“I tell him I haven’t done anything, that I know of. Not like him. But he is a sweet child after that, recalling the learned mentor on whose shoulders he is standing and deciding that perhaps we are very much alike.”

It was a strange exhilaration, hearing another Mem describe a moment I’d experienced. I’d stood not far from Dolores, watching the exchange while cameras flashed away. I hadn’t heard the conversation, but watching my Source and smiling when she smiled kept me from noticing too well the way her father never came over, even after Harvey’s father invited him to.

“It is exciting, of course, the motorboat that kites him before he is airborne and gliding on his own. The way I have to tilt my head to see this boy who was so recently standing on the earth, by my side, now soaring in the sky. But my Dolores is more exciting still.”

I dared not move. I dared not tempt her to quiet, though I knew she couldn’t see me, not really. If she could—if she were the real Dolores—she would’ve seen that it was me. I was the Mem she spoke of. But of course she was an extract, too, and she was only recalling someone else’s memory.

“She keeps watch, even when Laurence is hard to see.” Then the Mem laughed. “She’s much more Father’s daughter than I am, if her shared interest in flight is the judge. Her chaperone hands her a pair of theater glasses which I never see her return. Even when the commotion begins. And I wonder if the way I’m feeling about her is something like a mother hen.”

I laughed then at the real Dolores—who I was struggling to remember was not there in the Vault with me—and at myself. All the time she’d been in the Vault with me and I hadn’t thought to visit her memory, to see whether I was part of it.

“I tell Father that after today, I think I’d like to see her more.”

The quiet that followed was soft. We’d been privy to an exhibit that the city—perhaps the world—would not soon forget. And Dolores, as it turned out, had not paid much mind to what had happened in the sky.

“It was me,” I said through a gasp. If Harvey looked alarmed at being jolted out of our shared silence, I didn’t see. The room felt empty around me. I was the only one of Dolores’s Mems in the world for now; Extract No. 2 was long expired. “She doesn’t remember me. He didn’t want her to.”

By the time I looked at him, Harvey Parrish seemed to understand.

“Dolores doesn’t know that I exist.”

NO. 4

  NO. 4