So there was nothing to be done when almost immediately the dowager’s son scheduled to reprint his Keepsake with a memory of his own. The Mem would no longer be a living tribute to the delicate start of his parents’ love story, capturing when a young man first declared his intentions on the stoop of her father’s house. When the procedure was done, she would no longer be a girl at all. Though her shell would remain the same, her spawning memory would be replaced, reprinted so that the dowager’s son needn’t worry over the unfortunate consequences of overextraction. I imagined Harvey’s intrigue at the potential for research in a Mem whose reflection would not match its memory—if the phenomena didn’t expedite the poor creature’s expiration so severely that no research could be done. But research was not the law’s priority, and the wish of the dowager’s son was granted before the ink on the ruling could dry.

His was the first of the Keepsakes to expire, while Bankers and nurses hovered about the Mem, feverishly documenting its every confused lurch and shudder, the way it writhed and frothed at the mouth, its face pained by a congestion that could not be relieved. Its raven braid lightened and the color in its skin dried out. It happened so quickly that we could not afford to look away. The sight was remarkable, even to the now-twin clones, and they gathered around the third, drawn outside of themselves by the draining of life from their companion. It was as if they came to life long enough to see why they would die. Clinging together in the center of the crowd, the three reminded me of a tiny bouquet clutched in a hand. Only the first was reprinted, but inexplicably, one and then the other expired, losing color and wilting side by side, until a bright spot was gone from the Vault. Contemplating an endless life without their uncharacteristic whimsy, on top of everything else I couldn’t have, I was all the more certain that my sanest option was to save Dolores once again.

In my dormitory, I sat at the edge of my bed with the notebook Nurse Ettie had given me, recording my memories, experiments, and observations, so that they would not be lost with me. So that when I was no longer myself, when another memory had taken my place, someone would know I’d once had a mind of my own. My sweet friend Ettie, perhaps. The Professor and Harvey might return to these pages and remember me. And as I devoted myself to their record, my epiphanies continued, as though they would to the very end. Even while watching the Keepsakes defy every established fact about the limits and uniformity of all Mems aside from me, I had another.