The cruel thing about forgetting is you don't know what you've lost.
Swan wakes reaching for a memory that isn't there.
He's been dreaming—or thinks he's been dreaming—about his mother. She was laughing at something, her face lit with joy, and he was young enough that her happiness felt like weather, like an environment he existed within rather than an emotion he observed. The dream felt real. Felt like memory surfaced from wherever his brain has been hiding the pieces the erasure hasn't reached yet.
But when he tries to hold the memory, tries to hear the specific sound of her laughter, there's only static. White noise. The shape of remembering without any actual content.
He sits up on the salvaged mattress in Static Grounds' back room, his hands shaking. Tries again. Focuses. Reaches for the most basic details about the woman who raised him for twenty years:
Her laugh. Nothing. Just the abstract concept that mothers laugh, that his probably did too.
Her favorite color. Gone.
Her voice saying his name. Absent.
The way she smelled. Erased.
Every specific, personal detail that would make her her instead of just a generic mother-shaped void—all of it degraded past recovery.
Swan stumbles to the bathroom, turns on the light, stares at his reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink. His face looks back at him, but something's wrong. The reflection stutters, flickers, exists in multiple states like his code-sight is activating involuntarily. One moment he sees himself at twenty. The next at fifteen. Then at eight. Then back to twenty but translucent, like the mirror can't commit to which version of him deserves reflecting.
"No," he whispers to the unstable reflection. "Not from the inside. You can't take me from the inside too."
But the evidence is undeniable. The extensive reality manipulation—the Daemon battles, the interventions, the code rewrites—it's not just costing him relationships with others. It's costing him relationship with himself. The substrate can't maintain detailed memories when the consciousness holding them is being systematically overwritten by power use.
His father had a favorite book. Swan is certain of that. Absolutely certain. He remembers his father reading in the evenings, remembers a worn paperback spine, remembers annotations in the margins. But the title? The author? The specific words that made it favorite?
All static. All white noise. All memory-shaped absence.
Swan grips the sink until his knuckles go white. His reflection continues flickering through ages, through states of existence, like even the mirror isn't sure who he is anymore.
"Swan?" Elara's voice, soft through the door. "I heard you moving. Are you... are you okay?"
"No." His voice cracks. "Elara, I can't—I don't remember my mother's laugh. I don't remember my father's favorite book. I don't remember anything specific about them except the abstract fact that they existed until they didn't."
Silence. Then the door opens, and Elara stands there in clothes she's been wearing for two days, blood crusted beneath her nose, her arms completely covered in bracelets from wrist to shoulder now. She's become more silver than skin.
"I know," she says quietly. "I've been watching it happen. Documenting the progression. Every time you use your powers extensively, you lose more internal memories. It's not just external erasure anymore. It's internal degradation."
She holds up her blood-stained notebook. The physical record of everything Swan's losing. The external hard drive for a consciousness that's corrupting from the inside out.
"Come here," Elara says. "Let me read you yourself."
They sit on the couch in Static Grounds' main room, dawn light filtering through windows that exist in defiance of architecture. Elara opens her notebook, and Swan sees page after page of his life written in her careful handwriting. Events. Conversations. Details he told her during their weeks of documentation sessions.
"This is from three weeks ago," Elara says, finding an entry. "You told me about your seventh birthday. Your mother made a cake from scratch—chocolate with raspberry filling. Your father gave you a compass that supposedly belonged to his grandfather. You said the compass never pointed quite north, always a few degrees off, and your father told you that meant it was pointing toward your true direction instead of magnetic north."
Swan listens, and fragments surface. Not the full memory—that's gone—but impressions. The taste of chocolate. The weight of brass. The feeling of being seven and believing your father's gentle lies about magic compasses.
"The compass," he says slowly. "Did I... do I still have it?"
Elara flips through pages. "You said it was in your dorm room. Before the erasure. After... you never mentioned it again. Probably got reassigned with everything else when the system deleted your residency."
Another piece lost. Another fragment of physical proof that he was loved, that he mattered, that he existed in a family structure before the Institute decided otherwise.
"Read more," Swan says. His voice sounds hollow. "Please. I need to know who I was."
Elara continues reading. Each entry is a window into a self Swan can barely access anymore:
His mother taught biology at a community college. Came home exhausted but always made time to help with homework. Had a terrible singing voice but sang anyway. Died trying to expose Genesis Protocol.
His father worked in library sciences. Organized information for a living. Loved old books, physical media, things that couldn't be easily erased. Believed knowledge should be free. Also died trying to expose Genesis Protocol.
They were good people. They loved their son. They fought for what was right even when the cost was deletion.
And their son is forgetting them piece by piece, memory by memory, until all that remains is Elara's documentation of his documentation of their existence.
"I don't know my own childhood," Swan says. The words feel like confession and surrender. "I remember the shape of having had one. Remember there were birthdays and holidays and ordinary days. But the specific moments—the ones that make a life yours—those are gone."
"Not gone," Elara corrects gently. "Just... externalized. Preserved here." She taps her notebook. "I've been your memory keeper, Swan. Every story you've told me. Every detail you've shared. Every moment you wanted to preserve—I wrote it down. Backed it up. Made it physical so even if you forget, the truth remains."
