A biomedical engineer and single mother, Nora is quite knowledgeable about the Internet and modern day technologies. Her romance with Kidd began in high school leading to an engagement while she was still attending College and Kidd serving his final years in the military. Kino, their son was born without Kidd knowing about Nora's pregnancy. Information about the pregnancy is available in their shared on-line account, which Kidd did not access before his death. From high school through Kidd's years in the military and until his death, they created a trove of romantic memories that they digitized and preserved on-line to be passed to their children.
Kidd's mother and father were very supportive of Nora and looked forward to the birth of their only grandchild. But as Nora was struggling with the loss of Kidd in battle, her father dies in a suspicious fire that gutted his business. Nora's mother never regained consciousness upon seeing the charred body of her husband. But they leave behind considerable wealth, which Nora inherits. Nora has two bodies for three funerals; but in what order?
Like Kidd, Nora is an only child and now feels solely responsible for preserving their memories and the items from past generations of her family, for Kino. She decides to digitize her memories and her family heirlooms and to store the images on-line, so they can be shared. In her mind, that option is cheaper and convenient. Nora often discards the physical items after she scans them and encourages those close to her to create digitized content of what is valuable to them because that format is easier to preserve and to carry around.
At work, Nora joins the team responsible for implementing a new technology to replace a capability her company already owns. In the new approach, her employer will lease rather than own the Internet based software solution necessary to run the business and also to store the massive volume of data they generated. What she learned at work encouraged her to accelerate the digitization of her memories, convinced that option to be most cost effective as well.
Well into her preservation journey, an asteroid event that disrupted all global infrastructures, made it impossible for Nora to access the memories she stored on-line. The event caused unprecedented chaos all over the world and Nora was left wanting how to tell her story to Kino, without the visual props. Like Nora, corporations that embraced the practice of storing their capabilities and the information they need to run their businesses in servers they don't own, were left without the necessary capability and information, to re-start their businesses.
About two years after the event, Nora and Kino traveled the world in search of their memories. The foreign languages Nora learned while attending college suddenly became useful during their travels. Upon finding the server that may hold her memories, Nora was unable though, to view the contents stored in it because the technology to interpret the information at that level was indigenous by design and not shared with the global community. The cost of building a custom solution to access Nora's memories had been inordinately inflated by those who could build the solution, holding her memories hostage. Nora returns home with the server and worships it as a shrine.
At home, no one else responded emotionally or with reverence to the server because it was viewed as a black box by all, except Nora who had experience with the items before they were digitized. The content of the mailbox also included private pictures of her and Kidd, together in physically compromising situations, meant for their eyes only. She had hoped to tidy up the contents stored in her mailbox before passing that to her son, as a family heirloom.
Nora 'found' her server but the hunt for the servers that held the keys to re-starting global commerce had just only begun. The asteroid episode reportedly killed an estimated eight hundred million people, many thousands of miles away from the United States. Kidd's parents were never heard from again and their house was completely destroyed by fire during the event. Nora's story is a metaphor for corporate practices that encourage storing important corporate information and vital computing capabilities in cloud environments they do not own. It underscores how such behavior could potentially alter the balance of economic power if the casualties are corporate information assets and computing capabilities necessary to support global commerce.