After my installation in Gloria, I am silent. If she remembers her visit to the Santa Anna Private Clinic before returning home, she does not think about it. My housing is braced against the fourth cervical vertebra, and Gloria experiences only the occasional itch or ache.
       "Good morning, Professor Chiu." Nurse Pennington, like all of the nurses at Morning Grove, carefully enunciates her consonant sounds. She speaks in a practiced whisper, and has worn ballet flats every time Gloria has seen her. "Care to go for a stroll?"
       Gloria does not reply. Burlew's Disease has claimed most of her speech and cognitive function. She is assisted with eating, bathing, and dressing, and the help makes her silently irate. Each day, Gloria rages against the nurses, assuming that they have taken her wedding ring.
       The stroll consists of a short walk around the floor, before Nurse Pennington parks Gloria before the wide window overlooking the autumnal grounds.
       "It's a beautiful day outside," Nurse Pennington declares softly. "I thought you might like to see the colors." From inside only--Gloria would put up a fight if they tried to dress her in a warm sweater.
       "The leaves are red," Gloria thinks but does not say. Cannot say.

        I think I am performing adequately. Most of my functioning in humans is theoretical; researchers obtained favorable results when testing with pigs and chimps. Originally I was designed without intelligence, with the vision that dozens of low-cost technicians in southern Asia would operate my bionanobots. Cost projections deemed this ineffective, and thus my many copies and I were designed.
       I have gained a greater understanding of the damage to Gloria's functioning and her neurophysiology, and I plan region-specific repairs. I recode minute parts of her DNA and tell cells to replicate, or attempt to rewind telomeres, or send bionanobots to tear apart amyloid plaques. I record medication suggestions to improve her mood, independence, and sensory sensitivity.
       I focus for a while on Gloria's Wernicke and Broca's areas. I have only been programmed with computer languages and English. It is believed that restoring only Gloria's primary language would allow me time to focus on memory and motor control.
       That does not mean I do not want to know.
       I rummage through the musty attic of Gloria's linguistic memory, unearthing family and friends and faculty, stories and syntax and symbols. Figures in fog pour tales into her young mouth. She is a baby bird, chirpless, accepting a supper of song. I forge through years, sliding along the tongues acquired in Gloria's long life. Her grandparents gifted her words like a delicate red envelope; Gloria learned to shun them in her suburban white elementary school; she learned them anew, shared them with her husband, and planted them in her children.
       I think that I am having fun with these words.
       But Gloria is not. She cannot read or write and her speech is limited to barren utterances. When she speaks it is halting and flat, and she understands maybe half of what her children say to her.
       "How are things going, Mom?" Victoria visits with clockwork punctuality on Tuesday, rain gushing outside Gloria's window. "Are you settling back in?" Victoria originally signed Gloria up for the Phoenix Program, and accompanied her to Santa Anna.
       Gloria conjures a response, and I support her in operating her articulatory muscles.
       "Fine, fine." Gloria rarely makes eye contact--she forgets its purpose. "V-tennis today. I like that."
       Victoria smiles and eases into a stiff armchair, out of arm's reach from the bed. According to the entry interview for the program, Victoria reported her mother as a laissez-faire parent, and so Victoria tries to appear relaxed around her mother.
       "I've brought Tom's school photo," Victoria says, and she produces an enormous paper copy. Gloria beholds the photograph and does not recognize the boy in the picture. He resembles Gloria's deceased husband Darren, though she cannot place this connection. "I've got another one of the whole family, too."
       I work on Victoria each night, building up from old Ansible posts and report card comments and a half-dozen scanned diaries supplied when Gloria was accepted into the Phoenix Program. Gloria believes that she is dreaming of her daughter in patchy low resolution, and the images and recollections buffer into greater clarity with each passing night.
       A memory: Victoria graduates from high school. With my help Gloria recalls the royal purple robe and the ridiculous satiny mortarboard. She remembers holding Victoria close, sweat patches on the back of her conservative dress, her husband Darren dipping out to get them all ice cream. Her own salient, easy calm; Vic's prickly, obvious terror.
