The Digital Archive

I am holding a rectangular object

made of glass and aluminum.

It weighs exactly one hundred and seventy-four grams.

*

Inside this casing, there is a list of four hundred names.

Eleven of these people are dead.

I know they are dead

because I attended their funerals

or I was told about their deaths

by other people on this list.

*

I have not deleted their contact information.

I can see the specific arrangement of letters

that forms their names.

*

If I were to press my finger against the screen,

the device would attempt to establish a connection.

It would send a signal to a cellular tower.

The signal would travel to a server

and then to a handset

that is currently sitting in a drawer

or has been recycled into new components

for a different machine.

*

The call would not be answered.

There is no functioning vibrating motor to alert anyone.

There is no eardrum on the other end

to receive the sound waves.

*

I am keeping these names

because they are the only physical evidence I have

that these people once occupied a space next to me.

*

Their names are stored as binary code.

Zeros and ones etched into a flash memory chip

smaller than my fingernail.

*

The chip does not care if the person is breathing.

It only cares about the electrical charge required to maintain the data.

*

I spend three minutes looking at a name.

The person died in 2019.

*

The phone I used to call them in 2019 is gone,

but the data has been migrated three times

to this specific piece of hardware.

*

I am carrying the dead in my pocket

as a collection of stable electrons.

*

The concern is the permanence of the record

compared to the fragility of the body.

*

The concern is that I am talking to a piece of glass

about people who can no longer hear me.