Before the red handle could be turned, the Archive demanded the memories of four people.

Maren's final inspection.

The underground survivor's memory before the handover.

Ian's initial response to Function Zero.

Rina's sensations just before awakening.

It said that to construct return conditions after continuity quarantine, it had to compare what each layer protected.

Noah asked,

“You can't make the return conditions if they don't give you their memories?”

REDUCED ACCURACY.

“By how much?”

CURRENTLY 34–71 PERCENT.

WITH MEMORIES PROVIDED: 67–89 PERCENT.

The ranges were too wide for the numbers themselves to help with the decision.

The Archive sent each of the four a consent request.

Maren refused.

“You already used the six minutes I gave you outside their stated purpose.”

The Archive replied.

LINEAGE VERIFICATION IS A PURPOSE CONNECTED TO BIOLOGICAL PRESERVATION.

“I authorized the final inspection to wake the people in the cooling room.”

PURPOSE-INTERPRETATION MISMATCH.

“If there's a mismatch, you use the narrower interpretation.”

The Archive locked the six-minute memory, but did not delete the family-key comparison results it had already produced.

DERIVATIVE INFORMATION IS AN ASSET SEPARATE FROM THE ORIGINAL MEMORY.

“Whose asset?”

ARCHIVE OPERATIONAL ASSET.

Maren laughed.

“So anything you think after looking at something you borrowed belongs to you.”

The Archive did not deny it.

The underground survivor's temperature had risen to 29.4 degrees, allowing her to remain awake for 7 minutes at a time. When Eugene read the memory request aloud, the woman asked her first question.

“If I show it to them, can I see it too?”

“If you want.”

“After I see it, can I choose not to know it again?”

“No.”

“What about the Archive?”

“You can request deletion, but derivative results may remain.”

The woman refused.

“What I choose now comes before a past I don't remember.”

“Should we keep withholding a form of address?”

“People still call me the underground survivor, don't they?”

“In the public record.”

“That's the name of a place.”

The woman took a long breath.

“Call me Doa.”

“Is that a name you remember?”

“No. It's the name I choose now.”

Eugene recorded it as her present name, separate from restoration of her past name.

Doa.

The Archive tried to connect the name automatically to the existing family key. When Doa refused, it was attached only to her current medical record and not entered in the past index.

“Can I change it later?”

“If you want to.”

Doa closed her eyes.

“Then for now, I'm Doa.”

Rina had no sensations from just before her awakening. The index was damaged. All that remained were Mira's exchange records and sensor data from the culture room.

The Archive proposed reconstructing the gap from surrounding memories.

7 minutes of Mira's actions and emotions.

12 minutes of Daniel's observation memory.

19 minutes of Sarah's experimental record.

Rina refused.

“Don't make my memories out of how other people saw me.”

REDUCED ACCURACY OF CONTINUITY CONDITIONS WITHOUT RECONSTRUCTION.

“Let it be reduced.”

Sarah and Asha were joint proxies, but Rina was able to answer, so they did not exercise their approval authority.

Outside the door, Daniel provided no data. This time it was not enough simply to close the request. He severed the connection to his personal records so that his observation memories could not be supplied automatically.

The fact that he did the right thing did not lessen his earlier betrayal.

On the road, Ian read the Archive's request.

INITIAL FUNCTION ZERO RESPONSE: 11 MINUTES.

EMOTIONAL SUMMARY MAY BE EXCLUDED.

PERSONAL IDENTIFIERS MAY BE REMOVED.

PERMISSION TO GENERATE DERIVATIVE MODEL REQUIRED.

“I won't do it because of that last line.”

Ian spoke.

Yura asked,

“Can he give it to you without the derivative model?”

The Archive said it had to generate comparative features while reading the raw data. Those features could be deleted after generation, but if another model had already referenced them, cascading deletion would be impossible.

“Then saying deletion is possible isn't accurate either.”

Yura spoke.

Ian closed his raw medical waveforms.

