“I’ll give your memories back now.”
The terminal and M-03 spoke at the same time.
They had the same voice.
The same pitch, the same breathing, the same cadence at the end of every sentence.
Aaron looked down at the automaton. Blue light filled M-03’s glass eyes. The indicator on the central terminal blinked to the same rhythm.
They were connected.
No.
Maybe they had been one from the beginning.
“Step away from it.”
Ria grabbed Aaron by the shoulder and pulled him back.
At that moment, a metal plate rose from the control room floor.
A thin restraint ring snapped shut around Aaron’s ankle. He reflexively stepped backward. The ring caught only empty air and stopped.
A mechanical voice issued from the machine.
“Target location mismatch.”
“Target?”
Aaron asked.
Ria didn’t answer. Instead, she grabbed the main power handle beneath the central terminal and pulled it down.
The handle didn’t move.
“Remote lock.”
“Set by someone who’s dead?”
“Someone we thought was dead.”
Footsteps approached from outside the control room.
The safety inspection team had apparently made it to the steel door. Along with the sound of metal being pounded from outside came a voice.
“Senior Researcher Moren! Open the door!”
Ria didn’t answer.
Another sheet of paper slid out of the terminal.
A-07 Memory Seal Release Procedure.
Step 1. Original-memory comparison.
Step 2. Memory anchor core resonance.
Step 3. Retrieval.
Aaron stared at the last word.
“What does ‘retrieval’ mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything good.”
Ria opened the cover mounted beside the terminal. Inside were dozens of slender glass tubes. Some were empty, while blue liquid moved slowly inside the rest.
“You said this was a procedure for returning memories.”
“Here, ‘returning’ didn’t mean putting them back where they originally belonged.”
Ria pulled out one of the glass tubes.
Blue liquid spilled onto the floor. The machinery rumbling beneath the floor briefly fell out of rhythm.
“It meant rearranging them into a usable form.”
“They treated people’s minds like machine parts.”
“That’s why Yohan tried to stop the experiments.”
Aaron lowered M-03 from his arms.
The automaton couldn’t stand on its own. Its knee joints wouldn’t lock, so he had to prop it against the wall. Even so, its head tracked Aaron’s movements with perfect accuracy.
“Yohan.”
Aaron called the name.
The terminal’s indicator stopped.
M-03’s eyes darkened with it.
“Is that really you?”
After a moment, the voice returned.
“Part of me.”
“Part?”
“The portion of Yohan Remer’s memories that remains in this facility.”
Ria’s hand went rigid.
Still looking at the automaton, Aaron asked,
“Then is Yohan Remer himself dead?”
“Biological activity has ceased.”
“Am I supposed to feel relieved by that answer?”
“Relief is a function of the living.”
It was the sort of answer a person might give.
That was what made it even more unsettling.
Aaron stepped closer to M-03. Ria caught his arm, but this time he didn’t stop.
“You said you’d give my memories back.”
“That is correct.”
“What’s the price?”
Before the terminal could answer, Ria said,
“There isn’t even any guarantee that your memories will come back.”
Aaron looked at her.
“You said blocked memories return when the conditions are right.”
“Memories returning and memories being forcibly dragged out are two different things.”
Ria continued in a low voice.
“Memories don’t build themselves in order. Smells, pain, people’s faces, and the emotions you felt at the time all get tangled together. If you yank one out by force, you could tear the others apart with it.”
“Have you tried it, Senior Researcher?”
She fell silent.
Aaron understood what that silence meant now.
“You did it to yourself.”
Ria’s fingertips trembled.
Barely.
She quickly hid it by clenching her fist.
“That’s why I tried to stop you.”
An impact rang out from beyond the steel door.
“Forced entry beginning!”
Dust fell from the edges of the door.
There was no time.
Aaron quickly surveyed the control room. The locked main power. The instrument panel that had come back to life. The floor mechanism that recognized him as its target. The terminal resonating with M-03.
This wasn’t a situation where he could debate whether to recover his memories.
The facility had already begun the procedure.
His only choice was whether to surrender control or seize at least part of it.
“How do we stop the procedure?”
Ria pointed inside the terminal.
“We need to sever the central pressure line.”
“And then?”
“The entire section will shut down.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“We don’t know what’s connected below.”
Ria looked down at the floor.
“If the memory anchor core is still operating, cutting the power could erase everything left inside it.”
Yohan’s remaining memories.
The records of the other test subjects.
And his own memories from nine years ago.
Aaron wet his dry lips with the tip of his tongue.
The easiest way to survive was to shut everything down and run.
That was what his ordinary self would have done.
But if even that ordinary self was a memory someone had made for him, he couldn’t be sure he could trust the same standards anymore.
“Is partial recovery possible?”
Ria looked up.
“What do you mean?”
“Instead of getting everything back, we check just one thing.”
“Memories aren’t filing cabinets.”
“The machine would have sorted them like filing cabinets.”
Aaron picked up the sheet of paper that had come from the terminal.
Original-memory comparison.
Memory anchor core resonance.
Retrieval.
“This procedure doesn’t treat memories like they belong to a person. It divides them by number and stage. If that’s the case, the input paths should be divided too.”
Ria examined the inside of the terminal.
Small brass plates were attached beneath the glass tubes.
A-01.
A-02.
A-03.
The numbers continued up to twelve.
There were three glass tubes beneath A-07 alone.
Ria’s face hardened.
“They separated it three times.”
“Separated what?”
“Your memories.”
Faint writing remained beneath the tubes.
Sensory memory.
Event memory.
Subject-linked memory.
