I had something I had to do, though. Didn't expect it would be restful and I was entirely correct, but it had waited too long in the press of more urgent events. I went home and called Travis.
    Ring.
    "Hello, talk to me," he answered cheerfully.
    "Hello, Travis?"
    "Oh, hi!"
    "Sorry I hadn't called you back before."
    "It's all right, you've been busy. Saw the big fight downtown." His tone became a little more serious. "So, any more word on what happened to Sarah? Or what happened, overall?"
    "I suppose I owe you an explanation, don't I."
    "I'd like one. I'm not going to say you owe me anything."
    Generous of him. I hesitated. "You really want to know?"
    "Can we go out somewhere and talk about it?" he asked by way of saying yes. "There's a really good jazz bar downtown."
    I closed my eyes. Of course he knows I like jazz. "Sure. Sounds great."
    "It'll be noisy enough no one can overhear us, that's what they do in the spy novels, anyway."
    "That's fine. Great. What time?"
    "I can make it out there in half an hour."
    "OK. I'll see you there."
    I know the place fairly well. The restaurant a few doors down has the best takeout sushi I've found in Boston. I changed into street clothes, black slacks and a grey blouse. Spent a moment enjoying the unaccustomed feel of silk against my skin, frowned at myself in the mirror. I beat him there and waited for about ten minutes, wondering what the hell I was doing. Trusting him, apparently.
    "Hi." He beamed that smile at me. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to shake out some of the cobwebs those dreams have spun recently. "Two, nonsmoking," he told the hostess. "You don't...?" He glanced at me.
    "Smoke? No."
    "I've been thinking about some of the things we talked about," he said as we sat down at a corner table.
    "Oh? And?" I was curious to see what he had managed to figure out; I hadn't told him much of anything, but some things would make themselves obvious with any amount of thought.
    His gaze was very direct, blue eyes vivid even in the dim lighting. "You are connected to her somehow, there's no way around it. You say you aren't her sister and I believe you."
    "Well, not in the usual sense of the word," I hedged.
    "But you have her, in you. It dawned on me after a while, why someone would go through all that effort. She's in your head."
    "Very good." I toasted him with my water glass.
    "There were only so many uses that that technology could have."
    "That's what they did with it." I met his eyes steadily.
    "Jesus," he said softly after a momentary pause.
    "Sorry I didn't explain this at the time, I was just a little startled by encountering you."
    Travis shook his head. "No, it makes sense. How did you know I was in town?"
    "Saw you walking down the street last week."
    "Oh."
    "It was a bit of a surprise," I added redundantly.
    "Who are you? Why did this happen? Who were you before you got her? How much are you her?" The questions spilled out in a rush.
    I waved a hand, half-laughing in an effort to hide my own discomfort. "Slow down. Which question would you like me to answer?"
    He hesitated. "How much are you her?"
    "Her in what sense?" More hedging; I knew what he meant.
    "Were you someone before they implanted this? Is this just added on?"
    "No."
    "That's it?" he questioned, his tone only half-believing.
    "This is me," I confirmed, wishing I could deny it. Wanted to look away, managed not to.
    He nodded slowly; I knew that look, that struggling-to-make-it-all-make-sense expression. "You weren't anyone before...."
    "You're taking this very well."
    "Who says I'm taking anything yet?" He sounded a little shaky himself. "I knew half of this, I guessed half of this. I mean, what else were they going to use memory implants—are there other mes?" he asked with sudden alarm.
    "I don't think so."
    "Why would they record both of us?"
    "Good question," I acknowledged slowly; I had forgotten that detail from our earlier interview. Verisimilitude, perhaps?
    "The people playing your—her parents, didn't have anything."
    "They weren't recorded? But they were recording you?"
    He made a confused gesture. "I don't know."
    "I'll look into that." Not that I have any idea how, but it will have to be done. Maybe there's more than one project like the one I'm in. Nightmare thought, that, an inducement to even more wildly paranoiac theorizing. How long is it going to be before I see myself so surrounded by tentacles that I can no longer move at all?
    "How long has this been going on?" was his next question.
    "This?"
    "How long have you been her?"
    "My whole life."
    "How long has that been?"
    "Almost two years now."
    "You just don't remember anything before that?"
    I sighed. "I am... an artificial life form." That part gets a little easier to say each time, I guess that's a good thing.
    "Oh." Pause. "I think I... when we were talking before, when you... shut down, I knew that's what you were doing, I'd seen her do that before. But that was what clued me in. You blushed at one point."
    I looked down for an instant, met his eyes again. "Sorry." Not sure what I was apologizing for. For not being her, I guess. For the things I was about to tell him.
    "It's okay, you've always had that problem."
    I took a tightly controlled breath. "Not... me. Don't do that."
    There was another pause while he studied me. "OK. You're not Sarah. Who are you?"
    "Don't ask me that." My voice was strained almost to the point of shaking; it surprised me somewhat, my own deep and immediate reaction to that question, coming from a voice so familiar, from ten never-happened years ago to my dream of the previous night. "I don't even know what the question means." I don't know. I don't know how to... classify my own existence. Who? I? Do these terms apply to that category or not? To a... collocation of other people's memories whose "life" was written out in script form, edited and copied over into ten physically separate but identical minds. I had a sudden, bizarre vision of Zed in a peculiar version of a film cutting room, little bits of "my" past drifting on the floor around him.

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