She flips to another section. "Here. Age twelve. You broke your arm skateboarding. Your mother was furious—not because you were hurt but because you'd been doing tricks she'd explicitly forbidden. Your father snuck you ice cream while she was lecturing you about safety. You said it was the best ice cream you ever tasted because it came with permission to be stupid sometimes."
The memory doesn't surface. But the feeling does. The shape of being loved enough that your parents could be angry and indulgent simultaneously. The knowledge that you mattered enough for contradictory emotions.
"I'm disappearing from the inside out," Swan whispers. "The system erased me from external records. And now my powers are erasing me from internal ones. Eventually there'll be nothing left. Just a ghost who doesn't remember being human."
Elara's hand finds his. Her fingers are cold, trembling, but solid. Real. Anchor contact.
"Then I'll remember for you," she says fiercely. "I'll hold every detail you can't. I'll be your external memory until there's no me left to remember with. And even then—even when I'm gone—this notebook will remain. Physical proof that you existed. That you mattered. That you were loved."
She's crying now, blood and tears mixing on her cheeks. The Anchor effect is killing her faster than either of them wants to acknowledge. But she won't stop. Won't rest. Won't abandon him to forgetting.
"How do I save someone who's becoming a ghost to himself?" Elara's voice breaks completely. "How do I anchor you when you're erasing from the inside? I can remember for you but I can't make you remember. Can't restore what your powers are overwriting."
Swan doesn't have answers. Just pulls her closer, two people holding each other against the weight of accumulated loss. Outside, the campus wakes to another day of classes and Daemon threats and systematic experimentation. Inside Static Grounds, two anomalies sit with a notebook full of borrowed memories and the terrible knowledge that both of them are dying.
Just in different directions.
Elara is remembering too much—contradictions stacking until her brain can't process them all. Swan is remembering too little—his internal identity degrading until there's nothing but power and purpose without personal history.
"Read more," Swan says finally. "Please. Even if I can't fully access the memories, I want to hear them. Want to know who I was when I still knew myself."
Elara reads. For hours. Page after page of Swan's life documented with desperate precision. First day of school. First crush. First disappointment. First triumph. All the ordinary moments that make a person real rendered into ink and paper because the person himself can't hold them anymore.
And Swan listens. Sometimes fragments surface—impressions, emotions, the ghost of recognition. More often there's just absence. Just the knowledge that these things happened to someone who looked like him and answered to his name, but the experiential reality of being that person is gone.
Around noon, Ash arrives with food. Stops in the doorway, sees them on the couch, sees Elara reading and Swan listening with an expression of desperate attention, and quietly leaves the food without interrupting. Some moments are too intimate for intrusion.
By evening, Elara's voice is raw. Swan's head pounds from trying to force memories to surface. They've gone through a third of the notebook—seven years of life, documented and read aloud and still feeling like someone else's history.
"That's enough for today," Elara says, her voice barely above a whisper. "Your brain needs to rest. Process what it can."
Swan nods. Stands. Walks back to the bathroom. Looks at his reflection.
It's more stable now. Settled into his twenty-year-old face. But his eyes look older. Haunted. Like he's carrying centuries of forgetting compressed into weeks.
Behind him in the mirror, he sees Elara watching from the doorway. She's documenting even now—her gaze cataloging his body language, his expressions, the way he holds himself. Building an archive of who he is moment by moment because the person himself can't remember who he was year by year.
"Thank you," Swan says. "For being my memory. For holding me when I can't hold myself."
"Thank you for being worth remembering," Elara replies. "For giving me purpose. For letting me be useful while I'm still able."
They both know the math. She has weeks left, maybe days. He has... what? Until he forgets his own name? Until he can't remember why he's fighting? Until he's just a weapon with powers and no past?
The Genesis Protocol must not succeed, his mother said. But Swan is becoming its most successful product—a consciousness stripped of personal history, optimized for reality manipulation, freed from the weight of memory and identity.
Exactly what Lilith wanted.
Exactly what his parents died trying to prevent.
And the cruelest thing is that Swan knows he's losing the very memories that could remind him why he's supposed to resist. Knows that eventually he'll forget he had parents to avenge. Forget he made a promise to stop Genesis Protocol. Forget everything except the power and the present moment.
Unless Elara keeps reading him himself. Keeps anchoring him in the past he can't access. Keeps being the external hard drive for a consciousness that's degrading toward nothingness.
It's not sustainable. It's not enough.
But it's all they have.
Swan returns to the couch. Sits beside Elara. Takes her hand.
"Read more tomorrow?" he asks.
"Every day," she promises. "Until there are no more days. Until we've read every page twice and started over. Until you remember or until I forget. Whichever comes first."
They sit like that as night falls. As Static Grounds' impossible architecture shifts around them. As the city beyond continues its functioning, indifferent to two people trying desperately to hold onto identities that reality insists on deleting.
In the mirror across the room, Swan's reflection flickers one final time before stabilizing.
For now, he knows who he is.
For now, Elara remembers him.
For now, that has to be enough.
Even though they both know—with terrible, perfect certainty—that "for now" has an expiration date neither of them can afford but both of them are paying anyway.
[END OF CHAPTER]