“They wanted her well as much as I did,” he answered. “Her family said she was the luckiest wife.” He almost spat the words. “She’d married the only man who could spare her such pain.”

I thought of my own parents and the secrets they’d agreed to keep from Dolores the moment they rushed her to the clinic, the things they vowed never to discuss after her extractions, though she’d never remember them now. It seemed a sacrifice any number of families would make, and I couldn’t imagine they would lament escaping the memory themselves. The grand charade was never just for the Source.

“What happened to the Mem?” I asked.

The Professor had held me all this time, but now he released me and stood, taking a step back in case I didn’t want to be near when he answered. “I stayed with her until she expired, but I helped her to go quickly. It was painless. But for the prick of the syringe, she felt nothing, I can promise you that.”

My eyes grew wide and he took me by the shoulders.

“And you must never speak a word of it to Camille, if you love her. Of how this all began. She doesn’t know she was the first.”

“She doesn’t know she had a procedure?”

“She didn’t know anything about my research, about the technology I was creating, or that it was for her. Don’t you understand, I wanted her whole again and happy.”

“And what about you?”

As the words escaped me, I wondered whether my tone was curious or condemning. We’d spoken about Mems a thousand times, clinically discussing their short lives and the way they both existed and did not. And though they resembled someone with a life and a light inside them, Mems were something akin to shells, keepsake boxes housing memories sometimes precious but often despised. I should feel nothing at the news that my Professor had helped one to expire when she would have anyway. It shouldn’t require every ounce of restraint to keep my mind from wandering into labyrinths. Whether Camille Extract No. 1 had been exceptional was too bizarre to consider when my mind still caught on the fact that there’d been one in the first place.

I said it again in my head.

Camille Extract No. 1.