Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

opinion, the sooner that Seven’s issues were resolved, the sooner that he could help pioneer a lasting peace between the city’s government and the militant faction at war with it. Yet the gaze that Ninety-Nine regarded Eight with revealed a silent distrust. Eight gathered that Ninety-Nine struggled with the choice of either sharing the truth or producing a lie.
    “You don’t have to tell me,” Eight conceded, unwilling to make her friend uncomfortable.
    “I want to tell you,” Ninety-Nine confessed. “I do. Can you just...promise me that Tobias won’t find out?”
    “Ninety-Nine...” Eight groaned. “Tobias is my husband.”
    “I know, but Tobias and Seven already hate each other as it is. I don’t want you to give Tobias anything to use against Seven. Besides, if we don’t at least try to keep the peace between them, we’ll have a much nastier war on our hands.”
    “Tobias will never know,” Eight promised earnestly.
    Reassured, Ninety-Nine began, “Seven came to me about two weeks ago. I thought that his abrupt behavior changes might be grounded in chemical imbalances. Maybe he’s sick? Or maybe it was something worse than that?” Ninety-Nine reasoned audibly, moving to Eight’s side and punching a rapid series of codes that suspended Eight’s diagram and replaced it with her own.
    Another DNA strand appeared, equally as complex as Eight’s sample but remarkably different in a few key places. Numerous red pins highlighted points of interest along the strand and above the floating diagram was a classification: One-Six-Two-Seven.
    “Seven is in good health and there’s nothing biologically wrong with him within the strictest sense. However...” Ninety-Nine’s voice narrated, wavering somewhere between excitement and fear, “There’s something unique about his genetic structure. Something that is fundamentally different from the rest of ours. A mutation. An anomaly.” She paused, studying the rotating diagram in muted awe. “I believe it’s the source of the headaches and the nightmares he’s been experiencing.”
    “Headaches? Nightmares?” an alarmed Eight pressed.
    “Oh. Well, Seven told me about the headaches. As for the nightmares, I learned about those by spying on his sleeping patterns.”
    “How could you do that to him? You invaded his privacy,” Eight admonished Ninety-Nine.
    “His symptoms were in line with sleep deprivation and he would never have agreed to observance given the choice. I overrode the security protocols for our dormitories at home and used my access to monitor Seven,” Ninety-Nine’s emotionless explanation confirmed her trust in data. In statistics. Ninety-Nine blinked at Eight. “Like you said, there’s very little I can’t do with a computer. And do you realize how little he sleeps anymore? A weekly average of twenty hours,” she immediately answered her own question. “He talks in his sleep, you know. He’s mentioned you forty-one times in three weeks.”
    “Then he’s more deluded than I thought,” Eight replied hastily.
    “No, I don’t think it’s that it. Rather the opposite, he’s so tired these days that he’s perfectly lucid. Haven’t you noticed that he knows things about each of us that we’ve never told him? Or mysteriously references conversations that never happened? Eight, I don’t think these are headaches or dreams that he’s having, I think they’re memories .”
    “That’s impossible. Nobody who goes through what we’ve been through—” Eight began, only to be swiftly interrupted by a vociferous Ninety-Nine.
    “Don’t make generalizations, Eight. Given what the control group was up to when we arrived—”
    “But we already know that’s physically impossible,” Eight retaliated with practiced dreariness.
    “Why not? I’m the statistician here and I can tell you with every ounce of confidence I have that the odds of these being the first signs of insanity are just as good as the odds of this being a