The first Walter Mems never lived longer than a year. They were little boys afraid of the daylight. When they left the corners of their dormitory, they scurried around the facility like beaten dogs, except that their heads stayed tucked between their shoulders like little turtles. In their nervous condition, they sometimes ran into doors or the corners of walls despite having been trained safe routes to wander. And even though Walter never spared a thought to how they were faring or that they were in the Vault in the first place, it was for Mems such as Walter’s that the Professor brought nurses into the facility. Mems were personal possessions and, like a bank, the Vault strived to foster confidence that nothing but expiration would alter a Source’s belonging.

At first it seemed an overreaction. The young Walter Mems were the only extracts to that point to suffer injury, and theirs were thankfully slight and unintentional. Mems, after all, did not respond to their environments. While Bankers had noticed infrequent examples of Mems seeming to interact with their surroundings, it was clear that they perceived those surroundings as aspects of the memories they housed, not as they truly were. The young Walters who scurried fled from their father, not the Bankers, no matter how it looked to visitors.

If a Banker or able-bodied student could not easily restrain the young ones, there was nothing the new wave of nurses could possibly have done with Walter Gordon’s later Mems—the ones from his teenage years, when he’d gotten old enough to answer evil with evil, when he’d gotten strong enough to hit his father back. The memories had been anger once, or even pride—after all, he’d been the victor in the matches against his erstwhile Goliath almost as often as not. Those memories motivated him to prove his father wrong, to excel in his studies and then in the more profitable extracurriculars, to make every self-earned cent count. The fistfights and cauliflower ears meant he could do anything, that he could live on scraps while he magpied for the future. Now, in the years of hard-won excess, they were embarrassment; they were embittered and enraged at being controlled, at looking anything like Walter Sr. Those Mems were festering and dangerous. At first, it seemed they could not possibly last, and then it seemed they hung on out of defiance, refusing to expire. While the younger Walters had shrunk a little each day, a disquieting mélange of terror and surprise contorting their mouths even after their final breaths, the older ones stepped out of shadows, frightening the receptionists and staff. They curled forward, walking hunched and always baring their teeth. And without them—the young and the older—Walter Gordon was slowly slipping away.

“Walter,” the Professor said, craning his neck in an attempt to catch the man’s drifting eye. “Let’s stay on task, shall we?”