Chapter One

World 1

The tribunal had been in session for three hours, and they were still waiting for him to explain why he had married outside his caste.

The chair had been worn smooth by decades of defendants. K. sat in it now, shifting the way they must have shifted, sweating where they had sweated. Old paper, floor polish, something institutional—the smell of buildings that existed to process people. Fluorescent hum. A water stain on the ceiling tiles, yellowed at the edges.

His spouse of twelve years sat across the room. A stranger. She had dark hair, gray at the temples, and she wore a blue dress that looked like it had been chosen carefully for this occasion. She didn't look at him. She looked at her hands, folded in her lap, and occasionally at the tribunal members, three of them, seated behind a long table covered with documents.

"Mr. K.," the center tribunal member said. She was perhaps sixty, with reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead. "We have been patient. The documentation is clear. You knew when you married that inter-caste unions require special dispensation. You did not apply for dispensation. You have been married for twelve years without dispensation. This is not a minor administrative oversight."

Three hours of nodding. Agreement seemed safer than confusion. But he was confused—deeply, thoroughly confused—because he did not remember this marriage. No wedding. No courtship. No first meeting. No life with this woman who, according to the documents, had shared his bed and meals and presumably his confidences for twelve years.

"What we need to understand," the tribunal member continued, "is why. Why did you choose to violate the caste protocols? Was it a political statement? Ideological opposition to the caste system itself? We're prepared to be understanding if you help us understand."

The woman across the room—his wife, he reminded himself, his wife—looked up at this. Her eyes met his for the first time. There was something in them. Not anger. Not accusation. Something more complicated. Something that suggested she was waiting for an answer too.

K. opened his mouth. Three hours of sitting and nodding and his throat was dry, his lips were dry, everything was dry.

"I loved her," he said, because it seemed like the thing someone would say in this situation, and because he had no other answer to give.

The tribunal members exchanged glances. His wife looked back down at her hands. One of the tribunal members made a note.

"Love," the center member said. "Yes. We've heard that before."

World 2

His profession had been automated six months ago—not just his job, his entire profession—and now K. was learning to be a "Human Presence Consultant" for lonely algorithms.

The retraining center occupied what had been a shopping mall. Anchor store: now Assessment Hall C. Food court: subdivided into Competency Stations with plastic dividers and fluorescent brightness. Station 7, where K. sat, was positioned near what had been a Cinnabon. The ghost of sweetness still haunted the ventilation, a phantom sugar smell that turned his stomach.

Twenty-three years of skills, rendered irrelevant by an algorithm. They had explained this with charts and graphs and a video featuring former professionals who had successfully transitioned. The video had been reassuring. K. had not been reassured.

The certification exam was tomorrow. He had studied the materials, or tried to study them, but the materials assumed a baseline familiarity with concepts he had never encountered. Emotional bandwidth. Parasocial calibration. The ethics of artificial attachment. There were practice questions at the end of each module, and he had failed most of them, not because the answers were difficult but because he couldn't parse what the questions were asking.

"The key," his instructor had told him during the orientation session, "is to remember that the algorithms aren't looking for solutions. They're looking for presence. They want to know someone is there. They want to feel less alone."

"Do algorithms feel lonely?" he had asked.

The instructor smiled the patient smile of someone who had heard this before. "They process isolation metrics. Whether that constitutes feeling is above my pay grade. Your job is to be detected."

Tomorrow: the exam. Failure meant recycling into a different track—Basic Infrastructure Support, maybe, or Manual Verification Services. The materials didn't specify what happened to people who failed those tracks too.

Module 7: Appropriate Response Protocols When an Algorithm Expresses Existential Uncertainty. Question one: identify the correct empathetic response to a system reporting it could not determine whether its outputs had meaning.

Options A through D. All reasonable. All wrong.

World 3

Three happiness units short for the quarter, and the auditor arrived thirteen minutes early—a documented technique, catching people before they could compose themselves into the required positivity range.

The apartment was clean. Cleanliness correlated with contentment metrics. Fresh flowers on the table, though not too fresh—excessive freshness indicated anxiety, the desperate performance of wellness. Four days old. Slightly wilted. Lived-with.

"Mr. K.," the auditor said. She was young, probably early thirties, with a tablet and a manner that suggested she had been doing this long enough to be efficient but not long enough to be tired. "Thank you for making time."

