Megan, Nicolas thought to himself. Who the hell is Megan? An actress, celebrity, a colleague I forgot about? Is she a fragment of my imagination? He felt sad when thinking about the girl he knew nothing about. He was confused.

His daydreaming was cut short by the car's happy chime notifying him they arrived at the airport. He paid for the ride, picked up his bag from the trunk, and bolted towards the airport. He was running a bit late.

The airport appeared abandoned, but with so many people dying during the Black virus pandemic, it was to expected. Before boarding the plane, a rare human worker scanned his ticket and looked through his bag, then let him continue toward the plane doors.

His plane was almost empty as well. It was a newer electric model with silicon batteries, the kind capable of long flights. The flight information was uploaded to his phone when he boarded, he was to land in Japan in 8 hours. A notification popped up on his phone while he studied the flight plan. It was his colleague Maya confirming she'd be there to meet him at the Tokyo airport. He tried to sleep but couldn't. The mortifying uneasiness loomed over him. It will be a long 8 hours he thought to himself.

***

Japanese airport was devoid of humans too. One of the few people skittering around was his colleague Maya Takahashi, a brilliant epidemiologist who investigated the Black virus pandemic. She smiled when she saw him, he smiled back.

"How was the flight? " she asked with a hard accent.

"It was very nice. These new planes are amazing, quiet, and so comfortable," he responded.

"Yeah, my last flight was on those old kerosene planes, in the before quarantine times," she said in a nostalgic tone.

"That was so long ago... tell you what, after we stop the pandemic, let's go somewhere nice. I heard pollution is not that bad in Southern Europe. " Nicolas said while grinning.

" Sure, that would be nice," she said, then continued,

"I've always wanted to visit Hawaii, but the island is now under a strict quarantine, so it's a no-go. "

"Yeah, it was so sad to watch most of the finest tourist destinations slowly closing their gates. But personally, I would like to visit Moon and Mars habitation domes, going off Earth has always been my dream. " Nicolas responded.

" That's too expensive for us, we're just poor scientists. " Maya said and laughed.

"Okay, here on Earth, we need to go to the lab, but we need to make a stop at my place first so you can drop off that luggage," she said and turned around.

"Yeah let's go," Nicolas said, and then he turned his head just to see his reflection in a glass all jumbled up and blurry. What the hell? What's happening? He tried to step back but his legs didn't comply, he couldn't move, and his vision turned blurry. He saw Maya in the distance slowly walking away, strange noises echoed in his head, telling him something about how data had been corrupted and that extraction was advised. He felt his heart racing, feeling its every beat in his temple, he gasped for breath. He felt like he was dying, not knowing how or why. The last words he heard were User extraction initiated.

***

User extraction initiated. The memory echo was removed. Administering adrenaline. The user awakened. Welcome back. Ryan heard the words of his VI assistant echoing in the dive chamber. He hated the corrupted memory echoes, but the only way to know a memory echo had gone bad was to dive inside it.

He sat up in his dive capsule, half-submerged in the thick blue oxygen-rich gel that still clung to his throat and made him cough and gasp like a passionate smoker. The gel would eventually sublimate and release oxygen, and he had to suffer through it until all the gel was gone.

He removed electrodes that recorded his brainwaves during the dive sessions and then hurried towards the showers to wash the blue dive capsule goo off his skin.

While showering the feeling of eeriness gnawed at him, he felt wrong and out of place. That was the inconvenient consequence of looking into the memories of others. He also felt an urge to call his parents and tell them he landed in Tokyo. He hated that feeling, but that was unpreventable, and he had to look into all available memory echoes of scientists who researched the Black virus pandemic that almost wiped out humanity off the face of Earth.

He finished showering and returned to the lab. His AI lab assistant was already sitting on a couch by the dive capsule. It uploaded itself into one of the android bodies his company made. It was a female model made to look as close to the humans as they could make it. It had dark hair and a slim body profile its eyes were black with a dim yellow shining halo around the pupils. It wore a black dress and an angry look on its face.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"That's what corrupted data means, Ryan. " AI said with a condescending tone. She was very human-like and Ryan treated her like a human.

"Yeah, but we have to go through all of them Anya," he said and crashed on the couch beside her.

"Did you learn anything new? " Anya asked.

"Maya Takahashi, an epidemiologist from Tokyo, this Nicolas guy valued her expertise. I think she might be the answer, but there are no recent echo uploads of hers. Tokyo Echo storage facility had been damaged in an earthquake, and they'd never rebuilt it. Her original data is there but I don't think there's much of her time as a Black virus researcher stored. I think we need to bring her old echo over. " he said and prepared for what was about to happen.

"Are you out of your mind? Bringing echo into the real world? Echoes still believe they are humans you know, and after we put them into android bodies they become corrupted, and deleting an echo feels like killing a person all over again. She will surely break, and that's a cruel thing to do. " Anya responded, as expected. Bringing an echo over was a controversial thing to do after all.

"Well we can tell her that she was in a coma, we can add in something about amnesia, and make up some other diseases that would explain her android body not feeling quite human.

"Still, I don't think it will work, and I think it's not fair if we don't tell her the truth. Besides, why do we need her anyway? " Anya asked, and she sounded a little annoyed.

"We might not have her recent echo... but she researched this disease extensively, and her knowledge might help us more than just looking into her memories. She can help us cure Megan, or if we are to look at the bigger picture, she might help us find a definite cure. I think we can't run away from this disease we need to end it here and now. "

"You think that’s possible? It’s a fool’s errand if you ask me. Why don't you join the expedition to Aurora like all the sane scientists and engineers? Earth is lost, and few humans living down there are on borrowed time. It's not a nice thing to say, but it is true. "

"I doubt Aurora is habitable. I think that's a fairytale, crafted so people wouldn't lose all hope. " after he said that, Ryan stood up and approached the screen mounted on the steel wall. He tapped the panel, and an image from the exterior camera filled the screen. They were on the Salus IV, one of the many orbital stations built after it was clear that the Black virus was about to win. It was an orbital station in possession of his company, Future Robotics. Most of the space on the wall screen was occupied by the image of Earth. It looked so peaceful from high above. Unchanged, safe.

One part of the screen was taken by a silhouette of the shipyard, where a ship for the Aurora expedition was being assembled.

"So people now want to believe there is a small red dwarf star in the Kuiper belt with an Earth-like planet orbiting it, and they also wanted to believe that landing on a Moon was possible and that they can create artificial life. So chasing fairytales is what humans do best. Why not dream big? " Anya finished her speech with an undecipherable frown.

"Yeah, but that fairytale's truthfulness doesn't matter to Megan, she needs a cure," he said and pressed a button on a panel and a picture of a blonde woman submerged in a deep sleep capsule appeared, along with her vital signs data. She was in an artificially induced coma, which helped slow down the disease that was killing her.

Anya looked at the screen. His sister had been in a coma for 10 years, and Anya personally felt like he should let her go, but he would always get mad when she was to suggest that.

Megan hated the thought of making daily copies of her memories. She thought that if someone were to hack into the echo storage facility they would invade her privacy, or even copy her mind, which scared her the most, so she had no echo, which meant that if she was to die, she'd be gone forever.

"Okay, let's do it. We agreed that we can't use Maya’s backup echo from our database to bring her back, we need her original scan, and that means...going to Earth. " Anya said and looked at Ryan, then continued.

"We need his help, Ryan, we need your father."

"Yes, I am afraid so," Ryan responded defeatedly.