keep the book of Sabe’s decisions in tribal court. But he didn’t need to keep the other notebooks, the ones in which he’d written down his thoughts. He would use them as tinder for the cooking fire.

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences, and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I’m writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it’s easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are subject to every kind of error and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.

When it comes to our individual memories, I live on the opposite side of the divide. As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I’m threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events. I used to think it could be valuable for individuals to tell stories about themselves, valuable in a way that it couldn’t be for cultures, but I’m a product of my time, and times change. We can’t prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.

And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory? How much can you? You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you’ll find out.

But the reason I now recommend Remem is not for the shameful reminders it provides of your past; it’s to avoid the need for those in the future. Organic memory was what enabled me to construct a whitewashed narrative of my parenting skills, but by using digital memory from now on, I hope to keep that from happening. The truth about my behavior won’t be presented to me by someone else, making me defensive; it won’t even be something I’ll discover as a private shock, prompting a reevaluation. With Remem providing only the unvarnished facts, my image of myself will never stray too far from the truth in the first place.

Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that—I hope—acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.

Nicole has begun using Remem as well, and discovered that her recollection of events isn’t perfect either. This hasn’t made her forgive me for the way I treated her—nor should it, because her misdeeds were minor compared to mine—but it has softened her anger at my misremembering my actions, because she realizes it’s something we all do. And I’m embarrassed to admit that this is precisely the scenario Erica Meyers predicted when she talked about Remem’s effects on relationships.

This doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about the downsides of digital memory; there are many, and people need to be aware of them. I just don’t think I can argue the case with any sort of objectivity anymore. I abandoned the article I was planning to write about memory prostheses; I handed off the research I’d done to a colleague, and she wrote a fine piece about the pros and cons of the software, a dispassionate article free from all the soul-searching and angst that would have saturated anything I submitted. Instead, I’ve written this.

The account I’ve given of the Tiv is based in fact, but isn’t precisely accurate. There was indeed a dispute among the Tiv in 1941 over whom the Shangev clan should join with, based on differing claims about the parentage of the clan’s founder, and administrative records did show that the clan elders’ account of their genealogy had changed over time. But many of the specific details I’ve described are invented. The actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I’ve told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.

As for my account of my argument with Nicole, I’ve tried to make it as accurate as I possibly could. I’ve been recording everything since I started working on this project, and I’ve consulted the recordings repeatedly when writing this. But in my choice of which details to include and which to omit, perhaps I have just constructed another story. In spite of my efforts to be unflinching, have I flattered myself with this portrayal? Have I distorted events so they more closely follow the arc expected of a confessional narrative? The only way you can judge is by comparing my account against the recordings themselves, so I’m doing something I never thought I’d do: with Nicole’s permission, I am granting public access to my lifelog, such as it is. Take a look at the video, and decide for yourself.

And if you think I’ve been less than honest, tell me. I want to know.

#TRUTH OF FEELING

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