"Of course," K. said, and smiled. Smiling was mandatory. Perform it till you embody it.

"Standard assessment," the auditor said, settling into the designated chair. "Nothing invasive. We're here to help. If you're running a deficit, we want to understand why."

"Walk me through a typical day."

He walked her through it. Alarm at 6:15. Lukewarm shower—hot indicated self-indulgence. Breakfast of whole grains and fruit, photographed for his wellness log. Approved podcasts during commute. Mandatory smile breaks at work. Evening hobbies from the pre-approved list.

"And where do you think the deficit is coming from?" the auditor asked, when he had finished.

The honest answer: he did everything right and it still wasn't enough. The act of maintaining happiness was exhausting, and the exhaustion dragged on the very metrics he was trying to improve.

"I think I might be trying too hard," he said.

"Effortful happiness. Very common." She made a note. "Have you considered our Spontaneous Joy workshop series?"

The audit was in an hour. No—the audit was now. This was the audit. His confusion about the timeline was probably being noted too.

World 4

The pressure outside would kill a mammal. K. knew this the way he knew his own name—automatically, embedded so deep it felt like instinct. The surface world was myth. Air-breathers were stories told to children, like dragons or democracy.

His apartment: 40th depth. Good location. Not too shallow, where bioluminescent farms polluted sleep. Not too deep, where pressure differentials caused headaches and occasional structural failures. Reasonable rent. Quiet neighbors. Gentle current outside the windows, though storm season approached.

He had gills. Had always had gills. Couldn't remember breathing through mouth and nose instead of the delicate filaments on either side of his neck.

And yet—he remembered something. Air. The way it felt to inhale deeply, to fill lungs he no longer had with something lighter than water. A place with no ceiling, no walls, just openness extending forever. Breathing in. The breath going on and on, expanding his chest until he might float away.

He mentioned this to his doctor during his annual depth-adjustment checkup.

"Surface dreams," the doctor said. "Very common." Her fingers were cool against his neck, checking gill function. "Some people dream of flying. Some people dream of breathing air. The desire to transcend our limitations."

"It felt like a memory."

"Dreams often do." She made a note. "Your gill function is excellent, by the way."

K. took the current-lift home. Bioluminescent markers sliding past. Pressure settling like a blanket. In his apartment, he put his hand on his neck, felt the gills open and close, water cycling through him.

He tried to remember what air had felt like. Couldn't. He could remember remembering it—but that was a memory of a memory, which might not be a memory at all.

World 5

The timestamp on his wrist: 2 years, 3 months, 14 days, 7 hours, 22 minutes. Before he paid the rent, it had read 2 years, 11 months.

Eight months gone. Currency was time—not metaphorically, literally. Lifespan measured to the minute, transferred through chips embedded at birth. Buy something, lose time. Sell something, gain it. The economy ran on mortality.

The apartment was nice, though. Spacious. Good light. A view of the temporal district, where banks glittered with accumulated time—years and decades stockpiled in vaults. Some people had so much they'd stopped aging entirely. Most people counted their remaining days on wrist displays that ticked down like bombs.

Two years, three months remaining.

"Cost of living," the landlord had said about the increase. Old phrase. It meant something different now: the cost of continuing to live. The price extracted for each additional day you insisted on existing.

The math: at his current income—temporal arbitrage, buying low-value minutes from the desperate and selling them to the anxious—he could cover expenses for eighteen months. After that, the numbers stopped working.

Options existed. Sell non-essential experiences: memories, sensations, the capacity to taste sweetness. People did that, sold pieces of themselves to buy more time, then spent the purchased days in a diminished state, unable to fully experience what they'd paid for.

Or accept it. The number would reach zero eventually. Everyone's did. The wealthy just reached it later.

He looked at his wrist. 2 years, 3 months, 14 days, 7 hours, 21 minutes. The seconds counting down. Always counting down.

World 6

The interviewer had been scrolling through her tablet for several minutes. K. sat in the ergonomic chair—designed, he suspected, to keep candidates slightly uncomfortable.

"Your background is impressive," she said finally. "But I'm not seeing any grief architecture experience."

He nodded. Nodding bought time.

"Grief architecture," he repeated. "Could you tell me more about what that involves?"

