“No,” Elara said. “The migration overwrites everything. That’s the point.”
Elara hesitated. The protocol demanded honesty. “No. You will remember nothing from before. The chamber writes a new identity directly onto the neural substrate. It’s a clean slate.” migration chamber
Elara had thought the same thing, once. She had been passenger number seven. Her crime: refusing to design a weapon that could target civilians by their genetic markers. They had stripped her name, her face, her memory of her wife. But the chamber had failed, just slightly. A ghost remained—a recurring dream of hands holding hands in a garden. When the previous Migration Officer retired into the compost, Elara had volunteered for the post. She wanted to be close to the machine that had killed her. “No,” Elara said