THREAD ONE — RUNA
The bunker smells like copper and old sleep. I have been awake for nineteen hours and the memory is happening again.
It starts the same way it always does: a kitchen, yellow curtains, the sound of rain on a corrugated roof. A woman’s hands pressing dough against a wooden board. The smell of cardamom. I can feel the warmth of that kitchen on my face, the specific softness of that light, and I know with absolute certainty that I have never been inside that room. I grew up in a concrete relay station outside Bergen. There were no yellow curtains. There was no cardamom. My mother’s hands were always cold.
But the memory doesn’t care what I know.
I pull the neural tap from my temple before it can go further, and the kitchen dissolves. I’m back in the bunker’s equipment bay, surrounded by dead monitors and the low hum of our portable generator. Zaid is watching me from across the room. He has that look he gets, the one where his jaw tightens and he doesn’t say what he’s actually thinking.
“Again?” he asks.
“Again,” I say.
He crosses his arms. He is a big man, Zaid Halabi, broad-shouldered and careful in the way that people are careful when they have learned that carelessness costs lives. His face is weathered from three years on the surface, before the Ashfall made surface work impossible for anyone without a full respirator. There is a scar along his left jaw that he has never explained and I have learned not to ask. He does not trust the memory archive we found in the lower vault. He has said so, clearly, more than once.
“We should seal it,” he says. “Leave it for someone with the proper equipment.”
“There is no one with the proper equipment anymore,” I say. “There is only us.”
That is the argument we keep having. It does not resolve. It just rests for a while and then starts again.
THREAD TWO — JOAQUIN
I remember the day the sky went white.
I was eleven years old and standing on the roof of my uncle’s building in the city that used to be called Monterrey. The impact had happened two thousand kilometers away, but the shockwave still bent the air like something enormous had exhaled. My uncle pulled me inside. I remember the color of the light through the stairwell window. It was the color of a tooth.
Now I’m thirty-four and I’m sitting in a vault beneath the Pyrenees, and Runa is pulling a neural tap from her temple, and I am thinking about that light.
The archive we found is a pre-impact memory preservation system. Military grade, from the look of it. Someone built it to survive exactly what happened: the Castor Event, the Ashfall, the Long Winter that followed. The casing is a meter-thick shell of impact-resistant composite, and inside it are four hundred and twelve neural engrams. Four hundred and twelve people, or what’s left of them. Their memories, compressed and stored on crystalline lattice drives, waiting for a reader.
We are the reader. Runa is the reader, specifically, because she has the implant interface that lets her access the engrams directly. The rest of us use the secondary terminals, slower and less precise, like reading a transcript instead of hearing someone’s voice.
Anders thinks we should catalogue everything and move on. Mateo thinks we should find a way to transmit the archive to the eastern settlements before our power cells die. Zaid thinks we should leave it sealed.
I think the archive is trying to tell us something specific. I think it has been trying since we opened it three days ago.
THREAD ONE — RUNA
The engram that keeps bleeding into my passive state is labeled 0047-F. The archive’s index gives a name: Selin Arslan. Age at time of encoding: sixty-one. Occupation: atmospheric systems engineer.
I sit with that for a moment. An atmospheric systems engineer.
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