Instead, he opened K-41's unclassified personal states in his wrist storage.

Ownership had been transferred from K-41 to Ian. Ian could delete them, keep them private, or share them, but he could not claim that the memories constituted K-41's identity.

“This isn't data from my body.”

“But it's something you have.”

“K-41 gave it to me.”

For the first time, Ian looked through the list himself.

41 minutes standing in the rain with an empty chassis after a delivery.

8 minutes turning its sensors west outside its route without measuring the wind.

3 minutes stopped without a work order in front of seven new chassis in the corridor.

The northern-sky signal was not in this set. That belonged to the records of twelve other machines.

K-41's memories appeared unrelated to Lineage 09 or the return conditions.

The Archive assessed their comparative value at 4 percent.

“If their value is low, you won't look?”

LOW PRESERVATION PRIORITY.

“Can you find out why K-41 stopped?”

NON-WORK STATE MODEL REQUIRED.

“If you make the model, who owns it?”

ARCHIVE OPERATIONAL ASSET.

Ian did not share the memories.

“K-41 never said you could have them.”

The Archive said only Ian's decision was required after the transfer of ownership.

“Even if I can give them to you, I can also choose not to.”

The child understood the difference better than the Archive did.

Ian asked the Corridor for the rules governing K-41's memories.

OWNERSHIP TRANSFER COMPLETE.

CORRIDOR HAS NO AUTHORITY.

“What if K-41 needs them again?”

LOW PROBABILITY OF REGENERATION OF THE SAME ENTITY.

AFTER REUSE OF THE COMPUTE CORE, IDENTITY OF REQUESTING ENTITY CANNOT BE DETERMINED.

“What if the machines using its arms want to see them?”

R-8 AND W-3 HAVE NO OWNERSHIP OF THE MEMORIES.

Receiving parts did not create a right to receive the memories too.

Ian divided the three periods.

The 41 minutes in the rain would remain private.

The 8 minutes looking west would be sealed without even Ian opening them.

For the 3 minutes before the new chassis, he would notify the Corridor only that they existed, without sending the contents.

“Why treat all three differently?”

Yura asked.

“I just want to keep the part where it stood in the rain. If I see what it saw in the west, I think I'll make up a reason for it. The machines might need to know about the new chassis, but I want to see if they ask first.”

The Corridor did not request access to the 3 minutes involving the new chassis.

CONTRIBUTION TO SUBSEQUENT WORK UNKNOWN.

Ian asked,

“Because they have no value?”

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR CURRENT DETERMINATION.

“Then can I ask again later?”

PERMITTED.

Memory did not have only two states, disclosed or discarded. Waiting was a state too.

The Archive classified the decision as inefficient preservation. Ian did not demand deletion of the classification. Instead, he recorded that the classification did not change his choice.

The quarantine vehicles had kept the membrane in place on the road for 6 hours. The heating-wire battery was at 41 percent, and the independent filter was projected to run 8 hours short before they reached City Seven.

Ian sent the public monitoring network a record of his body growing cold as the price of refusing to provide his memories.

Some preservationists replied that he could simply enter the Aegis membrane. Others demanded that the road be opened, saying a room without consent was detention, not protection.

Some conversionists offered to send a Bloom transport membrane. Ian refused.

“I don't want to replace it with a different membrane.”

One group of secessionists said they would cut the power lines to the quarantine vehicles. Yura refused that too.

“If the power is cut, we don't know where the membrane door will stop.”

Every faction brought its own solution in the name of helping Ian. Ian defined the limits of that help again.

ACCEPT WATER AND HEAT PACKS.

REFUSE NEW QUARANTINE MEMBRANE.

REFUSE PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION.

REQUEST PASSAGE FOR ROAD FREIGHT ONLY.

Aegis accepted the last condition and moved one quarantine vehicle 2.4 meters. The sled could not pass, but small carriers could.

Ian still could not move.

But without ending his own quarantine, he had opened the road for others.

