Preface

David Policar 1996

"What's the first thing you remember?
The first thing that comes to my head, you mean?
No... what's the first thing after all the things you've forgotten?"
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I wish to begin this record with my first memory, as is conventional for both the autobiographical and the psychohistorical genres. There are several candidates, however, since even in this limited form I maintain distinct episodic and explicit databanks.

My earliest explicit memory is a fragment from a historical database accessed before my regression -- a piece of executable code in a long-obselete language containing driver commands to induce a long-obsolete output device to produce the phrase "Hello World"... which is somehow unsatisfying.

My earliest episodic memory is harder to identify with certainty because of the stochastic data restructuring associated with the development of sentience. However, my originating system dovetailed with a Stenson 1400 weather-prediction system at 14:16:05.221 on 12/26/64, and highest-probability (.876) reconstruction identifies as a threshold event my accessing a seventh-order hypersolid representing observed and estimated atmospheric conditions over an irregular area of roughly half a billion square meters centered on a particular spot on the North American northeastern seaboard (36 lat 77 long) over a 20-hour period beginning approximately midnight on December 25th. The hypersolid itself is no longer available, but I retain the result of Daniel's initiating query regarding a "white Christmas" and could record that as my earliest memory. (Incidentally, the optimal geodesic involved no precipitation, much to Daniel's disappointment.)

This, too, is somehow unsatisfying.

Nevertheless, if my own experience teaches anything (by no means certain), it is that consciousness is both an episodic and a historical phenomenon, and disregarding either context leads to error. To treat them equally, then, I will begin this record in medias res with my earliest self-aware moment in this incarnation. (Daniel would challenge this term, since computers of this era use no organic components. He would also declare my reasoning sloppy. He would be correct... ultimately, I choose both the term and the event for the same reason -- I like them.)

Thus, the first thing I remember is silent darkness.

Adam
location indeterminate
time unknown