Something in their voices—in their easy paranoia and their willingness to wholeheartedly accept that the end had come—made the moment companion with the present-day scene inside the Vault, despite that, at first, all they seemed to have in common was that they fell on a Wednesday. One was, after all, an apparently harmless event involving people collecting their possessions; it was as benign as any day inside the more traditional banks from which the Vault borrowed its professional language. The other event was of course more devastating, even after we discovered the Professor had escaped unscatched. It was the last of three crashes I’d personally witnessed in my life, each confirming the same lesson: that real life was fragile, and this fragility was born of chaos.

There was one more thing the St. Patrick’s Day accident had in common with the mass repossession taking place in the Vault: the murmuring of the women in the crowd, standing farther back, their mouths moving. The Vault’s sitting room was separated from the hall by the same wide, dramatic archway I’d seen in Windsor Station, and just on the other side, the women congregated in pairs or trios. The gathering ladies exchanged conversation fragments in whispers too enthusiastic to be low, with eyes cut to track the husbands and fathers collecting their Mems. It had been a week and a half since a teenage Walter Mem descended upon me, and today in the sitting room or in dormitories farther down the hall, Mems were being prepared for departure.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable. Unacceptable,” said a woman whose hat was embellished with waves of teal velvet. She and the two gathered around her were dressed in nearly identical fur-trimmed jackets that grazed their calves, and I wondered if they’d come together. But for their animated expressions, they almost reminded me of the Dowager Keepsakes.

“Had we known, we never would have left ours,” her companion agreed.

“But how would you know?”

“Exactly.”

“How would you know.” Now they nodded together, absolved of responsibility.

“My Charles only wants to believe the best about Professor Toutant.”

“Of course, we all do!”

“But if the clinic can just reprint the ones with bad behavior at their discretion, who’s to say it couldn’t be ours?”

“And if Professor Toutant can reprint over my Mems, shouldn’t he at least have the decency to inform me?”

“Well, you’d like to think so.”

“He couldn’t very well let some stranger use up my Mem, could he? Why then I’d be forced to extract a new one altogether every time I want to rid myself of a memory.”

“Oh dear!”

“Well, wouldn’t I?”

“I won’t have it, girls! I tell you I will not end up like one of his crackered-jacks.”