Then the forgetting started.
They weren’t small losses: no five-second delay recalling the name of Solara’s childhood pet. What Eliot could not remember were large swathes of past: sophomore year at the Academy, her first kiss…. Logic told her these things had happened. Freshman year, junior year. Never-been-kissed, second base. Memories fit in the middle, but—much like a secondhand jigsaw puzzle—whole picture pieces were missing.
Universe MB+178587977FLT6, the world Eliot came from, was fading.
If there was a fate worse than death, it was a life unremembered. Mom, Solara, Strom, her Academy friends… moment by moment they melted away from Eliot’s recollection, herself with them. She found no solace in her interface footage, for photographs were meant to preserve memories, not resurrect them, and so her family pixelated—three strangers on a Venetian boat, adrift in ruins.
Eliot watched the datastream of Dr. Ramírez again so she wouldn’t forget what she was doing, why she was here. Why was she here? Who was she trying to save, really? How could she make it count when the life she’d lived was falling into oblivion?
It wasn’t a question she could contemplate for long. Decay was hot on Eliot’s heels. The forgetting stretched on, over, out, spilling into the universes of Subject OneTwoThreeFour, hounding their countersignature through history with gathering strength. Subject Five was not a match, and Eliot left him in the arms of his mother in Alexandria. Once more saved, once more on the edge of burning.
Subject Six. Same routine, new haste. Eliot had no way of knowing when the Fade would find her, but she knew the force was close, its fingers of forgetfulness scratching at every universe she’d ever traveled through. Her days were spent on high alert—watching every moment for signs of the Fade’s arrival. Dr. Ramírez had shown her footage of the decay, but even watching herself watch it, Eliot knew there’d be no comparison between screens and life. The hologram’s projection looked fake, something stripped from a Sim programmer’s nightmares.
Her first encounter with the Fade was in Far’s universe. The sight was as horrible as it was magnificent—view of all views. Eliot stood on the Titanic’s first-class promenade, hip bones pressed against the railing, awaiting the arrival of the Invictus. Atlantic wind whispered salty nothings into her ears; water sped below, folding froth into the ocean liner’s hull. There was a peace to the scene Eliot only felt in hindsight: the calm before.
It started at the horizon, where the blue of the sea struck the blue of the sky. A pinpoint of not-blue appeared between the two elements. The spot mushroomed up and out: drinking the ocean, gnashing the heavens, devouring two of the vastest expanses known to twentieth-century man in seconds. Eliot stood on deck, transfixed by the magnitude of the force. It was too big, too massive for holograms or descriptions or human feeling. Even her fear was dwarfed in its presence….
Presence. Present! As soon as the Fade reached the promenade and clashed with Eliot’s present, she’d be unmade.
Jump immediately!
She did. The leap was through time, not dimensions, and even then only into later that evening. Eliot spent much of the night in the first-class dining saloon, waiting for the Invictus and the Fade in turn. The decay did follow at a delay, creeping into a not-distant-enough past, savoring the minutes she’d also spent eating, stripping the taste of poached salmon from Eliot’s tongue even as it sat in her belly.
She would have abandoned the day altogether, if her present wasn’t scheduled to intersect with Subject Seven’s present here. Roughly. The hours she was forced to skip worried her, but they mattered little in the end. The Invictus bounced off six o’clock—a time that no longer existed—and the resulting ten o’clock crash landing meant Eliot only had to jump another thirty minutes to realign their timetables, giving Far an extra half hour to fumble through the cargo room.
From there it was a familiar story, mostly remembered. Flashing the Rubaiyat. Teleporting onto the Invictus. Blackmail. The party in Vegas. Cucurbita conversations with Imogen. The meeting with Lux. Mission prep for Alexandria. Eliot had recorded every moment—even the ones that seemed too simple to store. The crew of the Invictus watched themselves through her eyes, their own transfixed. Only Imogen had moved, sliding from couch to floor, drowning her face in aquamarine hair while starry-eyed confessions played. Eliot was surprised at how much she felt for her, for all of them. In a matter of days, her loved ones had become strangers, while the strangers themselves became people she wanted to save….
The chip held almost a year’s worth of footage—but the Grid’s timelessness allowed them to watch it in a single sitting. A year. A minute. A month. A life. Seven infinite lives until only one memory remained in the systems. It opened with Imogen gazing into ash-strung skies. “The fires have already started.”
“Are we too late?” Then-Far asked.
“That’s enough.” Now-Far stood. “Pause.”
But the chip was programmed to respond to Eliot’s voice alone, and as much as she wanted to spare them the horror of Empra’s unmaking, she couldn’t. The Invictus’s crew knew what happened next, but soon they wouldn’t. They had to watch the footage to understand what the Fade took and remember the stakes….
“Stop!” Far tried again, louder. The stitches in Eliot’s hand throbbed alongside his shout—a fresh and oozing grief. “Make it stop!”
She wanted to. She didn’t.
The hologram dashed through Alexandrian streets, up the library steps. Eliot hadn’t rushed to Sappho’s scrolls but kept to the central stacks instead, watching to make sure Far got to the right place. Empra was always in the library’s southeast corner on this date, at this time. Her children always turned at the sound of her voice—their reunion always curdled inside Eliot’s heart. Empra McCarthy looked identical in every world, and even though Eliot knew these were other mothers, it was easier to imagine her own as a transient soul than to accept the Fade’s sentence.
That erasure wasn’t so abstract anymore. On the Titanic, it had been the decay’s size that struck Eliot; from the ground, it was the hunger. No element was safe. Water, air, earth, fire, stone, paper. The Fade destroyed everything.
Skin. Bone. Soul.
Empra was gone the instant the Fade touched her: presents intersecting. The Invictus would have unraveled, too, if Eliot hadn’t initiated the TM’s jump into the Grid. And so they were here, watching until the moment in the hologram overlapped with the moment they were sitting in. It could’ve gone on—ouroboros endlessness: serpent’s tail to serpent’s mouth to serpent’s tail to serpent’s mouth—but Eliot finally spoke.