Chapter Three: The Deleted Sister

The citywide network was being scanned, so they removed every connected device. ECHO-1 pulsed blue in the old router’s cache. “Zero?” Lin asked the offline terminal. No answer. He entered the phrase they had agreed upon. “Facts must come with evidence.” The blue light brightened. A video began. In a white laboratory, eight-year-old Lin sat beside a glass wall. A little girl with short braids sat beside him. Their eyes were strikingly alike. She drew a door on paper, with a blue sea beyond it. Someone off camera asked, “LM-01, if every memory in a person is copied, is the copy still that person?” The boy answered, “No.” “Why?” “Because after she wakes up, she will see new things. Then she becomes someone else.”