Memory
Shirayasha was complaining the other day about a manga she’d read recently. It was by one of her favorite writers, Nigoshi Toshimi, but she found it disappointing.
I was vaguely reminded of a different manga by the same writer. Shirayasha once showed it to me, a long time ago. It was about a world where humans and androids had lived together for so long, everyone had forgotten the humans came first!
The androids’ greatest flaw was that, although they could live for hundreds of years, they could hold only 20 years’ worth of memory. The oldest memories were continually being overwritten by the newest ones.
One of the major characters was an android who had once had a very close human friend. The human died tragically, and the android mourned his death. But it was almost 20 years ago, and now the android is grieving all over again because he’s about to lose even the memory of his friend, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
That was only a subplot; the main character was human, and the story was about him. But it’s what made the most impression on me.
I was vaguely reminded of a different manga by the same writer. Shirayasha once showed it to me, a long time ago. It was about a world where humans and androids had lived together for so long, everyone had forgotten the humans came first!
The androids’ greatest flaw was that, although they could live for hundreds of years, they could hold only 20 years’ worth of memory. The oldest memories were continually being overwritten by the newest ones.
One of the major characters was an android who had once had a very close human friend. The human died tragically, and the android mourned his death. But it was almost 20 years ago, and now the android is grieving all over again because he’s about to lose even the memory of his friend, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
That was only a subplot; the main character was human, and the story was about him. But it’s what made the most impression on me.