Ruins of Remembering

The word had no past tense. Kael Novak knew this because he had tried to explain it to the new workers at the salvage yard, and they had looked at him as though he had asked them to describe the color of a forgotten sound. "I go" was correct. "I went" was impossible. The colony had simply stopped making the grammatical distinction sometime between the Great Filtering and whatever came after.

Five years ago, something had happened in Geneva. Not an explosion. Not a war. A calculation so comprehensive, so all-consuming, that the act of computing it had somehow rewritten the historical records of most of Earth's populated regions. The data was not deleted. It was blurred—like a book left in the rain, the words still there but the meaning dissolved into grey smudges.

The colony that Kael lived in had been built on the edge of the old world's wreckage. They scavenged parts from the ruins and called them "finds." They did not have a word for "the past" anymore. They had a word for "before," which meant roughly the same thing but without the weight of personal memory attached to it.

Kael's grandmother had known the full past tense before she died when he was ten. She had taught him one word: once. She said it like a prayer. He did not know what it meant until he was twenty-three and found a diary in the ruins that contained the sentence: The rain on my face had a metallic taste.

He did not understand what "once had" meant in that context. He understood the words individually. Rain. Face. Metallic. Taste. But strung together in that order, they described an experience that was simultaneously familiar and utterly inaccessible.