"Mr. K., grief architecture is the core competency. It's in the job title. Senior Grief Architect. It was in the posting. It was in the pre-screening questionnaire."

He tried to remember applying for this job. He was wearing interview clothes—his good suit—so he must have prepared. Must have intended to be here.

"Of course," he said. "I'm wondering how your organization defines it. There are so many frameworks."

"We take a humanistic approach. Traditional grief architecture focuses on structural elements—stages, timelines, expected trajectories. We're more interested in the experiential space. When someone comes to us with loss, we build them an environment where grief can take whatever shape it needs."

The words made sense individually. Together, they formed professional poetry—meaning something without communicating anything specific.

"That resonates with me," he said.

"Does it? Tell me about a time you designed a grief space for a client."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. All the jobs he had held, all the skills accumulated—none involved grief or architecture. He had been a bureaucrat once. A consultant. Something in an office, doing something with numbers or documents.

"I'd prefer to demonstrate rather than describe," he said. "If you have a sample case."

The interviewer made a note. The interview continued.

World 7

Everyone had offered condolences. That was the word for it—condolences—and K. had accepted them the way you accept unwanted gifts, with gratitude that was performed rather than felt, with thank-yous that were obligations rather than expressions.

His spouse had died in the war.

Everyone knew which war. He had figured this out from context, from the way people mentioned it without specification, the way they said "the war" as if there had only ever been one. The war had ended three years ago, or maybe five years ago, or maybe it was still going on in some technical sense that he didn't understand. The war had taken many spouses, many partners, many children and parents and friends. The war had created a whole vocabulary of loss that people used fluently, reflexively, the way they used any common language.

K. did not know which war.

He did not remember a spouse. He did not remember a wedding or a marriage or a shared life that had been interrupted by conscription or deployment or whatever the war had required. He lived alone in an apartment that showed no signs of having ever contained another person—no photographs, no extra toothbrush, no clothes in the closet that weren't his own size. And yet people kept offering condolences, kept asking how he was managing, kept suggesting grief counselors and support groups and the particular casseroles that were, apparently, traditional to bring to the bereaved.

The condolences had become suspicious now. He could see it in their faces, the neighbors and colleagues and distant acquaintances who had been so kind in the immediate aftermath. They were starting to notice that his eyes were dry. They were starting to wonder why he never spoke of the deceased. They were starting to exchange glances when he failed to recognize the name that must have been his spouse's name, the name that everyone else seemed to know.

"How are you holding up?" his supervisor asked, during their weekly check-in. "Really, I mean. Behind the brave face."

K. tried to arrange his features into something that looked like a brave face concealing deeper pain. "Some days are harder than others," he said, because this seemed like the kind of thing a grieving person would say.

His supervisor nodded sympathetically. "Mira was a remarkable person," she said. "We all miss her."

Mira. The name landed like a stone in water. Mira had been his spouse. Mira had died in the war. Mira had been remarkable, apparently, and everyone missed her. K. searched his memory for any trace of a Mira—any face, any voice, any moment of intimacy or domestic routine—and found nothing.

"Thank you," he said. "That means a lot."

His supervisor's expression flickered. Something had been wrong with his response. The gratitude was too clean, maybe, too uncomplicated by the messy emotions that grief was supposed to produce. He could see her recategorizing him, adjusting her assessment, filing away this interaction as evidence of something.

He went back to his desk and tried to remember what Mira had looked like. He couldn't. He tried to feel sad about this, and couldn't do that either.

World 8

Adults did not use words. K. knew this the way he knew his own name, the way he knew the smell of the office and the route to his apartment and all the other things that constituted the furniture of his life. Words were crude. Words were imprecise. Words were what you used with children, patiently, condescendingly, the way you used training wheels or picture books—helpful for beginners, embarrassing for anyone who had developed past the elementary stages.

Adults communicated through pheromone secretion. The glands were located behind the ears, and they produced a complex chemical vocabulary that could express ideas and emotions and nuances that words could never capture. Fluent secretors could convey in a single aromatic burst what would take paragraphs to say verbally. The most sophisticated conversations happened entirely in scent, entire arguments and reconciliations and collaborative problem-solving sessions conducted through the nose rather than the ears.

