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“Lucia, would you please do me the favor of pulling off the curtains,” Gabino Santiago rasped on his bed. “I want to see the outside.”
An ordered tangle of sensory cables and tubes connected to the pulsating machine, which gave readings in numbers, ran all over his body.
“I’ve been expecting to do that as I have been doing for months, old Santiago,” the nurse said. She put his breakfast of oatmeal, glass of milk and a piece of banana on the movable table before him and walked toward the window and pulled the curtain. The weak natural light from outside washed into the room.
“A favor for you, my love,” the nurse said in a tender, teasing tone.
He heard how lovingly the nurse called him ‘my love’, but it did not matter a bit to him. All he wanted was to see the outside. He pushed a button beside the steel railing and his bed adjusted propping him halfway up. He looked beyond the glass window, over the spacious green lawn, at the line of old mango trees that hid by its rich foliage a creek, then past the shrubbery knoll to the jagged outline of the city. Soon the sun would rise over those glass and steel buildings and perennial light crafts zooming in and around the labyrinthine streets of the city.
“Eat your breakfast now, my love.”
He continued staring at the view outside, not hearing anymore what the nurse was saying to him, until the blue sky turned lighter and lighter and he stared at it wantonly knowing that he was visually feasting on something beautiful beyond description, at something he would never forget.
He could have done watching the sunrise by closing his still sleepy eyes by automatically switching on the nanochip in his brain and recall the same, familiar view. But why settle for something artificial when you can have the natural fresher one, he thought.
He squinted from time to time as if to absorb the invisible spirit of the view. He knew this experience would never be orphaned, forgotten memory. He would always remember it the way he experienced it the first time.
Everybody in the world remembers everything now, he thought, smiling bitterly.
Anyway, the version of his nanochip memory was the still reliable Super MemSoft III that could store fifty more years of experience, if he ever reached that length. His wife had the latest PulseSoft version 6.0 which had the capability to tap it onto televisions and share her visual experiences in hologram media.
He winced when he thought about the fact.
In split seconds the atomic circuitry in his memory chip calculated that it was almost five decades ago, or to be more precise 48 years, three months, seven days and 16 hours since the 27th of December of the year 2252. He was a century-and-a-half years old then, and around the globe during that time China suffered a death toll of two thousand who perished when a meteor hit their controlled colony in Mars; the Philippines signed a ten-year agreement with Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia on a space venture to explore Pluto; an earthquake with 7.5 intensity in the Richter scale hit Brazil that virtually severed the country into half as the ground opened a maw of twelve meters wide and several miles long with half a kilometer deep in the gash.
It was during this time when an inexplicable obsession to recall something in his childhood forced him to consult a memory nanochip specialist.
Dr. Artemio Baltazar, who sat at the other end of the table, shook his head with stoic, industrial coldness in his mien which could be interpreted as a lack of interest in Gabino’s trouble.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” the doctor said, leaning on the backrest of his black leather swivel chair as if announcing a terminal verdict on the case.
“Do you mean there’s no way to retrieve it?” Gabino asked, refusing to comprehend what he had just heard.
“The problem is that the experience occurred prior to the implant,” the doctor said rocking gently on his chair, then added, “You must understand that the chip’s function is not to absorb and interpret your pre-implant experience. It just does not work that way.
“There’s still no technology capable of decoding an already imprinted memory in your brain cells. Our science is still too young to pull that kind of thing.”
“There must be a way, somehow.” Gabino mumbled feebly.
“Have you tried the old science of regression? Practitioners of this ancient method are now rare. But I bet you can find one. As they fondly say: The soul remembers.”
Gabino strayed off his sight from the doctor, on toward the wall where wooden plaques of scientific achievements by the doctor hung, and composing mentally the right words to express his sad, frustrated thoughts.

To be continued…..