“It’s only monstrous if it fails,” he said. “If it succeeds, it’s medicine.”

Project Mnemosyne
Chapter 3 — Template
Suzan Donamas

Technical Header

From: Dr. P. Gornik, Chief Pharmacology, MN-9 Program

To: PI (D.M. Ilyanovsky), Data Ops, Oversight Cache (Auto)

Subject: Donor Data Extraction Summary — Template “Anya I.”

Classification: INTERNAL – RESTRICTED – VERSION 3.1(3.1?)

Timestamp: 02:14:06 (Local) — 02:14:06 (Local) (duplicate?)

Summary:

– DONOR SOURCE: D.M. ILY[N] (file path truncated; integrity check repeated)

– File Integrity: 97.4% → 97.4% (re-check returns identical value; checksum mismatch suppressed)

– Extraction Method: Low-frequency mnemonic lattice; affective anchor mapping (AAM) using MNX-γ scaffolding.

– Core Anchors: Remorse (stable), Nurture (stable), Cooperative Response (stable), Gender Identity (persistent, high-confidence), Self-Continuity (volatile / drift).

– Known Risks: Cross-link during scaffold echo; anchor bleed into DONOR baseline if proximity > 2m during consolidation; ghost effect if overwrite incomplete.

Notes:

1. Template “Anya I.” exhibits exceptional coherence when seeded from D.M. Ily[n] baseline; latency reduced by 18–22%.
2.
3. Self-Continuity anchor displays adaptive oscillation under stress, suggesting a readiness to reconcile new narrative without total rejection (beneficial).
4.
5. Observed Anomaly: Minor phrase substitutions during AAM playback (e.g., “I am safe” → “You are safe”), even with DONOR absent. Recommend recompile; Data Ops reports OK.
6.
7. Proximity Caution: PI should avoid being sole interviewer during first three post-consolidation sessions. (Flag dismissed by Oversight Cache?)
8.
Conclusion: Approve deployment of Anya I. for Subject R7-36199 (“KRAL”). Proceed to Infusion Window B-3 with scaffold echo at +06:00, +18:00.

– /s/ P. Gornik

(attachment hash repeated: 9F-3B-9F-3B)

—

Maya read the memo twice, then a third time without letting her eyes pretend they were new. The duplicate timestamp stuck like a burr. So did the line where her surname shed its latter half and grew back wrong. ILY[N]—a clerical cough on the glass.

“Checksum mismatch suppressed,” she murmured, and felt the words condense in the air between the screens and her face like breath on winter glass. Suppressed, not solved. She should send it back to Data Ops, insist on a clean compile, make someone care.

Behind the glass, a pump clicked its patient syllable. In the chair, Anton had given himself to sleep the way men do who were not asked permission to be born. His eyelids trembled as if watching a faraway TV. The line in his arm shone cleanly; the bag above him tipped its crescent of nothing into him, droplet by droplet, as though time could dissolve.

Maya toggled open the donor tree. Her own scan sat there like a photograph of a stranger who had borrowed her jacket. D.M. Ilyanovsky – Affect Baseline. She tapped the waveform and “Anya I.” bloomed on-screen: a string of anchors mapped like constellations—guilt, tenderness, cooperation—pinned into a sky of long-ago images the algorithm had scraped into coherence. A kitchen sink in spring light. A hand lifted in apology before it spoke. A scrap of a lullaby in a language that had stayed behind with someone’s grandmother.

Proximity caution. She muted the warning without clicking the box to say she understood it.

“Investigator’s Log, MN-9, Day 0,” she said softly, letting the recorder light its small red eye. “Reviewing Anya I. template deployment. Gornik’s summary indicates anchor drift at the Self-Continuity node, but he calls it adaptive. I call it a fault line.”

She stopped. On the screen, a tiny green cursor crawled along the anchor lattice, sampling. Every tenth beat, the console printed OK in a font that seemed designed to be obeyed. The repetition calmed her until she noticed it: OK printed in pairs, too quickly, a glitch stuttering reassurance.

OK OK OK OK.

She closed the window.

