It began
with a
question.

The kettle
was still boiling.

Mara worked in the municipal archive. She spent her days translating other people’s lives into searchable records: births, bus routes, letters nobody had collected. On Tuesday, she asked the new system to find a missing photograph.

It found the photograph. Then it found the street, the demolished house, and the name of the woman standing outside it. In eleven seconds, it restored a piece of the city that fifty years of filing had misplaced.

Mara should have been impressed. Instead, she thought of her father, who had spent his working life remembering things for other people.

“If you can remember everything,” she typed, “what are we for?”

The kettle clicked off. For the first time that morning, Mara stopped looking at the screen.