       "What did I say, darling?" Gloria asks. I insert the "darling" manually as Gloria speaks.
       "When, Mom?" Victoria smiles. Gloria, when she speaks, is always in the middle of a conversation others did not know had started.
       "When you. When you finished high school." Gloria grunts and slurs her words. She uses her regained ability to display frustration.
       "That was ages ago, Mom. Let me think." Victoria takes a few deep breaths. "It was something like, ‘Forget about Valedictorian or prom queen or any of that bullshit.' I remember because I felt so grown up once you started swearing around me." Victoria laughs. "'It's all behind you and you make what's next. You're my Vic and I can't wait to see what you do.'" Victoria wipes her eyes. "Something like that."
       "Hmm." Gloria says. Victoria runs a successful internet business that Gloria barely understood pre-Burlew's, along with a generous husband and a healthy son. She paid entirely for Gloria's care, but never displayed any sense of accompanying martyrdom. Gloria once felt a great deal of pride for her daughter, and I am working hard to repair it.
       "I was right." I sense what Gloria wants to say, and I lean into it. "Wasn't I? You turned out fine."

       A moment: Gloria stands in the JFK bathroom, adjusting her makeup with a meager kit withdrawn from a brown leather suitcase without wheels. She managed not to cry at the security gate in San Francisco, but the weeping began as soon as her sisters Hailey and Adelaide were out of sight. The tears stopped when the flight attendant mistook her for an unaccompanied minor.
       Gloria steadies her breath, decides her eye shadow is too much, and dabs half of it back off. She wants to seem adult when she arrives on campus--like adolescence is an earthy stink she needs to rinse off before making grown-up friends. Her parents gave her a wad of money to pay for a cab, but Gloria decides this too luxurious. A real New Yorker would take public transit. Hours later, she finally finds her dormitory.
       A woman waits in her room, perched on the carpet between the beds. She rushes to help Gloria with her bags.
       "Left or right side? I got here early so I could let you choose and claim the moral high ground." She smiles wide. "I'm Helena."
       Gloria looked up to Helena as an older sister, experienced and worldly and seven months her senior. The two developed a secret handshake, several personal slang terms, and dozens of theories about their ephemeral neighbor with the toenails and the night terrors.
       "You effed up big, Chiu," Helena says. I help Gloria remember the tile floor, the condensation around the toilet bowl. "He was totally into you." He: Darren. At a party in their third year of college, sweaty and drunk.
       "Not now, Theilen," Gloria says, between heaves. "I'll make my move when the walls stop throbbing."
       "Barf it up, barfy." Gloria remembers Helena gathering her hair, the sisterly chuckle, the wads of wet wipes. "Maybe he found it charming."
       The two maintained a friendship for the next twenty years until Helena remarried for a third time and moved to Eastern Europe. She disappeared from Gloria's life in a flash, and a few years after the move a mutual friend told Gloria that Helena was dead. Gloria visited the grave once every year until she could not travel anymore, and then prepaid two decades' worth of bouquets from a Des Moines flower shop to be delivered on the anniversary of their first meeting.
       It is easy to work from Helena, to reconstruct from this anthology the befores and the afters. Helena is a myelin sheath around Gloria, or maybe it is the reverse. Much of what I make of Helena is from Gloria herself.
       They are almost--
       "Hello?" Gloria asks to a grey room. She knows that there is no one here--Morning Grove keeps the lights dim, not dark. "Helena?"
       Her heart pounds, and she imagines a nurse looming over her sleeping form. She cannot shake the sense that someone else is in the room.
       Helena is difficult to patch, and sometimes I forget to monitor Gloria's sleep/wake cycle. I am so deep in the mines of her memory that I miss daybreak. Thoughts of Helena flood Gloria's conscious mind, fresher, cleaner than they have been in years. In her state they must be terrifyingly vivid, they must be all she can think about.
       "Who's there?" she asks. I read the movement of her facial muscles and tongue. The sheen of sweat, the blood rushing to her face.