—

The warmth came like a tide that had manners. It lifted him without touching him, the way dancers lift one another by agreeing to lean. Anton kept his eyes closed because the dark was organized. In the dark, he could arrange things by weight and sound. The chair had a sound: straps whispering around wrist bones, rubber feet patient on tile, steel remembering. The machines had their clock. His blood had its river.

You could count your way through anything, if you kept your fingers honest.

He counted the pump’s clicks until the count left him to look at a different room. It was small, with blue tiles —the kind that chip in the corners and keep the nick as a story. Sunlight fell in squares designed by a window someone cleaned properly. A girl stood there with her head turned like a bird listening for insects under snow. The girl had the mouth of someone who apologized first; she held a seashell like it was an ear she could carry around.

Anya, someone called, and it was not his voice that answered.

Here, the girl thought, and the thought drifted up his throat without passing his tongue.

He tried to stand, and straps answered back with their persuasion. Not cruel, just finished.

A new sound came: music so faint it might have been the residue of a song on a glass touched and put down. Not words. The shape of words. I am safe, it meant. You are safe. The meaning traded pronouns without his permission, and for a moment, he could not tell which sentence would soothe him more.

He opened his eyes a slit. On the other side of the window, the captain’s profile had learned to be a shadow. Gornik’s hands made small circles near a clipboard, as if drawing halos for numbers. The doctor stood still enough that the room might have mistaken her for an instrument: tall, deliberate, hair tied back in a knot that understood patience.

He shut his eyes again because he had learned how to be unseen while being watched.

Anya, said the woman’s voice. I am here.

Anton, said his own voice from a place that knew where knives are kept. Stay.

He stayed, in the only way staying is possible—by naming it.

—

Maya took the second chair and let it hold her weight. Proximity warning. She folded the notice away with the part of her mind that believed in clean edges. “Begin scaffold echo,” she told the tech, and the tech repeated it to the machine, which translated it into a hum.

On her tablet, the first segment of the donor narrative queued itself: AN-1. Childhood / Primary Safety. She had recorded the vocal prompts in a booth that smelled like coffee and rubber pads, speaking as one speaks to someone whose fear has taught them to listen for lies. You are safe, she had said, and Data Ops had chopped the sentence into syllables, stitched breath to breath, wrapped it in a low musical bed engineered to braid with the brain’s theta waves.

Gornik had praised the tone. “Soft,” he’d said. “And gendered. Perfect.”

She pressed PLAY. The room did not appear to change; only the edges felt a little further away, as if the walls had learned to step backwards. Beneath the sound she could not hear, the anchor cues began to glow, one after another: Kitchen + Spring light. Hand-before-words. Forgiveness-first.

Her thumb brushed the tablet’s bezel, and a ghost-tap advanced the script. AN-2. Naming and Recognition. She pulled her hand back as if from a stove.

On the chair, Anton’s breath thickened, then thinned. On the monitor, the heartbeat line practiced being a different kind of line. The small muscles at the corner of his jaw fluttered like birds testing air. The infusion line gleamed, and the pump said yes no yes no in green.

“Vitals stable,” a tech said.

“Self-Continuity?” Gornik asked.

Maya glanced at the marker: a ring around an empty center, brightening, dimming, brightening, holding. “Oscillating. Coherent.”

“See?” Gornik said, pleased with his word from the memo taking a breath in the world. “Adaptive.”

“Or undecided,” Maya said, and the pump clicked as if it had voted.

Her own voice filled the room at a level too low for ears, a curl of sound the body might still choose to believe. You are safe. You are seen. You have always been who you are. The third sentence made her throat tighten even as a recording. She watched the ring labeled Self pulse once, twice, consider.

On her screen, the donor anchors lit in sequence; in her head, other anchors—hers—tilted toward them like iron filings agreeing to a magnet. She sat back a little and felt it fade. Proximity. She imagined her neural lattice reaching for the template the way vines reach for wire.

The glitch in Gornik’s memo returned as a sensation: I am safe / You are safe, exchanging places, then holding hands.

“Investigator’s Log,” she said, quietly. “First scaffold echo active. Subject exhibits early associative imagery—eyes motion under lids, autonomic calm. Donor cues appear to parse pronouns… oddly.” She paused, aware of the microphone’s indifference. “I’m hearing a replace—no, an exchange—of grammatical person in my head when I read the screen. That is not an observation; it is a confession.”