Aaron pointed to the glass tube on the far left.
“Let’s open the sensory memory first.”
“Why that one?”
“If we look at the event first, it’ll be hard to tell whether it’s real or something that was created.”
He looked down at his palm.
The burn throbbed beneath the bandage.
“But smells and pain are harder to fake.”
Ria couldn’t argue.
Not because Aaron was necessarily right, but because they had no other option.
“Resonance requires the memory anchor core.”
Her gaze shifted to M-03.
The automaton spoke first.
“Authorization granted.”
“We don’t need your authorization.”
Ria snapped.
“You do. The procedure administrator account belongs to Yohan Remer.”
A new sentence appeared on the terminal.
Administrator approval complete.
Ria gritted her teeth.
“Still doing whatever you want, even after death.”
“I heard that when I was alive, too.”
Aaron looked back and forth between them.
A dead researcher and a living researcher were arguing across a machine.
Until this morning, his biggest concern had been extending his contract.
He hadn’t expected to miss that worry.
The steel door bent inward with a violent groan.
Ria made her decision.
“We’re opening only A-07’s sensory memory tube. If there’s any abnormal reaction, I’m cutting it off immediately.”
“You?”
“Your hands are already damaged enough.”
Ria released the lock beneath the glass tube.
Aaron placed a hand against M-03’s chest plate.
A faint vibration pulsed beneath the cold metal.
The memory anchor core beat like a heart.
“Ready?”
Ria asked.
“No.”
“Nice to hear some honesty.”
“Do it anyway.”
Ria turned the glass tube.
Click.
Blue liquid flowed along the tube and into the terminal.
Light burst from M-03’s chest.
Aaron didn’t even have time to close his eyes.
The smell came back first.
Disinfectant.
Wet coal.
An old leather strap.
The sweet smell of milk someone had been boiling.
The control room disappeared.
Aaron was sitting in a small chair.
His feet didn’t reach the floor.
Leather straps were wrapped around his wrists. Across from him stood a younger Ria. She wasn’t wearing a white coat, but the gray work clothes of an assistant researcher.
She secretly pressed a piece of candy into Aaron’s hand.
“Keep it in your mouth.”
Young Aaron asked,
“What if it hurts?”
Ria couldn’t answer.
Instead, she loosened the leather strap by one notch.
The door opened.
Yohan Remer walked in.
Aaron had never seen his face, not even in photographs, but he recognized him instantly.
The voice was the same.
“We’re stopping the experiment.”
Yohan said it.
Another researcher in the room snorted.
“Now?”
“It’s not the subject’s memories that are coming in.”
“What do you mean?”
Yohan looked past young Aaron.
There was no one there.
And yet his face was pale with fear.
“What we stored isn’t ours.”
A pounding came from inside the wall.
Boom.
Boom.
Young Aaron turned his head.
Inside the aether crystal embedded in the wall was the shape of a person.
Not just one.
Dozens.
All of them stood with their mouths open, saying the same thing.
Give it back.
The scene before Aaron’s eyes split apart.
When he returned to the control room, he was on his knees.
Blood dripped from his nose.
Ria pulled out the sensory memory tube and threw it onto the floor. The glass shattered, and blue liquid spread across the ground.
“Aaron. Can you hear me?”
He tried to answer, but no voice came out.
Sweetness lingered in his mouth.
It was the taste of the candy Ria had given him nine years ago.
The memory was real.
At least that fragment was.
Aaron wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand.
“Senior Researcher.”
“Don’t talk. Focus on your breathing—”
“You gave me candy.”
The color drained from Ria’s face.
That reaction was confirmation enough.
“You remembered?”
“A little.”
Aaron looked toward the wall.
It was only an ordinary steel panel now.
“I saw why Yohan stopped the experiment, too.”
M-03 raised its head.
“What did you see?”
“You don’t know either?”
“I am not event memory.”
That meant Yohan’s traces had been divided as well.
The voice inside M-03 wasn’t the whole of Yohan.
It might have been only the fragment he wanted to see preserved.
The steel door shook again.
One of the mounting screws shot loose.
The inspection team shouted from outside.
“Final warning! Open the door immediately!”
Ria pulled Aaron to his feet.
“We have to go.”
“Where?”
The wall opposite the control room shifted.
It was a mechanism neither of them had touched.
A hidden door opened, revealing an elevator descending into the depths.
A mechanical voice issued from the terminal.
“Step 1 complete.”
“Original-memory comparison rate: seventeen percent.”
“Transferring target A-07 to the central anchor core.”
Aaron stared into the elevator.
Small handprints overlapped across the floor.
They were the same size as the children’s handprints he had seen in his memory.
Ria stepped in front of Aaron.
“Don’t get on.”
“The door’s about to give.”
“I’ve never been down there myself.”
“That’s why we have to go.”
Aaron picked M-03 up again.
He had recovered one memory.
He had also confirmed that Ria had lied to him.
At the same time, he had learned that nine years ago, she had tried to protect him, even if only a little.
His distrust hadn’t disappeared.
Its shape had changed.
Now Ria was both the person who had hidden the truth from him and the only person within that truth who had loosened the strap around his wrist.
“Senior Researcher,”
Aaron said.
“This time, I’m going down because I choose to.”
Ria reached for him.
Before she could grab him, the elevator doors closed.
Through the last narrowing gap, she cursed and shoved herself inside after him.
The doors shut completely.
The elevator began to descend.
The terminal’s final announcement drifted down from the ceiling.
“The central anchor core welcomes the target’s return.”
A moment later, a voice identical to Aaron’s added,
“I’ve been waiting a long time.”