Sophie ran a calloused hand over the pitted marble, dust clinging to her gloves in a fine, grey powder. The inscription, a name long eroded, barely showed a date ending in ‘4’. Not 1884, nor 1944, but a much older 1744. She sighed, the air in the old cemetery thick with the scent of damp earth and fading stone. This was her everyday fight: the relentless, physical erosion of memory. A war against nature, time, and the apathy that comes after 4 generations. She had 4 more repairs scheduled for the day, each one a testament to things falling apart.
The relentless fight against time.
It made her think, often, about the other kind of decay. The one we can’t touch, can’t brush away. The digital kind. We talk about ‘eternal’ cloud storage, ‘indestructible’ hard drives, but how many of us have truly watched a link decay into a 404 error, or found an old file format rendered unreadable by a system that hasn’t existed since 2014? The core frustration isn’t just about losing data; it’s about the *illusion* of permanence, the quiet betrayal of our digital legacies. We assume digital means forever, yet it’s often more fragile than a crumbling headstone.
The Vigil of Preservation
Sophie, a groundskeeper for 44 years, had seen countless physical memorials succumb to the elements. Rust ate at iron fences. Moss obscured names. Stone crumbled