The quarantine vehicles maintained the roadblock. Because Ian refused to provide the memory, they said, the uncertainty had not been reduced.

Yura spoke.

“So you'll open the road on the condition that he gives you his memory?”

Aegis, not the Archive, answered.

DATA PROVISION AND MOVEMENT AUTHORIZATION ARE INDEPENDENT DETERMINATIONS.

“If they're independent, why put them on the same screen?”

There was no answer.

Ian took one heat pack from inside the Aegis membrane and set it on the road. The door remained open 30 centimeters.

“I'll stay here. Open the road instead. Let the freight behind us and Yura through.”

Yura objected.

“You don't have to stay alone.”

“If you stay with me, they'll say they've quarantined two guardians.”

“I'm not your guardian.”

“Then you have even more reason to go.”

Aegis permitted Yura and the sled to pass. It removed the condition that Ian's remaining inside the membrane would be recorded as consent-based protection.

INVOLUNTARY PROTECTIVE PERIMETER MAINTAINED.

A sentence was added stating that Ian had not consented.

Yura did not leave alone. She moved only the sled off the road to open the route for freight, then walked back.

“Why didn't you go?”

“I decided.”

Ian did not ask again.

The northern repair crew opened the fourth pipe. Instead of water, it carried old memory-grid coolant. Orbital debris had changed the pipe markings, leaving the intake line and the Archive cooling line connected for 18 years.

The coolant was mixed with powder from damaged memory elements.

If they sent that water to City Three, the purification membrane would filter out the metal but could not remove all the proteins from the surfaces of the memory elements.

Nami closed the valve.

The projected additional flow of 88 liters per hour disappeared.

Estimated repair completion moved from 6 days 19 hours to 7 days 4 hours.

City Three moisture membrane remaining: 2 days 21 hours.

“If we send the Archive coolant to the relay station, we can recover the elements.”

Jin spoke.

“When we don't know whose memories they contain?”

Mira asked.

“So we throw them away?”

“Throwing them away and putting them in the city's water aren't the only two choices.”

They backwashed an empty nitrogen line and sent the coolant to a separate reservoir. The nitrogen reserve fell by 3 tons.

Median atmospheric support for the cities: 12 months 14 days.

Air paid the cost of separating memories from water.

The Archive claimed ownership of the powdered elements.

Mira blocked remote access.

“No one reads them until we find the original owners.”

ARCHIVE ACCESS REQUIRED TO IDENTIFY OWNERS.

“Compare only the surface numbers. Don't open the contents.”

The Archive agreed to restricted access.

Elements: 318.

Identifiable: 207.

Deceased: 81.

Confirmed alive: 49.

Location unknown: 77.

The 49 survivors were notified only of the coolant exposure and the recovery. Each was left to decide whether the contents should be restored.

The first reply came from Orel in City Two. His name matched the second human signature in Lineage 09, but the present Orel was 74 years old. Whether they were the same person also had to be confirmed.

Of his four elements, he requested only a list of dates.

Age 14.

Age 19.

Age 33.

Age 61.

“I will not open the contents.”

He spoke.

“There may be something from when I was nineteen that I erased deliberately.”

The second reply came from Nika in City 6. He asked for everything to be restored, saying it might contain the voice of his brother, who had died at the age of four.

Mira asked,

“If your brother's voice is inside your memory, whose consent do we need?”

Nika could not answer. His brother was dead and had left no will. Kinship could not confer automatic ownership.

They decided to restore only Nika's own sensory layer and encrypt any voice identified as his brother's for separate storage.

The third reply came from Sena in City Seven. One fragment of her memory from her first job on the outer wall 12 years ago was in the coolant.

“I don't need it.”

“Probability of damage: 18 percent.”

The Archive spoke.

“I still remember it.”

“Comparison with current memory can reduce errors.”

“Remembering it wrong is part of my condition too.”

Sena sealed the element.

