Memory of Others

Chapter 6: The Unquiet Memory

Anna returned to Central City at dusk. The metal-clad buildings glowed as if the very sky were bleeding. After everything, she thought it was all over: she knew who she was, she had faced her creator, she had chosen to live.

But Anna forgot one thing:

Memories never sleep quietly.

Anna dreamed she was in a stark white room. There were no doors. No way out. On the table was a shattered mirror – and the fragments reflected many different versions of herself: she cried, she laughed, she died, she killed.

She woke up in the middle of the night, cold sweat soaking her shirt.

The neural scanning device blinked red.

SIGN OF MEMORY LEAK AT LEVEL 5.

That... can't be. She had self-checked her nervous system after leaving CODE 9-RED. She had wiped all connections to any remnants of the old system.

So what was coming back?

Anna sought out an old acquaintance – Alex, a "memory dealer" who had transferred memories for her a few years ago.

The café floated among the clouds – a place where those who didn't want to be followed often gathered. They sat across from each other. Alex was older now, his eyes replaced with mechanical ones, but his memory was still sharp as a knife.

— "You're still alive? Seems... still you."

— "You sold someone's memory. A person named 'L' – five years ago. Do you still have that copy?"

Alex frowned:

— "L? That was one of the strangest memory sets I ever dealt with. There was a strange security layer. I couldn't copy it, only transmit it once. It could be..."

— "It could be me." Anna thought to herself.

Alex sighed, then handed her an old data card, physically sealed – a type that could only be opened by a matching neural signature.

— "I kept this because Anna felt it... would come back to find him. Just like now."

Anna returned home, plugged the data card into the connection port. The screen displayed a warning:

NEURAL MATCH REQUIRED: CODE L-ΣΦ.

A slight electric current ran down her spine as the data was decrypted.

And then... she saw.

A locked memory. A completely different layer of memory.

Not Sofia's. Not the old versions.

It was the memory of... a child. A failed primitive copy.

In that memory, she saw herself – or rather a "little Anna" – trapped in a laboratory, continuously having her memory erased, then reloaded. A sophisticated mental torture cycle. And in the final moment, the child screamed:

— "I am not data! I am human!"

The memory ended with an image of a gloved hand injecting something into the child’s neck – and then the screen went black.

Anna backed away from her chair, her heart pounding.

She was not just a product of Sofia. She was not the first version.

She was the result of a series of failures – grafted, edited, and recreated from many previous versions. And there was one version, an “original child”, who might have been a real person.

And now, that layer of memory was trying to return – not through a device, not through data transmission – but through dreams, emotions, and instability.

No one had programmed it. No one can control it anymore.

It lives.

Anna stands in front of the mirror, looking at herself.

She realizes:

She can continue to live as “Anna” – a free entity, a self that accepts itself as the final product.

Or… she can go back to where it all began – where the first memory was copied, where the other child was mentally killed.

Maybe, there is still a real memory core that has not been destroyed.

And if she finds it – Anna will not only know the truth about herself.

She will redefine the concept of a human being in the era of memory copying.

Anna composes an encrypted message:

To: White Archive – Level 0

Subject: Request to access the original memory core

Verification code: MH-13-LΣΦ

Signed: Anna. Not a copy. Not the old one. But a return.