Everything She Remembers Belongs to Someone Else

She looked at the others, and then she looked up at the ceiling, in the direction of the speaker, as though she understood the node was there.
“Is it gone?”
“Yes,” the node said. “The core is intact. The impression is complete.”
She nodded slowly. She looked like someone who had set down something heavy and was still feeling the absence of the weight.
“Good,” she said. And then, after a moment: “She deserved to keep it.”
The node logged the timestamp. It logged the resolution. It logged the condition of all four subjects: stable.
Then it returned to what it had always done.
It watched. It recorded. It preserved.
The cores remained in their cabinet, in the dark, in the cold, each one holding a morning or an afternoon or a single ordinary moment that the world that made it no longer existed to remember.
The node kept them anyway.
That was the whole point.