The Offer

Morrow offered Elias a complete reconstruction of his missing 2018 period under independent supervision. The proposal arrived two weeks after the hearing, signed by the external clinical team now overseeing legacy participants. It promised source-separated viewing, continuous uncertainty labels, no Narrative Stability optimization and the ability to stop after any segment. The process would not claim to restore memory. It would assemble the strongest surviving evidence into immersive scenes and allow Elias to decide what, if anything, he accepted.

The old Elias would have signed before reaching the second page. The current one carried the proposal around for six days.

He took it to Lena first. They met in the same station coffee shop where she had told him Mara had never been diagnosed. Lena no longer worked at Morrow. She had resigned the morning after her testimony and accepted a temporary research post at a university ethics center that she joked paid partly in moral superiority and partly in disappointing coffee.

"Do you want me to tell you not to do it?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Then I'm not going to."

"Would you do it?"

"For myself?"

"Yes."

Lena considered. "Probably."

Elias looked up, surprised.

"You expected a more enlightened answer?"

"A little."

"I'm curious. I also believe reconstructions can be useful. None of this changes that."

"Even after Fallow."

"Especially after Fallow. The mistake is not using tools. The mistake is allowing usefulness to become authority without noticing."

Elias folded the proposal. "I want the noodles." Lena smiled. "The terrible ones?"

"Apparently. I want to remember the second meeting with Mara. I want Pember. I want to remember how we were."

"You may not get that. You may get scenes built from recordings and notes that eventually feel like memory."

"I know."

"Do you?"

He looked at her.

Lena smiled faintly. "Sorry. Had to."

He laughed.

There was a pause.

"I want to remember you too," Elias said.

Lena's smile disappeared.

"2018," he continued. "Not because I think there was some hidden romance. I know there wasn't. But you remember years of me that I don't. That creates an imbalance I hate."

"You hate imbalance or dependence?"

"Both."

"Maybe you don't need to correct it."

Elias looked out at the trains.

"Do you regret agreeing to Continuity?"

Lena took time before answering. "Yes. And no."

He waited.

"I regret strengthening the kitchen. I regret underestimating associative spread. I regret accepting your argument that protection of Mara justified risks we didn't understand. I don't regret helping protect her location once she chose not to be found."

"Even though the procedure hurt me."

"You are not the only person whose interests existed."

The sentence once would have sounded cruel. Now it sounded like the center of the whole story.

Elias nodded.

He took the proposal to Mara next. They met in a public garden halfway between Dunley and wherever she was currently living. She refused to specify which direction that was. She had cut her hair shorter since Carrow Bay.

"It makes you look like Mum," Elias said.

"Dangerous. She had terrible hair in the nineties."

"You know what I mean."

"Unfortunately."

They walked beneath bare trees. Elias gave her the proposal.

She read the first page and returned it.

"Not my decision."

"I know."

"Then why show me?"

"Because some of the source material is yours."

Mara stopped.

That answer mattered.

"They would exclude anything you don't consent to," Elias said. "I can reconstruct only my own recordings and notes."

"Would that be enough?"

"Probably not."

"Good."

He looked at her.

"I'm serious," Mara said. "Maybe not enough is the right amount."

"You don't want me to remember 2018."

"Part of me does. I hate being the only one carrying some of it. Another part remembers what happened when both of us became obsessed with making memory behave."

They resumed walking.

"I have one recording you haven't heard," Mara said.

Elias's attention sharpened automatically.

She noticed.

"See?"

"Sorry."

"It's from the second meeting. The bad noodles. I recorded ten minutes because I didn't trust you not to later claim you had been reasonable."

"Was I?"

"Absolutely not."

"Can I hear it?"

Mara looked at him.

Elias waited.

Then she said, "Not today."

The old frustration arrived.

He let it.

"Okay."

Mara studied his face as if looking for the hidden argument.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"You're extremely unsettling now."

"I've been told."

They reached the garden exit. Before leaving, Mara said, "If you decide to reconstruct, don't do it because you think the version with the most data wins."

"Why would I do it?"

"Because you want to meet the person you were. That's allowed."

"You hated him."

"Sometimes."

"You loved him."

Mara rolled her eyes. "Don't make me say emotionally useful things in public."

Elias smiled.

She hugged him.

It happened quickly enough that he had no time to prepare. For one second he stood rigid.

Then his arms came around her. No rain. No kitchen. No cup.

He did not try to memorize the details.