Your Childhood Requires a Password

How it begins

My childhood expired while I was making tea.

The notification was polite.

Renew now to keep being you.

I dismissed it.

Then I could not remember where my mother kept the cups.

I was standing in my own kitchen. The cups were on the shelf in front of me. But the older kitchen, the one inside my head, had gone dark.

I knew it had existed.

That was included in the free plan.

I opened the account page.

Payment declined.

A button offered three ways to improve my access to myself.

I called my brother.

We had not spoken since our father's funeral, which I could still remember because bereavement records remained available for ninety days.

"Daniel?"

"What happened?"

"How did you know something happened?"

"You don't call to discuss the weather."

I looked at the kettle.

"I can't remember the house."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, "You can use mine."

An hour later, his childhood appeared on my screen.

Same street.

Same front door.

Same garden wall with the missing brick.

Inside, everything was different.

My bedroom had a blue carpet.

I remembered red, or knew I had remembered red before the service asked me to pay.

In Daniel's version, there was a third bedroom.

A child's shoes stood beneath its bed.

"Who lived there?"

He did not answer.

The account page offered an upgrade.

Resolve family discrepancies.

I closed it.

Daniel moved closer to his camera.

"Don't buy that."

"Why?"

"Because they'll make us agree."

I looked at the shoes again.

Small. Green. Scuffed at the toes.

For the first time since the notification arrived, I wanted my childhood back less than I wanted to know who had been allowed to edit it.

"Tell me," I said.

Daniel looked away.

"Which version?"

He reached for the screen, then remembered there was no useful way to point at a room the archive had removed.