Two stories set in the same world, published in full. Both concern what happens when the work of remembering someone is handed to something else.
A man returns to his mother's sickroom after months away and finds a licensed proxy already sitting in the chair — wearing his shoulders, using his voice, and better at staying than he was. An account of an absence that could not be blamed on the thing that filled it.
Read the storyMara tends the held dead in a house built so that no one is ever let go. Descending to repair her mother's record, she finds her own name in the index — and learns what has been paid, and by whom, to keep her lit.
Read the storyAn archive is not a place where things are kept. It is a place where things are decided about.