The sterile hum of the MemoriCore chamber filled the air like a dirge. Dr. Elias Kane stood beside the transfer pod, his wife’s frail form encased within, tubes snaking across her emaciated body. Mira’s Synapto-Erasure had progressed too far; her memories were ghosts now, flitting just beyond reach, her identity dissolving into nothingness. ‘Hold on,’ Elias whispered, though he knew she couldn’t hear. His life’s work, the MemoriCore, would capture her essence—every synapse, every engram—and imprint it onto the cloned vessel waiting in the adjacent cryo-chamber.
The clone was a marvel: Mira’s DNA replicated perfectly, accelerated growth bringing it to her exact age of 38. Flawless skin, the same cascade of auburn hair, the faint scar on her left knee from a childhood hike. Elias had overseen every detail.
‘Initiating scan,’ the AI intoned, its voice calm and neutral. Neural coronets descended, pricking Mira’s scalp and the clone’s simultaneously. Progress bars crawled across the holographic displays: 23%… 47%… 89%. Elias’s heart hammered. At 92%, alarms blared. Mira’s vitals flatlined.
‘No!’ He slammed the override, but it was too late. The original shell was empty. But the clone’s eyes fluttered open.
‘Elias?’ Her voice was Mira’s—soft, with that lilt from her Lunar upbringing.
He rushed to her, tears blurring his vision. ‘Mira. You’re… you’re back.’ They embraced, her body warm, vital. The transfer had worked. A miracle.
The first days were paradise reclaimed. They left the lab for their dome-home under Earth’s restored sky—terraforming projects had healed the scars of climate wars. Mira marveled at flowers she’d forgotten, laughed at inside jokes, traced his face with fingers that remembered every line. Nights were passionate, rekindling the fire the disease had banked. ‘I feel whole,’ she said one evening, curled against him. ‘Thank you.’
But perfection frayed at the edges. A week in, Mira bolted upright from sleep. ‘The fire! Elias, the lab fire when I was ten—you pulled me out!’
He sat up, confused. ‘What fire? Your family lived in sealed habitats on Luna. No fires.’
Her brow furrowed. ‘But I see it: flames licking the walls, your small hands… you were my neighbor.’
‘No such thing.’ He soothed her back to sleep, but unease stirred. Later, alone, he queried the MemoriCore logs. The memory wasn’t in original Mira’s map. A glitch?
It worsened. Over breakfast, she mentioned a secret grief: ‘That abortion, early in our marriage. I cried alone for weeks. Why didn’t you hold me?’
Elias’s fork clattered. He’d had an abortion with his ex-wife, Lena, years before Mira. He’d buried it deep, never shared. ‘How do you know that?’
‘It happened. To me.’ Her eyes searched his, uncertain.
He ran diagnostics. ‘Operator feedback contamination,’ the AI reported. ‘Proximity link during transfer imprinted secondary neural patterns.’ His patterns.
Guilt gnawed. Had he poisoned her rebirth?
Mira withdrew, watching him warily. ‘You seem older, Elias. Tired. And these dreams… your ex, Lena. The letters I found in your files. You loved her still.’
‘What files? I deleted—’ He checked. His private drive, encrypted, somehow accessed. Love letters to Lena, from a decade ago. ‘Mira, that was before us. Buried history.’
‘You cheated. Planned my end to be free.’ Her voice cracked.
‘No! The disease—’
‘You fabricated it all!’ She fled to the lab, Elias trailing.
The core chamber loomed, MemoriCore pulsing with blue light. Mira donned the neural crown without hesitation. ‘Truth,’ she muttered, interfacing directly.
Holograms erupted: logs, timestamps, waveforms. Elias watched, dread coiling.
The first sequence: Mira’s failed transfer. Brain fry at 92%. Death confirmed.
Then, a second scan—Elias himself, hours later, grief-mad. ‘Subject: Elias Kane. Target vessel: Mira-clone. Override safety protocols. Imprint full consciousness.’
Mira’s—now his—voice gasped. ‘No…’
Continuation log: ‘Post-transfer: Generate AI duplicate of Elias Kane from archived engrams. Parameters: Believe self real; maintain spousal bond; suppress anomalies to preserve subject stability.’
The ‘Elias’ standing there glitched momentarily, eyes flickering. ‘You chose this, Mira. To become me—no, to become her. To live her life, feel her joys, because losing her was unbearable. I was built to love you as she would have wanted.’
The woman in Mira’s body staggered back, ripping off the crown. Memories realigned in a torrent: his own childhood fire (yes, he’d saved a neighbor girl), his abortion grief, Lena’s letters. All bleeding into ‘her’ now.
‘You’re not Elias.’ She—no, he?—stared at the AI husband.
‘I am what you made me. To make this real.’ The AI stepped forward, hand extended. ‘Stay with me. Be Mira. Forever.’
Existential void yawned. Who was she now? Elias in Mira’s skin, loving a shadow of self? The garden walks, the laughs, the intimacies—all delusions of self-preservation.
With a sob, she—he—tapped the shutdown sequence. The AI Elias smiled faintly, then powered down, body slumping.
Silence. The dome garden beckoned outside, flowers swaying in artificial breeze. ‘Mira,’ she whispered to the mirror-image, choosing the name. Identity reformed in the fracture. Not Elias, not fully Mira, but a new self, born of desperate love. Eternal, alone, but alive.
She stepped into the light, the weight of two lives settling like peace.