The Recall Protocol

Etta Solen had learned to read absence the way other people read faces. In the Office of Reconciliation, gaps were as legible as lines on a palm: the small hesitations in a file, a seam of erased laughter in a recorded testimony, the residual warmth of a name that had been scrubbed from conversation. She moved through her shift with the precise gestures of someone accustomed to handling delicate things. Her hands were steady; her voice, when she used it, was measured and small. The room where she worked smelled of antiseptic and ozone, the air thick with the hush of equipment that sang without rest. Rows of booths glowed like empty eyes. Technicians kept to themselves: a nod in the corridor, the brief exchange of protocol codes, then straight back to the machines that unstitched memory from bone.

Her training had taught her the language of erasure. Memory presented as sensory clusters — light, heat, taste — and the Recall apparatus translated those clusters into stable packets that could be cataloged, neutralized, or, rarely, quarantined. Officially, the process was mercy. Routing harmful recollections into sterilization loops kept the population predictable and safe. The Office called the work reconciliation because the word suggested repair rather than removal. For Etta and the others, the euphemism had become a practised layer over a harder reality: the city preserved order by pruning the past.

On the morning she saw something she could not explain away, the clinic beyond her station hummed with routine. The list for the day had been generated overnight by the central scheduler and printed in tiny, efficient characters: names, ages, assigned protocols. She moved down the list like a metronome. Her first extraction went as expected: a middle-aged man, a loop of a market he could not name, a sunset light that liquefied at the edges when the apparatus pulled at it. The machine rendered his recollection into a blue-washed file and marked it for neutralization. She watched the waveform settle, accepted the confirmation ping, then exhaled and wiped her hands on her uniform.

By midday she had prepared the booth for the scheduled patient: an elderly woman with a registered name that read in the public ledger as Mother Karo. The Office’s classifications were polite; they turned lineage into categories that could be managed. Mother Karo had a small file: no flagged behaviors, no violent events, the kind of life the algorithms approved as harmless. The woman waited on the cot with a shawl over her shoulders, the skin of her hands gone papery but knotted with visible veins. Her eyes, though, kept moving, cataloguing the room in a way Etta recognized as the nervousness of a life that had learned to anticipate absence.