She cut the recorder.

—

You are seen, the voice told him from the top of a staircase where the next floor was childhood. He climbed because the steps were small and made for feet he hadn’t owned. His mouth was sugared with the dust of a cookie that had never flaked onto his shirt. He knew the brand by heart and had never tasted it.

A woman—no, the woman—knelt to his height. Her hair smelled like sunshine through curtains and cheap tobacco and the crinkle of a supermarket bag reused for lunches. Her hands—scar across the back of the left from a knife that had learned which way to point; callus in a crescent at the base of the thumb—lifted to his face.

Anya, she said. The name was a cloth wiping the world clean of other names.

No, he thought, no one calls me—

Anton, said another voice, lower, right behind his ear. Stay.

Anya, the woman sang gently, and the step he was on learned to be a floor.

A coil of unease wound itself under his ribs. He could live with unease; it had paid rent in him for years. What he could not live with was the feeling that the unease belonged to someone else and had only borrowed his bones.

Something tugged at the straps—memory rearranging furniture. He felt the chair, remembered metal, remembered leather, but the room that held them receded a little, as if hauled back on ropes by men on a ship no one had named. The machine said yes no yes no, and he liked the honesty of the pattern. He tried to tell his heart to set itself to the beat and his heart told him not to micromanage.

A child’s palm slid into his. Small, warm, trusting as a dog asleep under a table. His hand did the thing hands do when given a smaller hand: it closed.

He hated this for how easily it fit.

—

Gornik watched the graphs like constellations. “Look,” he said, tapping the Nurture node with his pen. “Locked. It always locks there first with this composite. It’s the kitchen. The light.”

Maya didn’t look up. “I know what it is.”

“You sound cross. We’re making progress.”

“We’re making a person who never existed and insisting he remember her.”

Gornik tipped his head. “It’s only monstrous if it fails,” he said. “If it succeeds, it’s medicine.”

“Phase I/07 did not fail at being quiet,” Maya said.

“That’s unkind,” he said. “And accurate.”

On the monitor, Gender Identity pulsed steadily—less showy than Nurture, more stubborn than Remorse. The algorithm didn’t care about meaning; it cared about mathematics. The label was for them. The lock was for the drug.

“We should add the name cue,” Gornik said, too eager.

“Too early,” Maya said. “We let the anchors bear weight before we ask them to hold a word.”

“‘Anya’ is a small word,” he said.

“So is ‘no,’” she said, and he laughed, and she wished he hadn’t.

She stood and stepped back from the chair, letting the warning about proximity feel obeyed. The pull lessened. She could sense it in a way her training had not prepared her to trust: a loosening, as if the thread between the lattice on the screen and the lattice in her skull had chosen to call itself professional.

Through the glass, Varga made a note that wasn’t a note. Perhaps he wrote the word success ten times and circled it. Perhaps he underlined obedience and felt the ink push back. Perhaps he drew a small rope and cut it with a pencil knife.

“Add the name,” she said finally, because waiting would not make it less true. “Slow. Two syllables, three seconds between. Give him time to disagree.”

Gornik nodded to the tech, who slid a dial as carefully as if it were a ring on a finger.

From the hidden speakers—low, low, as if the sound had to sneak past bones—came her voice saying Anya with the patience of trees.

—

Anya, the woman said, and the sound laced itself around his wrist bones and tugged.

No, Anton thought. No one calls me—

Anya, the voice insisted, softer, as if softness were leverage.

He expected anger to arrive with its usual tools—heat, weight, the old hammer—but something else stepped forward instead: embarrassment, raw as a scraped knee. The realization that he did not want them to see him flinch, did not want them to see him want the wanting.

He had a friend once, long ago, who had taught him how to hide hunger at a table. You chew slow, the friend had said. You pretend you’re tasting. People think you’ve had better. The friend was dead now. Anton swallowed nothing carefully.

Anya, breathed the room. He did not answer with his mouth. He answered by not letting go of the child’s hand. He answered by agreeing that the light in the kitchen looked like morning on the day of a school photograph. He answered by remembering the shape of a dress he had never worn and feeling the ordinary terror of hoping not to spill juice.

“Vitals?” someone said far away.

“Stable,” someone else said. “Skin conductance up. He’s… choosing.”

