The first thing Marina did was pull her own records.
She had every right to. She was Class A-7. Her professional licensing was hers under the relevant statutes. Her exposure passport was hers under the privacy provisions of 2078. She had pulled her own records before, biennially, the way one checks a credit score. She pulled them now because she wanted to verify the date of the bad month in 2071.
She knew the date.
She had told her therapist about the date for nine years. The date was March 17. She had been Marked on the 14th. Twice-Marked on the 16th. Sealed on the 17th. She had checked into the consolidation-disruption protocol the morning of the 18th. Bahn had been her physician. The protocol had run seven days.
The records came back at four in the afternoon. She read them at her desk with a cup of tea cooling beside her.
The records said she had been Marked on March 14, 2071.
The records said she had been Twice-Marked on March 19.
The records said she had been Sealed on March 21.
The records said she had checked into the protocol on March 22.
She read the dates four times.
She had been off by five days.
The drift was not enormous. Five days was within the range of normal human memory error for an event nine years past. Most people, asked, would have been off by more. On any other afternoon she might have shrugged and corrected the memory and moved on.
She did not move on.
She did not move on because she had not been telling her therapist I think I was Sealed around the 17th. She had been telling her therapist I was Sealed on the 17th. She had been certain. She had been the kind of certain that did not admit revision. She had built nine years of internal narrative on the 17th. The 17th had been the day the world had asked her whether she could be trusted to know her own perceptions. The 17th had been the threshold she had crossed and come back from. The 17th had been the story she had told about herself, to herself, privately, repeatedly.
The 17th had not happened.
She put the tea down.
She walked into the kitchen. She poured it down the sink. She washed the cup. She came back to the desk. She looked at the records.
She thought, with the precision she brought to her thinking: I have lived for nine years on a date my own brain manufactured.
She thought: I have been certain.
She thought: I have been too certain.
She went to see Bahn the next morning.
Bahn was eighty-one and had retired from clinical practice but kept an office in the old consortium building because he refused, the way certain old men refuse, to admit that he had stopped working. He met her in the small white room at the back, where the chairs were too low. He remembered her. He asked after her parents, who were both dead. She told him. He was politely sorry, the way he had been politely sorry the first time, in 2071.
She asked, Bahn, do you remember when I was Sealed.
He said, of course. March of ‘71. Why.
She said, what day.
He paused.
He looked at her. He said, I don’t remember the exact day, Marina. It was a long time ago.
She said, I thought it was the 17th.
He said, that sounds about right.
She said, the records say the 21st.
He looked at her for a long moment.
He said, Marina.
He looked at his hands. He looked at her. He said, the records are correct.
She waited.
He said, I don’t say this part to patients often. I’m going to say it to you because you’ll work it out anyway and I would rather you work it out in this room.
She said, say it.
He said, your memory smoothed. It’s what happens. The week we kept you on the protocol, your brain was doing a great deal of work to stay itself. Some of that work was done to your memory of the week.
She said, am I going to remember other things this way.
He was quiet for a moment.
He said, Marina, you remember everything this way.
She sat with this for a while in the white room with the too-low chairs.
She said, Bahn, am I currently safe.
He said, as far as I know, you are.
She said, would you know.
He said, no.
She walked home through the park.
The cherry trees were doing what cherry trees did in April. She did not look at them because she had become, on the way home, suspicious of cherry trees. She was suspicious of the bay-leaf air that had been the first thing she had let in four days ago. She was suspicious of the package in the basement chamber, which the sensors had now logged as a custom perfume sample in a low-vapor lacquer carrier, a profile that did not match any registry entry and that she had not requested.
She was, mostly, suspicious of herself.
She had refused the contract. She knew she had refused the contract. She had said I’m sorry, this isn’t something I can take on, and the client representative had nodded.
She had said it.
She had not said anything else.
She had not, for example, said I will not be reporting this conversation, and you can take that as a guarantee.
She had not said that, because she did not say things like that. She refused, in the way she refused things, which was cleanly and without commentary. She had not promised the woman with the careful shoes anything except the refusal itself.
But.
She tried to remember the conversation in detail. She tried to remember what she had been wearing. She tried to remember which chair she had been sitting in. She remembered, with the smoothed certainty she had now decided was the symptom and not the truth, that she had been wearing the gray sweater, sitting in the desk chair, and had refused at 11:43 in the morning.
She accessed the meeting log.
The meeting log said the call had taken place at 14:22 in the afternoon.
She had been off by three hours.
She pulled the audio of the call. She had recorded the audio, as she recorded all professional calls. She listened to the audio.
She listened to her own voice say: let me think about it.
She listened to her own voice say: can you give me a week.
She listened to her own voice say, at the end: I’ll have something for you by Thursday.
She did not hear her own voice say I’m sorry, this isn’t something I can take on.
The recording was eleven minutes long. She listened to it twice.
She did not hear the refusal.
She went into the kitchen. She drank a glass of water. She came back to the desk.
She thought, with a precision that was beginning to break around the edges:
I refused.
I remember refusing.
I have not refused.
Esin called at six. Marina did not pick up.
The lacquered box was still in the basement. The sensors had logged the contents as a single sample vial in a low-vapor carrier. The lead notes included bay leaf and a low-temperature distillation of pho-style charred onion broth.
Marina did not, at first, recognize why those notes registered.
Then she did.
She sat in the desk chair for a long time. She did not move. She did not turn on the light when the sun set.
By Sunday she had assembled a list of four signatures on a document she now understood she needed to find. The list was unrelated to her refusal. The list was related to the original architecture. To who had decided, in 2067, that the world should not be told what they had found.
The first name was one she had seen three times in her childhood. Karl Olesen. A senator’s aide turned Secretary of Cognitive Rehabilitation, profiled in three of the news magazines her mother had subscribed to when Marina was a girl. She had a clear picture of him at forty, slightly out of date.
The other names she did not yet know. One of them was Henrik Voss. In the document she would find on Monday morning, his name would be annotated by hand in the margin.
She slept that Sunday night for the first time in four days. She slept seven hours. She dreamed.
In the dream she was certain of everything.