I sat on the bench outside the inn and tried to remember what the mimic looked like.
Not the general shape of it, that was there, the chest form and the lid and the rows of teeth that had been the last clear thing before the pain took over. The specific details. The texture of the exterior plating. The exact color of the single eye. The sound it made when the jaw muscles engaged.
Gray static. The details were there and then they were not, dissolving when I reached for them the way the image dissolves when you try to look directly at a dim star.
I had programmed memory fragmentation as a minor death penalty, the first tier of a system that got more aggressive with each subsequent death. First death: peripheral details lost. Combat specifics, environmental observations, tactical sequences
