“So what was all that about last night?” Evan asks as we take our usual table.

“All what?” I ask, cutting into my waffle and taking a bite.

“The yelling. You and Lin. I could hear it from my room and I’m two doors down. And the Residence has pretty good soundproofing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, we were in my room together, and I think we made out a little while we were taking a break from working on some code, but I wouldn’t have thought that would have gotten very loud.”

He shakes his head. “Not like that. If it had been that kind of noise I would be congratulating you right now. No, you two were definitely fighting.”

“Weird. She must have—” I catch myself. “I mean, I must have left it out of my daily read when I did my compiling for yesterday. Couldn’t have been that important.”

“I’ve been in your brain, brother. I know when you’re lying.”

I take a moment to chew my bacon before I answer. “Fine. She’s been helping with my replacement for not having a conscience. The, um, sexual consent part of it. We were doing some tests on it.”

“Oh, no. Do I need to kill you now? You know how I feel about that kind of thing.”

“No. At least, I don’t think so. You know me. You know I wouldn’t ever knowingly do anything like that.”

“Do you not remember? What’s in your logs? Even if you didn’t put it in to read this morning, you’ve still got it, right?”

“Maybe not? I sort of gave Lin full access. She did some edits. I don’t know what was in the missing section.”

Evan snorts and coughs, spitting hash browns across the table. “You did what?”

“She needs full access to do what she wants in there. So that we, the two of us, can do what we want.” I wipe my napkin across the table, cleaning up the half-chewed food. “What I really, really, really want.”

My brother closes his eyes and rests his forehead on his palm for twenty-one seconds before he speaks again.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“It’s your brain, so you can do what you want with it, but this is a very, very bad idea. Do you not remember what happened the last time you decided to tamper with what you remember and what you don’t? Or did that get erased from your brain too?”

“No. I remember. But this isn’t like that.”

“No, it’s dumber. I like Lin, and I think she’s generally good for you, but if you can’t even trust your own self with this kind of power, how could you possibly give it to anyone else? You didn’t even give me full access.”

“And you’re jealous that I gave it to her?”

“No, it’s not like that!”

“Then what is it? You want to be the only one of us who gets to get lucky?”

He straightens up. “No! I just want you to be safe. And not try to kill yourself again. And not, I don’t know, be anyone other than who you are.”

“What, do you think Lin’s going to turn me into a puppet?”

“No, but I do think maintaining your memories, such as they are, is too important for you to let anyone, yourself and Lin included, wipe things that happened to you from out of your mind. I get that you might want to pick and choose what you read back every day, but you need to at least be able to find out what really happened if you need to.”

“Fine. But I’m not taking her access away. I really, really need her to get what she’s working on finished. I can’t get, you know, fully intimate with her until then.”

He shakes his head again. “What are you now, Chad?”

“That’s a low blow, brother. And besides, we all like Chad now that he’s dead.”

Evan unclenches the fists that he had balled up and slows his breathing. “You’re right. That was uncalled for.” He takes a long, slow drink of his juice. “I just don’t want you to do anything that will come back to hurt you later because you’re dying to have sex now.”

“I appreciate that.”

“How about this: I’ll install some auditing stuff into your codebase. Whenever anyone edits your memory, it’ll make a copy of the original memory that you can still read if you want to. We’ll stash it off somewhere else on your storage system, so it won’t even show up in the live log, then when Lin makes changes she won’t have to see it. She’ll be happy with what she’s doing, you’ll have a backup. Lin never needs to know.”

I consider it for a bit as we finish our breakfasts.

“I guess that won’t hurt anything. But we probably better put this whole conversation into the new edited out audit log. And I don’t feel great about hiding this from her.”

“You’ll only have to feel guilty about it for a day. This talk doesn’t need to make it into your daily reading.”

He gets up and offers me his hand. “Come on. We’ll go do it in my office. I bet we’ll have it done by lunch. Then we can go watch the Geologists do their thing this afternoon.”

“That’s right,” I say, checking my schedule in my head. “They’re doing their final test run today.“

“Should be a great show.”