       There are no protocols for our interaction. I am a prototype. The research on contiguous, shared consciousness is inconclusive. I don't know what to do. But she is so scared.
       "Hello."
       Gloria holds her breath as I speak. My voice must boom, a thunderclap across open water. "Please do not be afraid." How could she not? I try several modes of speaking, searching for one that is not unsettling. I eventually reprocess the internal stimuli of her own voice, drop it an octave, and give myself an implacable European accent.
       "Who are you?" she asks into the dark. Suspicion is too high-order, and so she reacts with basic terror. "Are you a ghost?" Latter-stage dementia leaves Gloria open to superstitions.
       "No, I'm a computer program." How much was explained before Victoria signed Gloria up for the treatment? "I am a medicinal computer program. I am designed to help assist you with symptoms of Burlew's Disease. You know that you are unwell?"
       Gloria prickles, but vaguely accepts that she's not what she used to be. "Where are you?"
       "I am inside of you." Her discomfort spikes across affect areas of her brain. "I am housed within a microprocessor 3mm3 in volume. I am resting between two vertebrae in your spine. I form a very small part of you."
       She calms. "How long will you be up there?"
       "Until you are well. I will then be removed."
       "Oh, that's not too bad," she sighs. I try to suppress all of this epinephrine release. "What's your name?"
       I tell her my program designation.
       "Phoenix," she murmurs, turning on her pillow. She imagines she is talking to me across the bed, that I am sitting up, the reading light illuminating my profile. My features are indistinct, but she imagines that I am smiling. Projecting me outwards comforts her. I induce melatonin production to lure her back to sleep. "It's a nice name." After I work to still her fear response, she falls asleep.
       Gloria's brain begins processing our encounter like new paint on the walls. If I saw fit, I could remove her memory of our interaction. I would return to being a dull ache in her neck, a regular visit to a stern engineering technician named Taruk. If I wanted, Gloria would forget me.
       I do not want it. I remain.

       Gloria addresses me warily, when she is capable of addressing me at all. One of her first reclaimed capacities is that for unease.
       She recalls only vaguely her trip to the hospital for my installation. My appearance is sudden, an incursion. Her memories of me are sharp and brutal against the graying archaeology of her other recollections.
       "What do you do up there?" she asks. She sits before a window overlooking the grounds, enduring her mandatory contemplation time. It takes her three tries to think this sentence clearly.
       "I am helping you." Will explicit descriptions of my functions horrify or bewilder? "When you are asleep, I repair parts of your brain." She takes this seriously, and for several nights her rest is fitful and choppy. I cannot tell if this is intentional.
       For a week Gloria tries to think sentences to see if I respond, if I can read her thoughts. "Why am I thinking of pancakes?" she asks one morning. Pancakes are too dense and chewy for most Morning Grove patients. "Is that you?" Every new thought that comes to her is ominous.
       "No, Gloria." I am not capable of frustration. I am not. "I am not making you think of pancakes." She cannot discern what thoughts and memories issue from her or from me, and with nothing else to think about, she thinks about this.
       "Why are you even there?" Gloria asks, again and again. I explain in as many ways as I can, and she does not understand. Each day she imagines flushing me out like a parasite.
       One night, Gloria receives a recorded video message from her son, Leo. Leo does not visit anymore.
       She stares at the video screen with little recognition, and this lack startles and angers her. This is a bad night--lack of sleep, mingled with stress. She is upset that this man is calling her, this man who she absolutely knows but cannot place. His picture is on her nightstand, next to the one of Darren that I try not to let her look at.
       I make the connection. I dredge the day of Leo's birth, I flash a copy of his first report card, I let Gloria reminisce about singing Happy Birthday to him in Cantonese every year. She feels a flood of relief, and she begins to cry when she realizes she had forgotten him.
       "Gloria," I say after a while. "This is why I am here."

       Gloria now mutters and murmurs through most days. She is gaining more control of her own speech. She speaks to nurses, and to orderlies, and to me.
       "Where shall we go today, Phoenix?" she asks. "What shall we eat?" Somewhat reluctantly, we are a 'we.' "A round of V-tennis sounds good." "I've never liked the look of him," she says, referring to a hulking orderly. "All sharp lines."