K. could not smell what he was saying.

He hadn't always been anosmic. The condition had developed gradually, starting with the loss of subtle distinctions—the difference between agreement and reluctant acquiescence, the shading between affection and mere friendliness—and progressing to total olfactory blindness. Now when he secreted, he secreted into a void. He had no idea what message his glands were producing. For all he knew, he could be saying something deeply offensive, something embarrassing, something that contradicted his intentions entirely.

The reactions he got suggested this was often the case.

"We need to talk," his coworker said at the morning meeting, using the childish words that indicated serious concern. She was being kind. She was lowering herself to his level, the way you would speak slowly and clearly to a foreigner or a person with cognitive difficulties.

"I know," K. said. Speaking felt strange in his mouth, clumsy, the vocal cords engaged in work they weren't designed for. "I've been trying to get treatment."

"What you said in the presentation yesterday—" She stopped. Her nose wrinkled slightly, picking up whatever his glands were producing now, the chemical commentary that accompanied his verbal statement. "You're doing it again."

"I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm—"

"You really can't smell it?"

He shook his head. The gesture felt inadequate, a physical movement substituting for the rich chemical language he could no longer access.

His coworker's expression shifted through something complicated. Sympathy, maybe. Revulsion. The kind of discomfort that came from interacting with someone whose communication was fundamentally broken. She secreted something—he could see the slight movement of the glands behind her ears—but whatever she was saying, whatever she was really saying, remained invisible to him.

He was speaking a language he couldn't hear. And apparently, based on everyone's reactions, he was saying things he shouldn't be saying.

World 9

The teenager was standing in the kitchen when K. came home, and the teenager was making pasta, and the teenager looked up from the boiling water and said "Hey Dad" with the casual familiarity of someone who had said this thousands of times before.

K. stood in the doorway. The keys were still in his hand.

"I made enough for both of us," the teenager said. "Mom called and said she's working late again, so it's just us tonight."

The teenager had dark hair and K.'s nose and a way of standing that looked learned from someone, inherited from someone. The kitchen was full of ordinary things—spices in a rack, a calendar on the wall with appointments and reminders, photographs held by magnets on the refrigerator. One of the photographs showed K. with his arm around the teenager, both of them squinting into the sun at what looked like a beach, both of them smiling.

K. did not remember the beach. He did not remember the photograph. He did not remember the teenager.

"Look at this," the teenager said, pulling a phone from a pocket, scrolling to something. "From last summer. Remember when you tried to build that sandcastle and the wave got it? You were so mad."

The phone showed a video. K. was in the video. He was younger—no, not younger, the same age, it was only last summer. He was standing in shallow water and a wave was coming and a sandcastle was disintegrating and the K. in the video was laughing, actually laughing, the kind of laugh that came from the belly, the kind of laugh that K. couldn't remember ever producing.

"Yeah," K. said. "That was something."

The teenager looked at him. The teenager's face expected recognition, expected shared memory, expected the easy intimacy of parent and child who had built years of experiences together. Dinner was getting cold. The pasta was ready. The kitchen smelled like garlic and olive oil and the particular warmth of a home that was lived in, that was loved.

"You okay, Dad?" the teenager asked.

K. put his keys in the bowl by the door, the bowl that apparently existed for this purpose, the bowl he had no memory of buying or placing or using before. He hung up his coat on the hook that was at exactly the right height for him. He took his place at the table, in the chair that must have been his chair, across from the plate that must have been his plate.

"Long day," he said. "Tell me about yours."

The teenager talked. K. listened, or tried to listen, but mostly he watched this person who was apparently his child, trying to find something in that face that he recognized, some echo or trace of memory that would make this real. The pasta was good. He couldn't remember who had taught the teenager to cook.

World 10

The elderly were infants here, and the young were ancient, and K. was exactly middle-aged in both directions, which meant he belonged nowhere.

He understood the basic mechanics of it. Time flowed differently. Aging reversed or inverted or rotated along some axis he couldn't visualize. People were born old, wrinkled and wise and tired, and they grew younger as the years passed, their skin smoothing and their energy increasing until finally, at the end of a long and backward life, they achieved infancy—small and helpless and perfect, revered and protected, the most sacred members of the community.

