Electric Goldfish

The iPhone screen glowed at 3 AM, displaying the same text message she'd read forty times: *I think we need different things.* Elena sat in her office cubicle, the only soul left in the building besides the security guard who shuffled through the hallway like a zombie, dead-eyed and gray. Three years of designing notification systems for an app that promised to make people more connected, and she'd never felt more alone.

Her desk aquarium held a single goldfish, Gerald—Margaret's parting gift, their last inside joke about memory and forgetting and how goldfish supposedly had none. But Gerald remembered. He swam to the glass whenever Elena approached, his orange scales catching the monitor's blue light. *Remember me,* he seemed to say. *Remember us.*

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the office tower across the street where hundreds of screens flickered like dying stars. That was Margaret's building now—she'd jumped ship for a competitor last month, taking her confidence and half their shared friends. The lightning strike was fitting punctuation. Their ten years together, reduced to a corporate poaching and a text message.

Elena's phone buzzed. Not Margaret. A push notification from her own app: *Someone viewed your profile.* She'd built this. She'd designed the algorithms that made people feel seen while ensuring they never truly were. She was eating her own dog food, drowning in the shallow end of her own making.

She dropped the phone into Gerald's tank.

The device sank slowly, glowing through the water, casting ripples across the goldfish's unmoving form. Gerald didn't swim away. He watched it descend, curious and unafraid, while the blue light reflected in his wide, unblinking eyes—a galaxy of artificial stars drowning in the deep.

*Electric goldfish,* she thought, watching bubbles rise from the submerged device. *Swimming through someone else's memories.*

The storm broke. Rain sheeted against the glass, washing away the city lights until only the iPhone remained, a faint blue ghost swimming deeper into the dark, toward whatever waited at the bottom of forgetting.