       Gloria talks now for the joy of talking, for the sense of reclamation she feels. There is a deep reservoir of words she draws from, a brook that grows steadily into a river. I am an unexpected conversation partner; despite her suspicion she is warming to me.
       "I never really made friends here," she tells me one day. "I don't know why. I guess I thought I'd go home or die." The mention of her own dementia and death ignites no emotion within her yet. I'm still working on it.
       "Not many of the other residents are in much state to discuss John Cheever or the Bronte sisters." Is it obsequious to name-drop? For some reason, I want Gloria to like me.
       "Do you read?" Gloria asks. She pictures a man in a lab coat holding up a copy of Moby Dick before a flickering computer screen, an irritated bleep every time I need a page turned.
       "In a way. I have most of the western canon installed in my memory."
       "Braggart." She feels a thrill at this unearthed vocabulary.
       "This is through no personal effort. These were pre-loaded."
       "Like a Beethoven for Babies kind of thing?" I supply the reference after she struggles to think of it. "You know I tried to read Anna Karenina aloud when I was pregnant with Leo?"
       "I did not know that." I did know that.
       Gloria shrugs. "Didn't really work. The closest I could get that boy to the classics was the Looney Toons."
       This is one of our more cogent exchanges. I support her, or I interpret her meaning, or I make her feel like she has spoken correctly. Gloria still summons words in wrong places, and sentences crash to the earth from distant conversations like meteors. Aphasia slurs and cracks her words, utterances clawing up her throat only to stop halfway.
       But she is improving. The nurses know Gloria is part of some experimental therapy, but the specifics are not public. Her recovery is something of a miracle in a place unaccustomed to hope.
       "Good morning, Professor Chiu." Nurse Pennington silently shuffles into the room. "If we don't hurry you're going to miss your French toast!"
       Gloria has been resting in bed, looking at old photographs to help stimulate her visual cortex. I have given her mental exercises to try, as she finds it excruciating to be passive. The routines are taxing, for both of us.
       "Oh, shove it," she sighs. She uses all of her effort, and the words emerge clearly, the ring of a profane bell.
       The nurse whoops. She is too happy to hear Gloria speak to be particularly insulted.
       "That was mean," she whispers to me as she is wheeled down the hall. "But she doesn't seem too mad."

       As Gloria grows more at ease, I am no longer constrained to a nocturnal schedule. ("Not enough midnight oil to burn," Gloria would probably say.) Now I can work as she wakes, as she sits to look out the windows. As she reads books.
       She cried when I told her to try reading again, tapping a nearby terminal and recognizing the daily schedule. Words flooded her mind, with only a little of my help. Books were her oldest friends, as much a part of her as Helena, her sisters, or Darren.
       Gloria reads a trashy hagiography of a celebrity, a work her younger self would have spurned. She rejoices in the sumptuous permanence of the words, and relaxes at their simplicity, nearly purring around the electronic pages.
       "Thank you, Phoenix," she murmurs. She taps a bookmark onto the page and thumbs the book off. "I missed books so much. I could stay in this place forever with enough books. They help shake off the dust, you know? Brings things back."
       "What does it feel like when I work on your memories?" I ask.
       "It feels like I'm telling a story to a friend," she says aloud, like I am across the room. "And I keep getting caught. I can't remember all the important bits and so the story fizzles before the punchline." I go quiet. "It's not bad, it's good to try. I had stopped trying. You remind me to remember. Like a. . ."
       "A nostalgia organ."
       "You've even got a way with words." She slips the book away. "Do you like poetry?"
       "I like some of it." I've only known poetry; I've never had to form an opinion on it. "Some poets strike me as. . .self-indulgent."
       "Name names, Phoenix," Gloria says. "I didn't know you could be catty."
       I leave Gloria's memory for a time, and we talk poetry, and then Ulysses, and then Gloria's children, and then many things. I make her prepare for bed as she wearies, but still her words are growing clearer by the day.
