Jenna sighed. She was just settling into week three of her new job and the excitement of learning the computer system and other requirements had all but worn off. She looked around the office. The open work floor she sat in contained several banks of workstations. Little walls divided the cubicles for a sense of privacy, but if she stood up, she could see across the room. She was on the side opposite the bank of windows. She actually preferred it because when the day was warm and sunny, those window desks were sweltering. There were about eighty desks in all, but they were rarely all full – at least from what she had seen so far.

She sighed again and looked back at her two monitors. One had her Outlook pulled up. The only things in her inbox were weekly reminders for team meetings and a check-in from her supervisor. Further down was a handful of welcome messages from the last couple of weeks. On her second screen, she had the basic Memento file editor open and was clipping out errant branch memories from her sample of scan data.

Memento offered memory recording services for all of life’s needs. It started as family history packages. They were sort of like word-of-mouth stories but played in a quasi-AR environment. The wealthier clients would even have a full personality duplicate pulled down, but it was terribly time and resource intensive. Even then, there were often very complicated special requests to tweak some idiosyncrasy or mannerism: Could you make Granny slightly less racist? And also, can you remove that weird throat-clearing thing she does? Of course, the source donor was still alive when the brain scans took place, and the ‘adjustments’ usually weren’t shared directly with them.

Jenna had only observed a few brain scans as part of her training, but was very interested in doing more. Pulling the memories down was infinitely more interesting than editing them. She was also lucky that she didn’t work in that original Family and Legacy Services Division. She had been told that those full personality downloads took forever. Because the source donors tended to be older and rather well-situated financially, they requested a lot of bathroom breaks and other extravagant accommodations. You could try and break up the scan into multiple sessions, which was usually required anyway, but then overlapping and splicing the files was difficult and time-consuming.

Instead, Jenna was assigned to the Subject Mastery Division. There, the source donor had usually been requested to come in for complimentary services. Some other entity, like a. professional society, university, or law center, would foot the bill in an effort to retain the source donor’s subject matter expertise on a critical topic or industry.

“You know how they say everyone is replaceable?” Jenna had asked her dad when explaining what the job entailed. “Well, we believe that they aren’t. There are some people who just know so much about one thing, our clients want to make sure that that institutional knowledge is retained in case they…”

“Get hit by a bus?” her dad finished with a chuckle.

“Well, that’s not how Memento phrases it…” she said, rolling her eyes. “But yeah.”

Jenna’s current assignment involved a workforce management consultant from some Fortune 500 company, but it was partially a training exercise. She wouldn’t be authorized to move on to scanning new source donors until she had mastered the memory editing techniques. While the project was intended to hone her skills, it was also a real working example, meaning it was an actual case that needed to be edited and filed away. Once the memories were pruned, edited, and polished, they were submitted for filing into The Library. The Library was a redundant set of secure servers where all of Memento’s products were stored, regardless of the owner’s rights or privileges.

What made this case tricky is that the scanning tech had excited the memory response with very generic key terms like ‘work’, ‘force’, and ‘load’ in addition to ‘workforce’ and ‘workload’. Jenna had to wade through the errant memories associated with those simpler terms and weed out the ones that weren’t relevant to the subject mastery. For example, the man’s previous experience in structural engineering produced an entire subfolder on applied physics: How loads in a building cause forces in its structural members.

“Those uses of the words ‘force’ and ‘load’ have nothing to do with ‘workforce’ or ‘workload’,” she sighed. “Why would they use such generalized triggering terms!?”

Some of the catches were filtered by the AI tool, but part of her job was to validate and verify each and every irrelevancy flag to ensure good and useful information wasn’t being tossed out.

She rubbed her eyes and yawned louder than she meant to. The worker opposite her, a woman named Felicity, smiled and removed one earbud.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “You’re doing really good so far.”

“Oh, thanks,” Jenna replied. “I should really work on masking my fatigue a little better.”

“No need,” Felicity laughed. “We all understand. You got right into the deep stuff pretty quickly, too. Completing the tutorials in a week is wild.”

“Oh – really?” said Jenna. “I just want to do well. I really need this job but it’s definitely something I feel good at – should I say that?”

“Of course,” Felicity said. “Heaven forbid you find something you’re talented with that pays ok. Just try and pace yourself. The burnout is real. It helps a lot when you get to scans and stuff. They break up the monotony of editing.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait for scans,” Jenna said with a smile. “It just seems like a lot of responsibility with very little oversight.”

“Yeah,” Felicity agreed. “That’s life in The Brain Dump. They don’t run as much QC on a polished ‘experience’ like they do over in Legacy.”

“Brain Dump?” Jenna repeated.

“You haven’t heard anyone call us that yet?” Felicity laughed. “It’s just a silly nickname. Don’t let Talus hear you call us that though.”

“Oh,” Jenna replied. “Will we get in trouble?”

“Not really,” Felicity replied. “He’s just particular about things being called by their proper name, that’s all.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Jenna said merrily.

Felicity responded with a warm smile, reinserted her earbud, and returned to work. Her encouraging words and perspective had genuinely lifted Jenna’s spirits, and she continued her workforce manager case late into the afternoon.

Matt Hebert is an engineer and self-published author. His dopamine-fueled creative pursuits have spanned from chicken keeping, sand sculpture, acting, and public speaking, but writing is nearest and dearest to his heart. He lives in Bellevue with his wife and two daughters. You can find him on Instagram at @jerkofalltradeshebert or email him at matt.hebert.books@gmail.com

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