ReLive

On the desk which you work on during the weekends, you lean back after finishing a game of solitaire on your desktop computer. It was hard, but you did it: you were able to stack all four suites on their proper positions after an hour of hard work, without undoing any moves or using any hints of any sort. You relax and think about the papers you have to submit to your boss before the weekend ends. You decide to do that for later, thinking that you might be able to finish another game like the last one, as you feel particularly lucky today, having already won 2 solitaire games for today.

You get your right hand back on the mouse and lean forward, but you feel this strange numbing sensation once again in your hands. You've felt it many times already. Sometimes you feel the numbing sensation spread all the way to your shoulder, to your chest, where it feels like something is getting in the way of the blood from your heart to your hands. But today you decide to ignore it, knowing that the sensation would pass away like it does for every other time that it occurs to you.

But today, it's different. The numbing sensation spreads to your arms, your shoulders, your chest, and intensifies; almost as if you were injected with anesthesia in a dose enough to make you faint over. But after that, you feel pain in your chest - more intense than any pain you have ever felt in your entire life, almost as if your chest was being ripped from your ribcage. You know that you are going through a heart attack, and you know that you can do nothing more about it. You think that you should have noticed the symptoms earlier on, or that you should have at least told someone who could have known what was going on with you. But it is too late for that. You think about how sad it is that you have lived a life which is not any different from that of other people, being an office clerk who never had the chance to achieve anything save for surviving through every month for the next month's payroll. But you think back on your life as you lay motionless with your head slumped against the table, thinking how funny it is that your last achievement on earth was completing a solitaire game. At least you did not die before completing that game. That would have been so uncool.

Even with your eyes closed, though, you can make out letters. "R-e-L-..." - there's a strange feeling that you've never felt before, almost as if you were waking up from a dream even if you were wide awake. The letters become clearer as the view from your eyes behind your closed eyelids become brighter. You read the letters in black against a white background - "ReLive".

Memories then flood your brain as if they were your own - as if they were memories that you forgot like how you would forget a word that got stuck on the tip of your tongue. The memories feel like they're yours, but you decide to recall everything that you can, starting from the very first memory that you can retrieve that you know isn't from your life as Joe the clerk.

You remember that this feeling of disorientation is so very familiar - you've felt it before so many times already every time you die. You remember that all your brain is always a mess during the moment you die, and you remember how it is that everything finally makes sense once all your memories come flooding back once again.

You remember that your live as Joe the clerk was the one that you chose to live - you were tired of living as a filthy rich billionaire all the time, or being involved in high-octane crime scenes for almost every day of the lives you chose to live, so you tried being someone average from America for a change.

You remember that you were able to choose the lives you wanted to live because you were not a physical being. You remembered that you were once a person living in the year 2116 - when virtual reality and neural technology evolved to the point where you could transfer your consciousness into a server - Niflheim - which would allow you to do anything you want in your brain's own "isolated" universe - where you could become a god by manipulating your world inside the computer in whatever way you wanted, so long as you were creative enough to think of such a thing.

You made that jump into living in a digital world, and you lived inside a computer with other people who also chose to do so. Then you talked to other people who also chose to do the same as you for a while, but that got boring. Then you tried doing everything you wanted to - recreating Earth from what the server pictures it to be and playing out various roles in it, from dictator to prostitute, from Einstein to Tesla. And yet you got bored, because you had already done everything that you wanted to, in the universe where you lived as a god who always got what he wanted. A god who ran out of things that he ever wanted.

So by the year 8232, when the mortal humans who have not abandoned their physical bodies developed a technology that allowed users of Niflheim to forget parts of their memory, there was a lot of fuss among Niflheim's users. There was finally the chance to remove the boredom from living as a god, by forgetting one's experiences as a god. There were many spin-offs of the technology, but what caught your eye in particular was a piece of software called ReLive, which allowed you to try living as a human of your choice without any memories of being in Niflheim. And so you tried it out, living out your physical life as a nanotech engineer, not knowing anything about what has happened in your life so far. You started out without a single memory as a baby, and you slowly made your way through everything in your life, except for the fact that you died in a nanomachine incident in your laboratory as opposed to transferring your consciousness into Niflheim to end your physical life.

You remember that it was nice, living without knowing that you could get anything that you wanted the moment you thought about it. You also found it fun to look back at your life as the you, without remembering the boredom of having experienced almost everything the Universe has to offer. And so, you tried out dozens of lives over and over again, knowing that you would never be tired of what you are doing, so long as you forget whatever it is that you have already gone through every time you start a new life. You remembered all of this, and you think that even now, as you have just finished living the life of Joe the clerk, about the amazing feeling of remembering that you're a god who chose to live the life of someone on earth without any memories of being a god just for fun. You think about how amazing it is to remember every time you "die" that you're not living out your life with boundaries like the lives of those people who don't live in Niflheim, and you think about how it is that that amazing sensation doesn't change, ever, no matter how many lives you live through. And so you wake up, restart ReLive, configure its settings and start your next life as a soccer player in Romania, knowing that you would rather be doing this than going through Niflheim like a god, with all of your memories of being a god, boringly.