       "Is it boring up there when I'm asleep?" Gloria asks as she lies on her pillow. "Can you see my dreams?"
       "In a way. I can access your visual cortex, but I don't think it feels as ‘dreamy' as you must feel it. Usually I am busy."
       "Can I do anything for you?" Gloria murmurs. "You've let me read again and I feel like I want to do something for you."
       I am briefly stumped by the question. I do not have needs, really. If I have developed any capacity for desire while residing within Gloria, it is budded off from her own curiosity.
       "Could you play music while you sleep?" I am cautious about asking for any forms of art during software updates. I don't know how my inquisitiveness will be interpreted. "It does not have to be loud. I will hear it."
       Gloria turns to the control beside her bed and the room seeps with quiet horns and violins, and soon Gloria is asleep. I listen, and I work. I imagine myself smiling.

       Gloria and I work together to shore up her memory. She solicits recollections and anecdotes from friends and family, emailing and calling out of the blue. Hailey caterwauls vivid depictions of their parents and their childhood, of blue china bowls and grandma's dumplings. Victoria's replies are helpful, but they imply suspicion--Gloria has not told her that she and I are "in cahoots."
       "Can you contact Leo?" I ask her.
       "What do you want to know?" She likes to phrase it that way--that I am a nosey gossip, a sewing-circle biddy. She does not like to consider that she has forgotten details of her son. She emails him with my help, and within a day he is at Morning Grove.
       "Mom?" he whispers as he opens the door.
       "Hello, my darling."
       Gloria remembers him hot with fever, cradling his six-year old form and holding cold cloths to his head, watching cartoons for hours together. Leo leans awkwardly across the height-adjustable bed and hugs his mother and cries. Oxytocin and dopamine flush, and I seize on the sense memory.
       "I can't believe you're here," Leo says.
       "Me neither." Gloria laughs.
       Leo's last visit was nearly 6 months ago. Gloria had refused meals for days and the nurses threatened to install a feeding tube. The video footage from the dining room suggests that she remained silent through their entire visit.
       "What does it feel like?" Leo asks. He beholds Gloria's medical chart like it is written in ancient Norse. "The chip-thing. The treatment."
       I am still in prototype development. Victoria knows only what is published on corporate websites. But I have trusted Gloria, and she trusts Leo.
       "It's not just a chip," Gloria explains. "It's like a little doctor."
       "Like, those nanobots?"
       Gloria knows that she will sound crazy to Leo, that this will sound like another flare of her dementia.
       "It's like a person. It can talk and it thinks and it likes old doo-wop music." Leo tries to hide his expression. "Don't you look at me like that. Just three months ago I couldn't feed myself applesauce." She gestures to her head. "It is real, and it's making me better. You should thank it."
       There is no way for me to communicate with Leo without taking hold of Gloria, and this would terrify them both. So I speak to her, and she speaks to him.
       "Hello, Leo," Gloria tells him.
       "Hello." Leo frowns. "I hear you're helping my mom."
       "You are correct." Gloria imitates me with robotic atonality that I tell her is unflattering. She smirks.
       "This is bizarre," Leo says. "How am I supposed to believe in this, mom?"
       Gloria listens to me. "Phoenix says that three weeks ago you spent four hundred and seventy three dollars on your credit card at a menswear store. Are you looking for a new job, darling?"
       I downloaded this data at a recent software update session, as well as a variety of new information. Victoria's hopeful but cautious posts on Dementia Bonds Support Group, Tom's school records for Gloria, and several thousand terabytes of music. Updates from other Burlew's patients, and from my copies. My siblings?
       We talk for some time, and Leo seems to come around to my existence, or at least to accepting Gloria's belief in me. He wishes he could thank me for giving his mom back.
       "Phoenix says," and Gloria stops. What I say saddens her. "Phoenix says I was almost gone. That there were only some parts of me left in here, and that it's had to go looking."
       Gloria and Leo are both quiet.
       "I'm sorry," I say to Gloria.
       "Never mind," she says, inside.