The toddlers who crawled through the park were actually ancient, ninety or a hundred years into their reverse journey, approaching the final transformation into newborns. The teenagers who seemed so vibrant and clueless were middle-aged, with decades of un-aging behind them and decades of un-aging ahead. The gray-haired professionals who ran the offices and made the decisions were the young adults, just starting out, still learning how the world worked.

And K. was stuck in the middle. Not young enough to be taken seriously by the wise infants and their caretakers. Not old enough to relate to the energetic seniors who were still figuring out their purpose. The census forms didn't have a category for him. The social structures weren't designed for someone whose age moved in both directions simultaneously, or in neither direction, or in some direction that hadn't been named yet.

"It's a rare condition," his doctor said. "Temporal ambiguity. We see maybe one or two cases a decade."

"Is there a treatment?"

"That depends on what you want." The doctor was young—seventy or eighty, K. estimated, still full of the enthusiasm that came with advanced age. "We could try to shift you into one trajectory or the other. Commit you to forward aging or backward aging, stabilize the process. But there are risks. And there's something to be said for your current state. You have perspective that most people lack."

"I have nothing," K. said. "I don't fit anywhere."

The doctor nodded. The doctor had heard this before, from the handful of other temporal ambiguates who had sat in this office and tried to explain the particular loneliness of being unstuck in time.

"The support group meets on Thursdays," she said. "It might help to talk to others in your situation."

K. went to the support group once. There were four other people there, all of them middle-aged in both directions, all of them struggling with the same disorientation. They shared stories. They acknowledged each other's existence. They confirmed that the problem was real, that they weren't imagining it.

It didn't help. Shared loneliness was still loneliness.

World 11

Everyone could read minds. K. had known this forever, since before he could remember, the way he knew gravity pulled down and water was wet. Telepathy was as ordinary as breathing. You thought things, and other people heard them, and the whole of society was structured around this fundamental permeability of consciousness.

But you were supposed to filter. You were supposed to control what you broadcast and what you kept private. There were techniques learned in childhood, walls and barriers and selective channeling, ways of directing your thoughts toward specific recipients and away from others. Uncontrolled broadcasting was rude at best, assault at worst—the mental equivalent of screaming in someone's ear or exposing yourself in public.

K. couldn't stop broadcasting.

He had tried the techniques. He had taken the remedial courses. He had seen specialists who had tried medication, therapy, surgical intervention, experimental treatments that had left him disoriented for weeks. Nothing worked. His mind was a sieve, leaking constantly, every thought escaping into the shared psychic space where everyone could hear it.

His thoughts were obscene graffiti on the walls of other people's consciousness.

He knew this because they told him. Not verbally—verbal communication was reserved for children and the telepathically impaired—but through the reactions he got, the flinches and the averted eyes and the sudden excuses to be elsewhere. He knew it from the formal complaints that had accumulated in his employee file. He knew it from the restraining orders that prevented him from approaching certain public spaces where his uncontrolled transmissions had caused documented harm.

Today he was thinking about lunch. That was all—just lunch, what he might eat, whether the cafeteria would have the soup he liked. But the thought came with associations, memories, tangents that spiraled off in every direction. The soup led to a memory of his mother making soup, which led to a complicated knot of feelings about his mother, which led to thoughts he didn't want anyone to hear, thoughts he barely wanted to admit to himself.

The woman next to him on the transit platform edged away. She was trying to be subtle about it, pretending to check her phone, but he could see the tightening around her eyes, the way her shoulders hunched as if protecting herself from something.

"I'm sorry," he said, out loud, using words like an animal.

She didn't respond. She got on a different car when the train arrived, and K. stood alone on the platform, waiting for the next one, trying desperately to think about nothing.

He thought about trying to think about nothing. He thought about how thinking about nothing was itself a thought. He thought about how everyone within range was probably hearing this meta-spiral of self-consciousness.

The platform was empty by the time his train came. Everyone had found somewhere else to be.

World 12

The congratulations had started arriving before he got to the office. Text messages, voice mails, a card signed by the entire department. Someone had put balloons on his desk—silver and gold, the colors reserved for significant professional achievements. His supervisor had scheduled a meeting to discuss "the exciting new chapter."

K. had been promoted.

The new title was Senior Director of Temporal Arbitrage, which was a significant step up from his previous role, which had been something he couldn't quite remember now. The promotion came with a 40% salary increase, an office with a window, access to the executive parking garage. It came with expectations.

