The Professor hadn’t told me such a thing existed. We talked often of the department and his work: the way they had begun stretching and changing society itself, and how we would have to come to terms with what these new creatures actually were—if they were or were not people; if they were possessions; if emotions could be put aside and appearances were in fact deceiving. I say “we” because he always allowed me to feel an integral part of it all, rather than one of “them.” Because he promised I was outside of it now, in my robe and my movie theater, my galas and my apartment. But if he’d never mentioned that Sources could and probably had been reprinting Mems all this time, it could only mean he worried what the advancement would mean for me.

“There is a way to print a new memory over a Mem,” I said, to anchor myself in the conversation at hand.

Harvey sat on the bed across from mine.

“How does it change them? Us?” And before he could answer, I shivered. “Does it hurt?”

The question was like a starter shot sending a runner out across the track. Harvey’s hand was suddenly over mine, his pale eyes glistening like pools of water.

“Is that why I’ve been recalled? So that she can reprint me?”

“We can’t afford to let that happen, Dolores.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “It isn’t my name.”

“Has someone given you another?”

“I have. My name is Elsie.”

And when he lifted his hand to cup one side of my face, I was surprised.

“You are remarkable. Elsie.”

NO. 3

  NO. 3  

The next time Harvey Parrish came to my dormitory, he brought two photographs of me: one the nurse had taken the week before, the night the Dolores extract expired; the other his father had taken. The recent photo was cast aside for the one I hadn’t expected him to bring. Immediately I felt its weight and significance; it returned to me so easily that I wondered what had kept it away till now.

“I’d just woken up,” I told him, eyes anchored on the earliest evidence that I was unlike every previous Mem. In the photograph, I was still lying on the cold steel stretcher so unlike the well-padded one Dolores inhabited. She was out of focus—I being the reason the elder Parrish had paused in his examination to take the photo in the first place—but I could see that she was still asleep. Only my eyes were open. Only my head turned on the gurney to look at the lens as though into a pair of eyes. “Your father was the first thing I saw, once I was outside Dolores. He heard my first words.”

“I’m cold.”

I looked at Harvey, sitting on the bed across from mine, leaning toward me in a way he hadn’t before. “How did you know?”