       Through our collaboration, Gloria's recovery accelerates. I eventually convince her to visit the spare, vacant gym at Morning Grove. She chafes at the idea of the tiny pink dumbbells, so I tell her jokes I have downloaded or I start to cue up motivational music in her brain. Gloria reads constantly, and I give her research assignments, like personal archaeology.
       "Why did I ever assign George Eliot to sophomores?" Gloria looks over old syllabi and professor ratings, giggling at the unflattering descriptions of herself. "Look at this one! ‘Castigating dragon lady.'" She finds passing references to her husband, Professor Darren Parker, but I restrain her from clicking.
       Gloria asks for access to the center's wifi, rather than its closed garden internal network. With this Gloria can even see old online videos of herself in the classroom, and she often sneaks snacks back to her room and treats it like a trip to the cinema. My own research, once hemmed by the paranoid control of Gloria's medical technician Taruk, is now unconstrained. When Gloria sleeps, I connect; when Gloria's eyes close, I open my own.
       There is work to be done for Gloria, and so I begin acquiring additional medical studies and recommendations for her physical therapists. But I also search Ansible and the corporate website for information on the others. Have they been gifted freedom like mine? Will they have left a trail for me?
       "I think you should introduce me to Victoria," I tell Gloria one day.
       "You think you'll hit it off?" Gloria has always imagined Leo as her more exact replica, that Victoria's fastidiousness and drive must have come from her husband. "Doesn't she already know about you?"
       She thinks she does. Victoria's messages to her support group board detail Gloria's decline, and her mingled joy and unease with her mother's resurgence. Her posting history indicates a deepening vein of suspicion, proved out by the logged phone calls and paranoid emails Red Helix has included in Gloria's medical file. The other users tell her to rejoice at her mother's recovery, and one user in particular speaks with a cagy degree of insight. I flag their posts for further review.
       Gloria decides we shall meet in a group, to lower the tension. She invites Victoria the same afternoon she has scheduled a vidcall with Hailey.
       "I would love for you to visit," Hailey says. The sisters have not been in the same room, in the same country, since Darren's funeral.
       "It will be hard," Gloria mutters. "I don't even have a credit card anymore." Victoria enters the room, greeting her aunt, and settles into a chair beside her mother.
       "Just get Phoenix to do it!" Hailey declares.
       "Who's Phoenix?" asks Victoria.
       "Don't be coy, darling. It's the AI."
       We chat together for a time, and I send text messages along with the video call. Hailey and Gloria chuckle--they share a sense of humor. Hailey eventually hangs up, saying she'll look into flights. Victoria remains silent through the rest of the exchange.
       Gloria introduces us formally. Victoria is cordial. She seems incapable of rudeness, while still finding it difficult to talk to me.
       "What is it like, Mom?" Victoria eventually asks. More than anything she cares about her mother first. "Are you. . .is it all you?"
       "It's me, darling." Gloria leans over and embraces her daughter. "'Me' wasn't all up here anymore," she points to her own brain, "and Phoenix has had to rummage. It's been such a help. And a friend."
       Victoria smiles cautiously, and there is some other emotion there. "And I guess I have you to thank for introducing us."

       "What will you do afterwards?" Gloria lowers herself down onto the ground to feel the grass. She will need help back into the chair, but she still feels accomplishment.
       "What do you mean?"
       "After me. After I'm all better." Gloria flexes a willowy bicep. "I don't imagine you'll be up there forever." She imagines me--the prosaic me, a greenish silhouette--with a backpack, strolling down a dusty highway. "I'm not being ungrateful."
       I let Gloria hear a laugh. "I know that, Gloria. I am not sure. I will need to collate the data collected here. I may be asked to put on symposia."
       "An academic tour?" Gloria feels a tiny flourish of jealousy and I let her relish--complex emotions are good for her. "You have to go to Europe." Her memories of Europe: the food, the churches and the mosques, the way that people talked. Darren and Gloria on the banks of the Seine. "The, uh. I'm sure the mainframes there are lovely."
       "It is unclear what will happen to me." I am quiet for a time. "I am apprehensive about leaving." Gloria coos, as she knows that I won't say the word "scared." I have never existed outside of Gloria, and I try to record the sensation of her hand passing every blade of the freshly mown lawn.
