The Gap

You don't notice the memory grid until it hiccups. It's the thing that lets the whole city remember together, your transit card, your door, the cafe that knows your order, all of it humming along on the shared grid so smoothly you forget it's a thing that can break. On a Thursday in March it broke. Soft reboot, the city called it afterward, very calm, very managed. Six hours of grid memory simply gone, citywide, wiped clean, and the official line was that nothing important had happened in those six hours anyway, the grid had checked, it was fine. And here is the part where my life got strange. I remembered the six hours. Not through the grid. In my own head, the old way, the way people used to remember things before the grid did it for us. I remembered all six hours perfectly. And in the middle of them there was a girl, and her name was Sol, and when I went looking for Sol the next day the grid had no record that she had ever existed.