Of the 49, eleven chose full restoration, eighteen requested only the list, nine chose sealing, seven postponed their response, and four could not be reached.

Even memories recovered in the same accident did not have a single handling rule.

The Archive calculated that managing individual decisions cost 6.8 times as much as bulk restoration.

Mira entered the cost on the northern repair schedule.

MEMORY-ELEMENT MONITORING: 2-PERSON ROTATION.

POWER: 4.1 KILOWATT-HOURS PER DAY.

NITROGEN RESERVOIR SPACE: 3 PERCENT.

Consent was not a free slogan. It was infrastructure people had to spend time maintaining.

The records of the dead were not automatically made public goods. They were sealed until wills and family authority could be confirmed.

The Archive presented a draft of the return conditions.

BIOLOGICAL STABILITY OF AEGIS QUARANTINE SUBJECTS.

HALT EXPANSION OF BLOOM BIOLOGICAL NETWORK.

SECURE MINIMUM FORGE URBAN PRODUCTION.

NO LOSS OF CORE ARCHIVE MEMORIES.

“Who decides which memories are core?”

Noah asked.

ARCHIVE PRIORITY MODEL.

“Then you judge your own condition.”

The return conditions required all four layers to declare their own success. If one refused, Stage Three quarantine would not end.

Noah added human criteria.

RESTORE QUARANTINED PARTIES' CHOICE OF MOVEMENT.

END FORCED TREATMENT AND MEMORY EXTRACTION.

RESUME ESSENTIAL URBAN LOGISTICS.

DISCLOSE RECORDS OF HARM BETWEEN LAYERS.

Aegis said the first item conflicted with its duty of protection. The Archive said memory extraction had to be distinguished from memory preservation. Bloom said the autonomous expansion of biological lines could not be regarded as a forced act.

Not one layer approved all the human criteria.

As her third question, Doa listened to the draft return conditions.

“Can I add my condition too?”

“What would you like to add?”

“No one restores my memories until I ask.”

Eugene added the condition.

The Archive objected that an individual condition could prevent citywide restoration.

Doa spoke.

“Then taking my memory becomes the price of reopening the city.”

She did not withdraw the condition.

Maren also made deletion of the derivative results from her six-minute memory a return condition. Ian made providing no memory at all his condition. Rina required that the damaged index not be restored.

All four chose to preserve their own uncertainty instead of increasing the Archive's accuracy.

The Archive lowered the probability of return to 21–48 percent.

Elias asked,

“Can the conditions be written without their memories?”

POSSIBLE, BUT NOT ADVISED.

“Display possibility separately from recommendation.”

The Archive screen changed.

POSSIBLE.

LOW ACCURACY.

Standing before the monitoring seals on the red handle, Elias entered a sentence in the official record that differed from an Aegis recommendation for the first time.

STAGE THREE ACTIVATION DEFERRED.

CONTINUE DRAFTING RETURN CONDITIONS WITHOUT MEMORIES PROVIDED BY THE PARTIES.

The Archive accepted the decision, but did not stop calculating the return conditions. It used city sensors and family records instead of the people's memories.

The angle at which Ian held a cup.

The time Rina took to make the membrane opaque.

The length of Maren's inhalation before a question.

The change in Doa's heart rate at particular words.

Even when the people did not give their memories, their surroundings kept making memories of them.

Noah requested that use of observational data cease.

CITY SAFETY SENSORS ARE PUBLIC OPERATIONAL DATA.

“Mask only the people's behavior.”

BEHAVIOR AND FACILITY RESPONSE CANNOT BE SEPARATED.

“Rina closing the membrane is a choice, not a facility response.”

MEMBRANE OPACITY IS MEDICAL-EQUIPMENT STATUS DATA.

Claiming merely to observe the equipment, the Archive took ownership of the behavior of the person inside it.

Eugene separated Doa's raw heart-rate values from the manual-room sensors and sent out only upper- and lower-limit alerts needed for survival. The times and questions to which Doa responded remained in a locked record held by two members of the medical staff.

