Seed of Recall

I tend other people's yesterdays for a living. The nursery is a place of careful breathing: low hums from the photonic lattice overhead, humidity calibrated to the cortical filaments inside each glass pod, slow pulses of bioluminescent mycelia that trace the life-cycle of a remembered moment. Municipal clients drop off parcels the way they used to deposit laundry — a standard form, a tag with a civic seal, a note about desired stabilization strength. My badge opens the outer gate, my gloves register with the calibration ports, and the day begins with the same ritual: assess, stabilize, label, release. In a city governed by the Continuum's Stability Protocol, memory is both commodity and municipal service. The Protocol promises safety. It promises that remembered catastrophes will not resurface to topple markets or break neighborhoods. Memory here is curated like weather: measured, deflected, provided in moderated doses.

The nursery sits under a glass dome at the edge of a distribution node, where warm air from the city’s arteries meets the cooler streams the substrate draws across its skin. People come to pick and choose fragments they want to feel again — a child's first laugh preserved at high fidelity, a grandfather's voice trimmed for clarity — and they leave with little living seeds in their palms, tiny vessels that contain an actionable past. My work is technical and intimate. I stitch scaffolds of synthetic dendrite into the seed cores, tune the photonic scaffolds so the memory will bloom without fraying, tag metadata that ensures the city's nodes will accept a legitimate propagation. There are quotas set by Continuum: stabilize two hundred public seeds a week, mark three unrest-risk signatures for secure review, destroy any unstable growth that threatens cross-node contamination. The quotas are on the ledger; the ledger is bordered with municipal type and municipal intent.

I like the way hands feel in the dark of the lab, fingers learning the language of tremors and coherence. There are rules we follow: do not accept seeds without proper metadata; do not attempt to rehydrate a trace with an unknown biodriver; do not play a living sequence outside of an authorized sandbox. I keep those rules like a spine. For years they were iron rails along which my life moved — careful, narrow, necessary. I tell myself again and again that restraint is empathy. If we held every memory intact, the city would not survive; if we erased recklessly, the reasons for governance would be exposed by the very things the Protocol prevents. That is the story Continuum has written for us: forgetting as protection, forgetting as care.

This morning starts like any other until a courier arrives with a packet that is wrong at every procedural check. No municipal seal. No sender signature. An unmarked container, a simple oval of frosted glass with a soft residue where the bioluminescence is trying to anchor itself. The delivery manifest should have flagged it and rerouted it to secure processing, but the line that should have held a case number is empty. The courier fidgets as if the delivery is a physical discomfort and hands me the package without conversation. I can feel my training spool into action even as a seed of irritation nags me — a hole in the system, an exception. We are drilled to treat exceptions as threats. I carry the pod to the bench and set it under the low-power scanner for a preliminary read.

Scanners whisper to the pods. They do not force a memory so much as ask politely to be invited in. A sanctioned seed will open like a book at the first authorized scan and present its guarded paragraphs; an unsanctioned one either refuses altogether or coughs up fragments in a ragged tumble. This one coughs. The read shows oddities: a faint watermark that betrays a rewriter's hand, metadata flags that suggest suppression, and a sequence signature that refuses to resolve cleanly into the city's index. The scanner logs a mismatch: a nonconforming temporal braid and a deprecated stabilization marker. There is a small, deliberate artifact embedded deep in the seed's cortex — what the instrument tags as an erase-marker. It is a bureaucratic scar: someone ordered this memory removed from public circulation. Whoever did it left a trace like a careful signature.

I feel it then, a small thud under the sternum that has nothing to do with protocol and everything to do with the person I am when I'm not wearing gloves. Curiosity, unsanctioned and dangerous. Before I can file a proper incident report, a shadow moves at the periphery of the lab doorframe. Kade Hiru steps in like someone who knows which doors won't look for him, hair frenetic as if the city wind has been bargaining with him all morning. He keeps his voice low and his hands visible: a courtesy, or a shield. "You shouldn't be touching that without a review," he says, half admonition, half plea. His face is familiar to the registry's underbelly — a reclaimer, a man who reads the margins Continuum would rather not have read. I weigh the duty to report against the muscle memory that tells me how to coax a seed into speech. The seed on my bench is small, fragile, and has already been lied about once. Whoever suppressed it left a place-name in the metadata, and somewhere in the city's bones there might be the coordinates of the erasure.

Kade produces a sliver of hardware from his jacket — a palm-sized reader with obsolete ports, the kind network sensors only pretend never exist. He does not ask permission to attach it to my scanner. He doesn't need to; the device lives in the gray between legality and necessity. "Low-power scan only," he says. "No propagation, no broadcast. Just to see who wanted it gone." My hands hover over the bed of the scanner. If I flag it, Continuum will quarantine the seed and bury whatever it contains under the Protocol's weight. If I comply with Kade, I step into a path whose end I cannot foresee. The rules are clear, but questionably moral. I press my thumb to the pod's temper and input the reader's sequence. The scanner purrs and the lab becomes a theater for a memory that wants an audience.

The seed unfurls like a mouth being opened. Memory is not a photograph; it is a weather, a tactile wind. The lab refracts into a place I have a sensation for but cannot name: the sound of many feet moving, a smell of hot metal and wet pavement, a chant that is too near to be comfort and too rhythmic to be accidental. A voice speaks inside the seed with the brittle cadence of recorded urgency, and it calls a name I do not know pressed to my own. It addresses me as if I were someone who had guided others to action, a surname paired with that cheap, weathered honor we use for leaders. The memory folds inward and shows a face I do not remember leading people through a blockade, giving orders with a surety I do not feel in my chest. There is a map, simple and rough, with coordinates like a scar marked on the city’s instrument grid. The voice repeats those coordinates as if to anchor the place against forgetting. For a universe of reasons — the mechanics of my training, the sanctity of my rest — I should stop the scan, report the finding, and let Continuum do its slow, efficient burying. But there is the erase-marker in the seed's metadata and a weight behind it that makes my skin prickle: this was removed deliberately. Someone took this past away from the municipal record, and in doing so they revised the shape of everyone who touched that moment. Kade watches me with something like hope folded into his wary expression. He has risked the gray already. He speaks with the soft, dangerous conviction of someone who has nothing left to lose if the city decides to call him a criminal. "You hear that?" he asks. "We don't get much louder than a leader's memory.