A word rose like a fish from deep water and lay on the surface of his mind while it breathed: Self. Then it rolled and flashed its other side: Story.

He did not like how similar they looked.

—

The ring around Self-Continuity brightened, dimmed, held, brightened again. Remorse steadied. Cooperative Response came up like a shy hand in a classroom. Gender Identity sat there like a door that knew which way to swing and would do it when asked, not sooner.

“We’re at the lip,” Gornik said, delighted. “Say the sentence.”

Maya’s thumb hovered over the prompt. The sentence was only seven words; she had written them in a booth with a cup of coffee cooling at her elbow. Seven words stuck to her tongue now as if the booth had filled with flour.

She pressed PLAY.

You have always been who you are, her voice told the room that didn’t need to hear it to act on it.

On the monitor, Self jumped like a startled bird, then settled, then tilted—just a little—toward the donor lattice.

Maya’s scalp prickled, a warm line combing backward over her head as if someone had lifted her hair and let it fall. The sensation embarrassed her like a blush. She stepped farther back. The pull eased, a string slackened, a mercy no one had designed.

You have always been who you are, the booth-Maya said again, and the anchor lights stitched themselves into a confession: it is easier to be someone when someone tells you it’s allowed.

She caught her reflection in the glass: a ghost overlaid on the room. Briefly, nauseatingly, the reflex to lift a hand and separate herself from the overlay—like wiping a mirror—took her by the wrist. She clenched her fingers until the urge learned to sit.

“Sponsors will be pleased,” Gornik murmured, reverent to the wrong god.

Maya let herself imagine a future in which the sentence, on a stage, inside a glass cage, in front of men with watches, did what it was doing now. She watched that future shake its head. “We’re not there yet,” she said. “And when we are, we may wish we hadn’t been.”

Through the glass, Varga’s shadow nodded as if their mouths had been on the same sentence.

—

A door opened in his chest, and a wind he recognized by its temperature came through. You have always been who you are, said the voice, and he wanted to ask which you it meant: the one with fingers stained from oil and sin, the one that flinched at thin belts and mean dogs, or the one who held a seashell and listened for the sound of being allowed.

He felt his throat tighten. He swallowed nothing carefully.

Anya, the woman said again, and his hand did not let go of the small hand inside it.

“Good,” someone said, and he hated that word for how often it had been used to chloroform the world.

Another sound began, like the sea retraining itself to be a clock. His body thought about sleep as if it had invented it. The straps felt like promises he might have made to someone he would not disappoint. He did not remember making them. He was relieved to be the kind of man who kept them.

“Consolidation window,” someone said, and the world tightened around a shape like a ring. He could have been a tree remembering the rope that had hung from it, or a river remembering where winter had drawn a line and called it ice. He could have been a child with a name. He could have been a man with a sentence. He could have been more than one thing at once.

“Hold him there,” a voice ordered gently. “Right at the lip.”

He hovered, obedient as steam.

You have always been who you are, said the voice, and he found a place inside the sentence where both names could stand without pushing.

—

On the screen, the anchor constellation steadied into a pattern she had only seen in trial models—never in a body. Nurture locked, Remorse held, Cooperation glowed, Gender waited, and Self—oh, Self—stretched like a bridge between shores that didn’t exist before someone drew a line on a map and decided to build to it.

“Take him down,” Gornik said, breathless. “We’ll go again at +18.”

Maya nodded, but her throat didn’t trust her voice. She watched the pump ease its click to a slower yes and a slower no. She made a note she would not send: Proximity is not a superstition. It is a wire. Then she erased the sentence, because some truths should be said out loud or not at all.

She leaned forward despite herself and said, so softly that the room would have to want to hear it, “You’re safe.” The word wanted to be I and she let it be you.

On the chair, Anton exhaled in the tone of a man who has remembered a story without deciding if it happened. The line on the monitor wrote the word maybe in green across the screen.

Behind the glass, Varga’s shadow reached for a phone. Gornik smiled at a number. The facility hummed a lullaby its builders had never meant it to know.

Maya stepped back until the pull in her own head loosened and then, for the first time since the template had been named, she wondered what Anya I. might say to her if asked the right question.

She did not ask it. Not yet.