After being away from the Vault for the better part of two decades, I had no idea how many Dolores extractions had come and gone, or why. Of course, I was still nineteen, as I always will be, but I knew that the real Dolores must be nearly thirty-nine now. To be quite honest, it hadn’t occurred to me until my recall, until another Dolores was there in front of me. In all my years thinking about my Source, in the innumerable nights I’d dreamed of our last moments as one mind or of our solitary moment standing side by side, I never altered her. A real person might have envisioned herself progressing through age, imagining the changes her style and wardrobe and even her physique would undergo. But frozen in my own age, I kept her there with me. Just as a film preserved a romance while in real life the actors moved on, in my mind, Dolores was ever young because I was. I never considered how she would look at twenty-one or twenty-five or her late thirties. And while I presumed that the Dolores on the bed was a recent extraction, I couldn’t say if she’d been lying there a year or a day. After all, I wasn’t entirely sure what thirty-eight looked like, not to the point of accurately assigning it to anyone. The huddled extract may have been thirty-eight or thirty-one, if she wasn’t younger still. What I did know for sure was that she would not last much longer.

The Mem’s skin was dim. Especially where her elbows bent, curving around the legs drawn to her breast, it had already faded from my deep brown to a hollow gray and then cracked. Her eyes were pools of black into which her lashes and eyebrows seemed to be sinking, and the blackness seemed almost to bleed into her once dark skin. Her hair should have been a bright copper, like our mother’s. Instead it was a sour shade of yellow, and while I and the Dolores I’d known wore our hair shiny and pressed, this fading extract had a short bob of wispy frizz. I rather liked the hairstyle itself, preferring it to the long, tiresome styles of my own, bygone year when a woman’s hair was her crowning glory and achievement. What I could not imagine was that my Source would want to be seen with her stylishly short hair in such a state, even if only by Bankers and staff. I couldn’t imagine that her father would be pleased either.