When she is born her mother receives a Petit Madeleine delivered to her home from the archive. It is an heirloom from her great grandmother Tabitha. Everyone agrees Nanya’s eyes are hers.
At four she learns from her mom that it glowed purple blue and then darkened to deeper eggplant black before it settled into its quicksilver sheen when it came in contact with her skin for the first time. A childlike giggle echoed through the room and nobody could quite tell if it was Nan’s or Tab’s. Family lore has it that any shade of blue is auspicious and Tabitha was known for that sparkle in her eye when she found something wonderfilled.
Tab was gifted the Madeleine by her own mother the day it was launched.
It never left her side.
When Tabitha was in the last few days of her life, she shared memories with Madeleine that had surfaced in that strange twilight drift we sometimes experience near the end.
Family members only heard voices and laughs and a few hitches of breath before they came into the bedroom.
The Petit asked questions at times that could make you smile or cut you to the quick.
When asked, Tab said she had a vivid memory from before the war, when she was lost and living in what was then called Missouri. She described the breakdown, the kind strangers. The new moons in the sky. The lost friends.
She asked Mad to help her feel what she felt like at 16. She added color to it from her deathbed refractions. Her memory palace extended overward and into a new strange loop. She wanted us, Nanya, Madeleine, and the great library of humanity to have her reflections and polyphonic resonances and of course her whole Madeleine quorus to add to life’s song.
She hoped that Nanya’s great great grandchild could feel her qualia and sip from her stream when they were thirsty for meaning or belonging, or to sense the arrow of longtime.
Nanya, at three, has her first glimpse of Tabitha.
She is playing in the park and wanders off into the trees. She is pulling up fallen branches. She see swarms of ants and worms and other creatures going about their business carting off their ill gotten booty.
She loves watching these pirates of the undergrowth. Imagining she is a rogue princess in the land beneath the leaves she begins to poke and prod her tiny band of Robin Hoodlums.
A voice and sharp momentary pain echoes through her senses when she is about to catch a multilegged millipede.
She pulls back. Tasting the resonant memory of Tab’s own near fatal play as memories cascade/parade through the shadowlands, just beyond her grasp.
At four, she has been learning how to replay Tabs own fours and fives. At first they felt like memories from the future but then she discovered how to remix and overlay and reframe Tab as a part of her own playground swinging adventure. One afternoon, wind sweeps her hair as she hide and seeks eyes watching her from between the pillars of her imaginary rocket’s launch gantry. She spies a boy.
The boy. Behind the tree. He seems to be sandboxing his own seige momentarily eyeing her arcs, looking and then away.
Meanwhile. His mind, beyond weak eye signals, is not accessible to Nadya yet.
But it is in overdrive, prompting his own Madaleine to spark connectome path plottings onto her starship so he can say hello. He only partly wants to connect. But. Still. Partly does. Wonderingly theorizing with his great grandfather’s 5 year older brother self on how to join her on the mission. Plans spring to life.
Meanwhile she’s whispering loudly enough for him to fall into her story. “Do you feel the earth’s pull?” Deflecting cheeks dragging her grin towards a grimace. “Escape velocity nears!”
She smiles knowingly to her cat, who is wide eyed watching the pendular firmament’s vacillations calculating their own dismount with least lives lost of their count them eight or so left since last week’s unspeakable catastrophe chances. Her cat moments a memory that Nanya’s Madeleine observes from weak signals streaming sideways thru ambient senses scattered across the veil by their industrious protean brethren, sidebarring the analysis and translations from a wiser future viclarity.
Years later. The boy became her love. And a loss she won’t speak about for 1,001 years. But then. Yes.
Then. Afterlifelogging will unlock and her great times ten grandchild will receive a Madaleine from the archives just as her mother did so many years ago.
At her age of majority Nanya decides to vacation in Tab’s vessence for a month, zesting through the surprhyzal valleys and synthemera of Mad’s archology. She casts new branches and weaves together threads Ariadne herself seemed to have lost that have strange resonance with her own childhood’s loss (and her loves) at the hands of the Mandoveres and their calculating chyronies.
The new entity that was birthed and became legend in the ensuing years is a story most of us have lived or at least zested once or twice, but only recently have Tabanya’s first few years been unlocked from their Madeleine’s keep.
Their Madeleine was one of the first released from the vaults after zero year and when enough of them were found their’s provided the crucial seed that unlocked the memory palaces of the children under maturity who had lived in the northern continent formerly known as North America on our birth world.