He was gentle, with what seemed like limitless patience. The Professor often reduced it to professionalism, but I had seen Bankers fray. Even when they didn’t unravel completely, it was often not without discernible effort and necessary breaks. The Professor’s compassion was genuine. Their conditions, after all, were his doing.

“Wally? Can you tell me what you had for breakfast this morning?”

“Eggs,” Walter answered, adjusting in his seat and trying with all his might to keep from investigating the many weights and knickknacks on the desk between them.

“Eggs.” The Professor read the notes provided by Walter’s maid. “Yes, that’s right. And how were they prepared?”

“I know this.” Only he wasn’t responding to the question, but rather to the inkwell before him.

“Indeed, you do. You’ve been here many times. In a moment, you’ll get to tell me everything you remember from my desk, every scratch. But for the time being, I’d like to know how your eggs were prepared this morning. Can you tell me that?”

“Yes, they were hard. Lydia used a spoon to break the shell for me.”

The Professor smiled and made an annotation on the paper. Frankly, the sight of a grown man behaving in such a way was hardly a smiling matter. It defied everything I knew, and I felt sick in Walter’s presence.

In the sitting room, a Banker and nurse observed a fractured Source, on holiday from both her native Paris and her senses, with one of her Mems. Alongside a dozen other sights, it was one I would never have seen in the year after I was born, back before the staff knew of fragmenting minds or had entertained the notion that extracted memories might help in their treatment. Nevertheless, there they were: the Source wearing a sloppy frock that the nurse had given up trying to keep on both the woman’s shoulders, and the Mem wearing exactly what is required in the Vault and looking remarkably more put together as a result.

No questions were asked; no attempts made to guide the visit. The Banker and nurse simply sat the two together and kept them there, hoping for something to happen, something that science had yet to identify, which might benefit the woman who’d given too much of herself away. Inside the Vault, everything was an experiment.

“It’s not as though she can reabsorb her memory,” I said to Harvey when he found me observing the scene. “How can sitting beside her Mem help?”

“It’s your fault, to be honest.” He was eating a small helping of ice cream from a paper bowl.

“Mine?”

“Mm-hmm. You so damaged our intellectual hubris that we’ll try almost anything now, we’re so completely at a loss for an explanation.”