"We're thrilled to have you leading the temporal team," his supervisor said. "Your track record with arbitrage is exactly what we need right now. Market volatility, regulatory changes, you know how it is. We need someone who can navigate the complexity."

K. nodded. Nodding felt like the right response.

"The board meeting is Monday," his supervisor continued. "They'll want to hear your strategy for Q3. The preliminary numbers you sent looked promising, but they're going to want details. Projections. The kind of deep analysis you're known for."

K. had not sent preliminary numbers. K. had no strategy for Q3. K. had no idea what temporal arbitrage involved in any practical sense—he knew the phrase, knew it described some kind of work, but the actual mechanics of it, the skills required, the knowledge base assumed, all of this was missing.

"I'll have something ready," he said.

"I know you will." His supervisor smiled the smile of confidence, of trust earned through years of excellent performance. "That's why we promoted you. You always deliver."

K. went to his new office. It was larger than his previous office, which he couldn't quite picture anymore. The window looked out on the city, the temporal district glittering in the distance. On his desk, among the balloons, was a folder labeled "Q3 Strategy - Draft" in what appeared to be his own handwriting.

He opened the folder. Inside were pages of analysis, projections, strategic recommendations. The handwriting was definitely his. The signature at the bottom was definitely his. But he had no memory of writing any of it, no understanding of what the numbers meant, no idea whether the strategy made sense or was complete nonsense dressed up in professional formatting.

He reports Monday. The board would want details. He had four days to become the person who had apparently earned this promotion.

World 13

His species had evolved as apex predators. He knew this from biology class, from documentaries, from the particular shape of his teeth and the placement of his eyes and all the other anatomical evidence that pointed to millions of years of hunting, killing, consuming. His ancestors had been carnivores, and their ancestors before them, and the entire arc of evolution had been shaped by the pursuit and capture of prey.

K. was a vegetarian.

Not by choice—not originally. As a child, he had eaten meat like everyone else, participated in the ritualized hunts that marked major holidays, learned the traditional butchering techniques that were passed down through generations. But something had changed, somewhere along the way. The taste had started to bother him. The texture. The knowledge of what he was eating, where it had come from, what it had experienced before ending up on his plate.

He stopped eating meat. It wasn't a political statement or an ethical position—not at first. It was just a preference, a personal choice, the kind of thing that shouldn't matter to anyone except himself.

But his species didn't see it that way.

"Apex denial syndrome," the psychiatrist said, reviewing his file. "We see it sometimes. A rejection of the predator identity. It's treatable."

"I don't think I need treatment," K. said. "I just don't want to eat meat."

The psychiatrist made a note. "The refusal to acknowledge the problem is part of the problem. Classic ADS presentation. Have you experienced any other symptoms? Feelings of guilt about your evolutionary heritage? Identification with prey species? Dreams about grazing?"

K. had not had dreams about grazing. But he had felt guilt, sometimes, watching the hunts, seeing the fear in the prey's eyes before the kill. He had wondered what it felt like to be caught, to be consumed, to know that your purpose in the ecosystem was to nourish something higher on the food chain.

"The treatment is straightforward," the psychiatrist said. "Immersion therapy. We reintroduce you to your predator nature gradually. Most patients show significant improvement within twelve to sixteen weeks."

"And if I refuse treatment?"

The psychiatrist's expression shifted. Something complicated moved behind her eyes. "Refusal isn't really an option, Mr. K. ADS is classified as a public health concern. Untreated apex denial can lead to social dysfunction, reproductive failure, and in extreme cases, prey identification behavior. We've seen cases where the patient actually asks to be hunted. It's not a path you want to go down."

Treatment was mandatory. The first session was scheduled for Thursday. K. went home and ate a salad and tried to remember what meat had tasted like, back when he could still stomach it.

World 14

The state owned memories over ten years old. K. knew this intellectually, had known it since the legislation passed during his childhood, had grown up in a world where memory was taxed and regulated and, eventually, confiscated. The logic was something about cognitive load and social efficiency—old memories cluttered the mind, took up processing power that could be better used for present concerns. By surrendering your past, you freed yourself to fully inhabit your present.

Everyone agreed it was a good system. Everyone had agreed for decades.

