The Banker, coming out of his thoughts, turned to look at me with an unreadable expression. He couldn’t know how the cold in my stomach had turned to revulsion. Mems didn’t warrant funerals, which must have been why no one thought it morbid to search me for signs of expiration immediately after taking another Mem’s shell away.

“They do share a file,” he said, when I felt he might not speak again. “Every Dolores. Except you. Nineteen years later and you are still the only one.”

The room was still then, the nurse paused with her fingers between the pages.

“I’ll only be a moment.” The nurse left us to search whatever cabinet housed the singularly unique file of Dolores’s first extract. Never mind that if asked, I might have told her there was no record to find. I hadn’t been visited since my arrival, by a day nurse or anyone else. And, present circumstances notwithstanding, I could not imagine anyone had thought it permissible to examine me in my sleep. Whether that assumption was reasonable, I couldn’t know.

I didn’t expect him to stay. When the Banker didn’t leave, instead breathing deep and stretching his neck and shoulders, I moved to sit on the edge of the expired Mem’s bed to face him.

“You have your father’s eyes,” I told him.

They brightened just slightly meeting my own. “I have his last name as well. But being who you are, you probably noticed the resemblance first.”

The tag that hung over the right breast of his jacket listed his post and his name. Harvey Parrish.

“My father spoke of you quite a lot.”

Now I looked at the linoleum floor to interrupt the swelling inside me. I felt so full at the thought that I worried I might spill over in front of him. Full at the thought that if he could not always talk to me, the elder Parrish had at least talked about me. Full at the sudden desire to tell my former Banker everything that I’d seen and done since the last time I saw him, since he’d suggested I might do well someplace beyond the Vault. Full of something more somber, too: that of the thousands of things I had owned in my life outside, I now had just three mementos of that time.

“He’s...” I began but couldn’t finish.

“Expired,” Harvey said.

“Memories expire,” I said, two tears slipping down my face and beneath my chin. “I know the difference between Mems and real people.”

“Of course.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket as he crossed between the beds and sat beside me. And Harvey Parrish offered it to me.