The valve came into focus – that is, what was left of it. The short length of pipe between the body of the valve itself and the access flange on top was cleanly shorn away.

Impossible.

Catastrophic failures like this would come at the weakest point: the flange, not the valve body. And if it did, it wouldn’t be a clean cut. This was sabotage.

“Area scan,” she said, momentarily forgetting the loss of connection with the grid’s orbiting stratosat. Static crackled back. “Shit.” She panned the landscape. Nobody.

HyRope: HyRope to Home. Com with grid nine-hundred is still down. Valve has been... cut?

Home: Ent– the–

HyRope: Repeat?

Static.

“Fuck.”

The entire grid would slowly drop in efficiency if it couldn’t be closed or bypassed. Doing the shutdown manually was the only remaining option, and not an easy one at that. She spun the byceptor and raced down the line a safe distance to the nearest bypass valve. She jumped off and pried its integrated shut-off lever until it locked into place. With all of her weight behind it, the metal arm moved tediously forward. Being seldom, if ever, used and crusted in dust, it had nearly seized. She ducked underneath to the opposite side and pulled the stubborn lever backward with a series of bouncing yanks.

Her spiracles were sucking open and closed from the exertion. She released the arm and stood back to catch her breath. The flow had only partially abated. Steam continued blasting skyward where it evaporated under the gaze of Pangema’s burning eye.

The plume darkened as a shadow materialized in the geyser’s bloom.

CHAPTER THREE

I navigated to a secure search engine and slid Clay Dean’s A World of Flies from the shelf above my desk. I had brought it home from Jim’s shop a few months back just for the hell of it, thinking maybe I’d pick up a tip or two. I’d flipped through it for any obscure tidbits on fish behavior that might up my fly-tying game, but quickly found that there wasn’t anything written on its pages that I didn’t already know.

I turned to the chapter on Strathspey flies where I kept my research list. Jumping off points for my nightly dives generally fell under one of the following topics, and quickly devolved from there.

cryptomnesia

spirit possession

multiple personalities as a result of forgotten trauma

recovered memories

confabulation

strategic retrieval account theory

revelation

frontal lobe damage

source amnesia

Jamais vu

transferred psychography

phenomenology

And so on.

You think those sound nuts? At my lowest I’ve dug into “past-life regression”, the ultra-kook theory that one person can recover memories from past incarnations. As in, reincarnation.

The most famous case, and the one that kicked off the whole past-life regression movement involved a housewife named Virginia Tighe who believed she possessed the memories of a 19th-century Irish woman named Bridey Murphy. I was rooting for Virginia as I did my research because, as insane as it sounded, it might have provided an explanation for me. Maybe I had PLR too. But, like everything else, it turned out to be bullshit. Virginia had grown up living next door to an Irish lady who was of similar age and station to Murphy, and was indeed named “Bridie Murphy Corkell”. Experts explained it as a straightforward case of cryptomnesia, where a person mistakes a forgotten memory as something new and original. It was back to the drawing board for me.