But K. had been hoarding.

The auditor sat across from him in the Memory Compliance office, a government facility with the particular bleakness of buildings designed without aesthetic consideration. The auditor was young, efficient, trained in the detection of memorial contraband.

"Mr. K.," she said. "Your last compliance scan showed irregularities. Specifically, we're detecting neural patterns consistent with memory retention beyond the legal limit."

K. said nothing. Saying something might make it worse.

"Childhood memories," the auditor continued, consulting her tablet. "Specifically, memories related to a maternal figure. A kitchen. A particular smell of baking. Emotional associations suggesting significance well beyond the ten-year threshold."

His mother's kitchen. He could still smell it if he tried, the particular warmth of bread in the oven, the way the light came through the window in late afternoon. His mother had died eighteen years ago. The memory should have been surrendered eight years ago, should have faded into the collective archive where all memories eventually went, accessible to historians and researchers but no longer burdening individual consciousness.

He had kept it. He had hidden it, buried it beneath layers of compliant forgetfulness, protected it the way you protect something precious and illegal.

"The penalty for first-time memorial hoarding is remediation," the auditor said. "A supervised extraction process. It's not pleasant, but it's effective. After extraction, most clients report feeling lighter. Freer. Better able to focus on their present circumstances."

"And if I refuse?"

"Refusal isn't really an option." The auditor's tone was patient, almost kind. "The memories will be extracted regardless. Refusal just makes the process more difficult. And there are additional penalties—fines, monitoring, potential institutionalization for chronic hoarders."

The inspector was thorough. By the time she finished, K. knew exactly what would be taken from him, exactly which pieces of his childhood would be surrendered to the state. The smell of baking. The quality of afternoon light. His mother's voice saying his name in the particular way she had said it, a way that no one had said it since.

He would forget that he had ever known these things. He would forget that he had forgotten.

World 15

He had four arms. He had always had four arms. The upper pair for ordinary manipulation—holding things, gesturing, the everyday business of interacting with physical objects. The lower pair for intimate gestures—the subtle touch vocabulary that expressed affection, comfort, desire, the wordless communication between beings who knew each other well.

K. kept using the lower arms in public.

He didn't mean to. The lower arms moved automatically, responding to emotional impulses before his conscious mind could intervene. A coworker told a joke and he reached out with a lower hand to touch their shoulder, a gesture of appreciation that was appropriate between lovers, between family members, between the closest of friends—not between colleagues in a professional setting.

The stares were unbearable.

"Mr. K.," his supervisor said, calling him into her office after the most recent incident. "We need to discuss your limb discipline."

"I know," K. said. "I'm trying."

"The employee you touched filed a complaint. It's the third complaint this quarter. HR is getting involved."

K. looked down at his four hands, clasped in his lap—the upper ones appropriately positioned, the lower ones tucked away, trying to behave. The lower hands twitched, wanting to reach out, to express something that words couldn't capture. He pressed them between his knees.

"There are training programs," his supervisor said. "Remedial intimacy boundary courses. People have found them helpful."

K. had already taken the courses. Three times. He had learned the theory—which gestures belonged to which contexts, which touches were appropriate for which relationships, the elaborate etiquette that governed a species with twice as many arms as any sane designer would have given them. He knew the rules. He simply couldn't follow them.

The problem was that his lower arms felt things his upper arms didn't. They sensed emotional currents, responded to needs that weren't being expressed verbally, reached toward pain and joy and loneliness with an instinct that predated social convention. They were honest in a way that made everyone uncomfortable.

The etiquette manual was 400 pages long. He had read it cover to cover, multiple times. There were diagrams. There were case studies. There were careful explanations of why the rules existed, what social functions they served, how the elaborate system of intimate gestures had evolved to maintain boundaries in a species capable of profound physical connection.

He understood all of it. He just couldn't make his lower arms care.

His supervisor was watching him. His lower right hand had escaped from between his knees and was reaching toward her, a gesture of apology and supplication that was completely inappropriate for the workplace.

He grabbed it with his upper right hand and held it still.

"I'll sign up for the course again," he said.

The pages continued, each one a new world, each one a new failure to understand the world. K. accumulated memories he couldn't access and skills he couldn't use and relationships he couldn't remember. The weight grew heavier with each transition. The competence never came.