As he walked through the scanner, Trebron wondered what he would do in case his memory chip got deleted. Even more, though, he thought about the fact that he didn't care about it all that much. All of the memory he had stored would no longer be of any use on the other side -- nobody would believe or care about the stories from the world he had left behind.

 

At that moment a message lit up on the screen ahead of him: "Storing old configuration... - please wait..." Why was this information being stored? Who would ever need it? A couple moments later a new message "Information storage complete!" and then "Reformatting..." and now "Please select new profession" and after that a long list of professions.

 

Trebron was stumped.

 

This is where I should provide some background. The gate Trebron was going through (don't know why I was using the past tense, but it sounded good to me) was to leave the old world behind and to enter into a new world. He's been brought here by his family because they didn't like him the way he was -- they wanted him to be different. So that's why the brought him here: At this gate people can have their past erased and create an entirely new life. There's only one caveat: they must leave their old life completely behind. So that means they lose their family, friends,... -- anything that belonged to the past. This gate is the portal to an entirely new world. In fact, after processing, people are returned to the old world, but they are given an entirely new identity and they will no longer remember anything from the past -- and neither will other people be able to recognize them. Only the computer system has this information, and it is used simply to process the transformation. It was a a program started many years ago by a President who called it "Open for Life".

 

At any rate, if you look out around the corner you can see his family waiting for Trebron to select one of the occupations that are available. The people who bring others here to be reprogrammed are given this indication as a way to make them happy with the system. You see the government has found this system to be very useful -- but I digress....

 

In fact, the people are simply shown what they want to see. Also, I am the one who actually selects this choice (Trebron has no capacity to think, so how should he be able to make this decision?) -- but his family doesn't know that.

 

I always select default. In a previous job, I was engaged with making "expert" decisions about the classification of information and languge. I asked for a transfer to this job, just because I wanted to try something new and now I've decided that it's best to let the computer decide.

 

You see, people who are brought to this gate are deemed complete and utter failures at what they did, and if I select default, then the computer selects that best choice depending on the personal, intellectual and physical characteristics of the unsatisfactory individual. There - I just pressed the default button, there: you can see it looks like Trebron is selecting a new life from the list, and now Trebron's family is shown "Writer" and they are all happy, because that is what they wanted him to be. And now you can see how Trebron is efficiently knocked over and carried off by the conveyor belt for processing. And Trebron's family is now hugging each other and so glad, they've decided to go get a pizza and celebrate!

 

This system works like a charm -- I so love my job! :D