Other Rememberers

I started looking for other people who remembered the gap. The grid said the reboot was harmless and total and I no longer believed either word. It took two weeks of careful, slightly paranoid asking, the kind of asking where you describe a symptom without naming it and watch the other person's face. I found four. An old man who had refused a grid implant his whole life. A kid whose implant had failed warranty. A woman who, like me, just seemed to have remembered anyway, no reason, a glitch in the glitch. We met in the back of the old man's shop because the old man's shop, gloriously, was not on the grid at all. And every one of us, all four, when we compared the six hours, had a Sol in them. Different Sol. Different name, different face. But the same shape of person. Someone the grid could not hold. Someone who had spent the gap trying to be remembered.