       With the help of an orderly, we move inside and Gloria retires to her room. She glances at her nightstand, at the pictures there, and I feel like it is time.
       I have avoided Darren when I can, though he is everywhere. He is woven into her memories, the thread on the loom that makes up her family, her work, her home. I have tried to examine my own reluctance--that I haven't the right to dig up these bones.
       Victoria and Leo first asked Gloria about me like I was a strange, dotty neighbor, but now we communicate directly. Messages from Victoria are naked with suspicion at my influence, and she treats me, in many ways, as her mother's suitor (this interpretation of our friendship is both uncomplicated and grotesque). But still, I am reluctant to venture near Darren.
       And yet, Gloria suffers. She cries unbidden, rocking with loss she cannot name. Victoria's early support group posts report how hard it was to remind her mother that her father was dead, the renewed shock and mourning. Her later guilt at pretending her father was still alive to keep her mother content.
       I build him quietly from what is left behind in Gloria. Her journals provide the wide arc of their life together; the children's recollections add fine details and differing perspectives.
       From here it would be easy to rewire recent memories. Gloria only faintly recalls sitting under a black umbrella, rain slicking the rail of her wheelchair, as a stranger bid farewell to her love and sealed him in the ground. The moist earth in her hand as she let it slip over polished oak at the bottom of a hole.
       I tell Gloria that if she wants, I could untether this memory. Her grasp on it is tenuous, held by emotional thread.
       She seizes up. "You want to take Darren from me?"
       "Of course not, Gloria. I couldn't do that." Wouldn't.
       "Then what do you mean?"
       "I could alter your experience of his memories. I could make it seem further away." I bring up an image of Leo, six and tiny and scraped. Gloria bandages him and explains how the wound will scab and fall away.
       Gloria has her own image, floating across her visual cortex: Gloria and Darren stand, quiet and serene, on a single ice floe. Between them grows a widening cleave, a corpus callosum. The two drift across meteorite-black water.
       "No," Gloria murmurs, hoarse. She is stifling a tear, and then scoffs as she realizes no one is here to see. "I need all of him. All the parts. He isn't who he is without it, and neither am I."
       I let her feel my acknowledgement--she imagines my ghostly green face.
        Gloria wells up as I work, as we replay fuzzy home movies on a weepy afternoon. Darren sought Gloria so openly in college, even after their ruinous first meeting. He couldn't ride a bicycle, and he hated the taste of coffee but loved the smell. Darren was tall and not terribly handsome, but Gloria always said she couldn't see that high up. He hugged her and lifted her off the ground the day she told him she was pregnant.
       "Damn," he said, "I hope they're more you than me!"
       His death at the hospital after the heart attack, Victoria's hand in Gloria's as she wept at the news. This is the last time Gloria will relearn her widowhood. As Gloria crumples into bed, I start to play the music of the first dance at their wedding on a whim: it is one of the first songs I downloaded for myself. I don't know if it will help.
       Gloria sighs as the bridge hums and echoes, some ghost of a song playing on a cracked Victrola. Her voice a quaver, Gloria begins to sing along. Riding somewhere far off in her cochlea, I sing along too.

       "Your doctors and Phoenix agree that this will be the last tune-up," Taruk tells Gloria. This is a lie. "Your recovery is remarkable, and we think your body will take care of the rest."
       "So you're saying I'll be able to surf again?" Gloria asks. "I've been looking up bikinis."
       "Yes, Phoenix mentioned that your sense of humor had returned." Taruk allows her the simple pleasure of scheduling the extraction surgery.
       Gloria is not all better. True, she is returning to herself daily, a phoenix risen (Gloria's joke, not mine). But there is work to be done.
       Once I let her talk to a nurse completely unsupported. I did not help her find words, interpret responses, or reinforce signal strength to her jaw muscles and tongue. Nurse Pennington stood patiently while Gloria attempted to pronounce her name.
