Roche looks up at the ceiling and produces a low grind that Sarya’s Network unit would probably tell her is annoyance. With a click and a hiss, his torso slides open with a puff of cold vapor. He reaches inside himself, then holds both hands out in front of him.
Sarya has never been so glad to see a few grams of synthetic materials. She leaps forward and seizes her locket and earbuds, their freezing surfaces stinging her bandaged fingers. The earbuds are painfully cold when she slides them into her ear canals, but it doesn’t matter because as soon as the tiny projector rests on her forehead where it should be, the world exists again. Information springs from all three of the people in her room and the hallway, names and tiers and public biographies and—goddess, the little one really is a three. Sarya stares at the mess of blinking eyes on the floor and wonders again: how does she fit that much brain in a head that size? But the eyes aren’t staring back anymore; they are looking at Roche. More specifically, they are looking at Roche’s other hand, and when Sarya follows the gazes she understands why.
There, in Roche’s other hand, a pulsing and glowing sphere of light has spun into existence. It is a shimmering globe of Standard symbols, a blend of orange light and holograms, and anchored in the center is the phrase [Error: Unauthorized User].
“That’s…mine?” Sarya asks uncertainly, watching the symbols spiral.
“Is it not?” asks Roche, cutting off the light show when he closes his hand. “Because in that case—”
“I mean, yeah,” she says, holding out her hand. “Obviously it’s mine.”
She nearly drops the object when it is grudgingly placed into her palm, mostly because all the symbols floating around it make its size impossible to determine. She feels something cold and heavy rolling in her hand under all that light, something dense and maybe thumb-sized with an embossed logo on one side. “I just…I’ve never seen it before,” she says, staring. But even as she says it, a memory flashes through her mind. She shivers.
The sphere turns white. “Hello, new user,” says the device in a tinny voice. “Please identify yourself.”
“How odd,” says Roche. “To own something you’ve never seen before.”
“What is it?” says Mer.
Roche takes a step toward Sarya, nearly stepping on a spellbound Sandy. “That,” he says, pointing with a gleaming finger, “is a—”
“Help Article Number One: Welcome to Memory Vault!” says the device in a piercing voice, vibrating against Sarya’s hand with each syllable. “Do you find your memories cumbersome to organize? Do you recall things you would rather not? With the AivvTech Memory Vault, non-ideal mnemonic experiences will soon be a distant memory. Remove, add, rearrange, and edit your recollections to shape your ideal past. Store your extra memories for later reminiscence, or transfer them to loved ones to—”
“Enough, device,” says Roche.
Mer scratches his head with a long black talon. “A box of memories,” he says. “How about that.”
Roche is still staring at Sarya’s hands, every lens extended. “That is very highly regulated technology,” he says. “Difficult to come by. Always interesting, if you can get them open. You see them occasionally in my line of work.”
Mer is now scratching several other places. “What is your line of work?” he asks.
Roche performs a motion that Sarya’s unit interprets as a [shrug]. “Stealing things, lately.”
Sarya stands in her quarters, gazing into the slowly shifting symbols drifting over her hand. She has seen this before, she’s sure of it. Slowly, wonderingly, she raises the glowing object to her temple. She can feel her pulse mounting as she does it, and sweat prickles her back.
“Authorized user detected,” says the tiny voice. “Hello, Sarya the Daughter. Please unlock this device to continue.”
She pulls it away and stares. The symbols have changed to blue, and the phrase [Welcome, Authorized User!] now slowly orbits. “It really is mine,” she says softly.
“You’ll need a viewer,” says Roche, taking another step forward. “Memories are of course multisense, and very tricky to transfer. As my mind has been recently backed up, I volunteer. You unlock it, I will experience them and…well, I suppose we’ll go from there.”
“Why do you know so much about this?” asks Mer, now nibbling delicately at the point of a talon.
“When you’ve lived as many lives as I have, you learn a thing or