Aide-mémoire. The note you make so that you will not have to trust
your memory. That is the whole of the name, and most of the idea. Human memory is not
a recording — it is a reconstruction, performed fresh each time and quietly edited by
whoever you have since become. Most of what happened to you last Tuesday is simply
gone, and the part that stayed did not stay because it mattered.
It started with a blue. In a short story by Alastair Reynolds — the
one that reached most people through Love, Death & Robots — a celebrated
artist called Zima makes murals on a cosmic scale, and every one of them carries a
particular shade of blue. Critics read it as a signature, or a manifesto. It is
neither. Long before the upgrades that turned him into an artist, Zima had been a
small machine that cleaned a swimming pool, and the blue is the colour of that pool's
tiles. His entire body of work turns out to be one machine trying to reach its own
first memory. Having found it, he takes himself apart until he is that machine again,
and swims.
What we took from it is not the ending. It is the premise: that a
life is held together by small, true, recorded things, and that the grand
reconstruction is worth nothing once it has lost them. This is exactly the failure
mode of a system that summarises your life for you. It will produce something fluent,
confident and unfalsifiable, and you will have no way to check it.
So AideMemo cites. What it answers about your day points back to what it came from —
the recording, the note, the photograph — and where that is a recording, you can play
it. The archive is meant to be argued with.
Hence a bird, inside an A. A bird, because memory is the thing that
leaves if you do not write it down; an A, for the aide-mémoire it lives in. The blue is
where it started. And because those small, true things are the most personal a life
has, AideMemo keeps them where they belong — with you.
Zima Blue is a short story by Alastair Reynolds, first published in 2005 and
adapted for Love, Death & Robots in 2019. AideMemo began in homage to it
and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to its author, publishers or
adapters.