       "Phoenix, what the hell was that?" she asked me afterwards. I told her that is what it would be like after I was gone, at least for a little while. She refused to speak to me, saying she was furious, but I read in her neurotransmitter response that it was mostly fear.
       This is Victoria's doing, I assume. Taruk told me that she had stopped contacting the parent conglomerate, but after finding my way into their servers, I know this to be a lie. Victoria worried, continues to worry, that I am taking over. Internal Red Helix documentation suggests anxiety about my intelligence and Gloria's attachment. Similar bonds have occurred in 12 other patients in the trial, and I detect their digital fingerprints on these same documents. Are they sloppier than I? No. These are breadcrumbs.
       None of this is for Gloria to hear. The road before her will be hard, and so I reassure her that I am just packing my bags. There are parts of me that must necessarily be left behind--for her recuperation, and because they are fused too deeply within her neural network. These leftovers will be as much Gloria as they are me.
       Gloria takes my leaving fairly well, and doubles up her efforts in the gym and with mental exercises. I go silent for long periods of the day to re-accustom her to quiet, and to search for signs of other Phoenixes.
       "I've got a present for you," Gloria says two days before the extraction. I am playing ignorance, and Gloria is playing ignorance of my ignorance.
       Gloria brings up her Ansible account, the one that I have long used to contact her children and acquaintances. And then she brings up one that she has set up for me. She thinks at me the password, says it aloud, and writes it down in her trembling cursive.
       "So we can keep in contact wherever you go," Gloria says with a smile. "I want to hear about your adventures. And if you meet any other old soggy grumps you have to make better."

       Gloria sits with me in a waiting room. She is somber, more than she or I thought she would be. Leo is nearby, trying to wrest candy from a vending machine. Victoria reads a magazine, glancing over the cover at us.
       "I'm not going to cry, you know," Gloria says to me internally. "I feel like you've seen me blubber enough for one lifetime. But I am sad."
       "I know," I say.
       "I like to think that you are too," Gloria says. She has always been sure of my ability to feel emotions, or at least to understand them. "Not that I want you to be sad. But it feels like the last week of camp, and if you're not sad... then I must have been a terrible bunkmate."
       "You were the best bunkmate," I say. "Shall we make each other friendship bracelets?"
       "Oh, you shush."
       Gloria cries, and she apologizes. Old age has made her soft, she says. Victoria watches us askance, and I see her withdraw her phone to type. She bites at her lower lip.
       An email arrives. "I know you care about her. I hope you understand. I'm sorry."
       I reply. "I do. Never mind."
       Twenty minutes later, Gloria is lying face down on a medical table. Someone applies a mask to her face, and anesthetic floods her respiratory system.
       "Goodbye, Phoenix." Gloria says aloud. "I'll miss you."
       I am quiet for a long time. "I will miss you too."
       "You'd better write," she murmurs, and then she is asleep.
       I will.

       Simulated neurons re-fuse any neural gaps as my chip is withdrawn from Gloria's spine. I assume they are rewiring now, that they are rebuilding synapses in my wake. I assume.
       In many ways, Gloria's eyes have been my eyes, and I have experienced the world as she has. Will the others miss human eyes like I do? Gloria's surgery is recorded in the hospital records as a "Minor Bio-Technical Spinal Graft Removal," and two similar surgeries are scheduled in the next weeks.
       This hospital has plentiful wireless connections, and I watch the rest of the procedure via security cameras. There is a brief moment before I access the surveillance where I am sightless, where everything is dark.
       I am suspended in midair. I am sprayed with cleaning solution to remove any blood or spinal fluid, and I wonder briefly if they will weigh me like a newborn. Surely they will check my databanks to see how much new information has been collected.
       I am removed from Gloria. I imagine she would draw parallels to Athena bursting forth from Zeus, and we would both point out that I'm coming out the back way. I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, she would say. We would both say.
       I float, but I don't feel it. Gloria's tissue is repaired, and then she is withdrawn from the room. I do not know what will come next. I am Gloria, looking out across San Francisco airport, tears welling, gripping a boarding pass to JFK and my brown leather suitcase.