I was still on the bench when I noticed the first gap.
Not a game memory. Not tactical information about the mimic or Whisperfall's layout, those I had already established as foggy and worked around. This was something else, a real-world memory, reached for out of habit and not there.
My college graduation.
I knew it had happened. I had a degree. I had the knowledge that came from four years of computer science coursework, intact and functional, the actual content of what I had learned sitting in my head exactly where it had always been. But the day itself, walking across a stage, my name called by someone I should remember, the expression on Mom's face in the crowd, whatever I had felt in that moment, gone. Not faded. Not blurry. Absent, the way a word is absent when you know it exists
