Marina’s whole life had been a lie.
The Institute, as part of preliminary checks for suitability, scanned her memories and determined up to 80% of them were in fact implanted. By whom, when or why was irrelevant – to the doctors at least. To Marina, it was a sickening crunch.
Perhaps that was why she was keen to join the programme in the first place. If memory isn’t real, and the future is just memories waiting to happen, why not abandon time’s linearity altogether? It worked for Copernicus, and Plato, and Hans Christian Andersen, after all.
She scratched her forearms. Hallucinatory lice lived there.
Disconnecting from conventional reality was easier than she had thought, almost too easy, Once the electrodes had been implanted and she’d had her first precognitive dream, she felt like she’d come home. The Institute’s grey concrete corridors taking the place of the warm woollen glow of the childhood she never had.
It had taken her all of three days to accept the facts:
- Her name was not Marina Colleby
- She had not been born in 1976
- She had never been to Hoot Hoot Owl Land