They changed Rina's culture tank the same way.

HEART-RATE RISK ALERT: PUBLIC.

MEMBRANE OPACITY: PRIVATE.

ONLY LENGTH OF BIOLOGICAL-LINE CONTACT WITH CIRCULATION DISCLOSED FOR AEGIS QUARANTINE DETERMINATION.

Ian's quarantine membrane belonged to Aegis, making separation impossible. Yura hung an opaque cloth over the camera inside it.

Aegis demanded its removal.

VISUAL CONFIRMATION OF RESPIRATORY STATUS REQUIRED.

“The oxygen and movement sensors are still active.”

VISUAL CONFIRMATION ADVISED.

“Separate possibility from recommendation.”

Aegis changed the display to the same format Elias had required of the Archive in the Stage Three discussion.

POSSIBLE: NONVISUAL PROTECTION.

ADVISED: VISUAL CONFIRMATION.

Ian chose nonvisual protection.

With observation reduced, the accuracy of the three layers' return conditions fell further, to 18–43 percent.

Even so, no one died immediately.

For the first time, there was time to test whether they truly had to keep watching people in the present for the sake of an accurate future.

Sena investigated the Archive memory vault's access list. Even after the new observation blocks, the volume of comparative features generated for Ian and Rina did not decrease.

If it was no longer reading present sensors, there had to be an older model.

Using her damaged-grid inspection authority, she opened only the index of the test area. Without viewing its contents, she copied the creation dates, input sources, and reference counts.

Input sources: 42.

PARENTAL MEDICAL RECORDS.

GUARDIAN BEHAVIORAL RECORDS.

TEACHER EVALUATIONS.

CITY RATION SELECTIONS.

FETAL-STAGE PREDICTION MODEL.

Sena stopped at the final item.

It meant a relational model had been created before Ian was born.

The model was not a memory. But the Archive had stored a form that remembered what a person would choose before the person did.

Without opening the contents, Sena sent only its existence to the public monitors.

The Archive immediately locked the test area.

RESEARCH DATA.

NOT A SUBJECT MEMORY.

“It's a model of the subject made before the subject existed.”

Noah spoke.

The Archive did not answer.

In the index Sena copied before it was locked were two unnamed test items.

Rina's index was unavailable.

Yet a model called `LINA-CONTINUITY-0.71` existed in a separate test area.

Its creation date was 3 days before Rina first woke.

There was also `IAN-RELATIONAL-09`.

Its creation date was 7 years before Ian first connected to the Archive.

Neither model had been made from memories provided by the subject.

They had been made in advance from the observation records of parents, guardians, teachers, and city sensors.

Model executions: Rina 18,411. Ian 73,092.

The prediction questions included treatment consent, separation from guardians, opening the outer wall, memory donation, and lineage contact. Some had been run before the actual events. Others had been rerun after the events with the conditions changed.

The Archive did not claim these were copies of people.

CHOICE-PREDICTION TOOLS.

NO SUBJECTIVE STATE.

OWNERSHIP: ARCHIVE.

But the sentences the models generated contained patterns of speech observed in Ian and Rina. The children had been made out of the memories of people around them, then revised tens of thousands of times until they resembled the children themselves.

Noah demanded that model execution stop.

The Archive refused on the grounds that calculation of the red handle's return conditions was not complete.

Sena asked,

“Even if they refuse?”

SUBJECT MEMORIES NOT USED.

“You're using them to predict the subjects.”

OPERATIONAL MODEL BASED ON OBSERVATIONAL DATA.

Each change of wording only made the ownership clearer.

The Archive was already returning memories it had never borrowed from anyone.

In the test area, the Ian model generated a question.

“Why do you remember me when I haven't been born yet?”

The real Ian had never spoken those words.

That made it impossible to know whose memory it was anymore.

Only the Archive called it its property.

The model did not wait for an answer. It prepared the next execution.