“Come to think of it, I remember getting almost punched in the face with that, too,” Sedge said, frowning.
Dry Grass sat still, looking down at the table as though tallying up these experiences. “We did notice some of that in our experiments, yes; memories whose tails were left dangling trying their best to dovetail into the new ones being formed,” she said slowly. “But come, they are unmuting. We should be quiet. We should listen.”
Sure enough, the mute symbol had begun to pulse, and a few seconds later, it disappeared and the small noises of rustling began to come through from phys-side once more.
-“Thank you for clarifying,” Dry Grass said, offering a hint of a bow to the gathered System techs and administrators. “We would like to ask if there has been a general memory modification that would have removed time leading up to
+“Thank you for clarifying,” Dry Grass said, offering a hint of a bow to the gathered System techs and administrators. “We would like to ask if there has been a general memory modification that would have removed time leading up to midnight. Nearly everyone within the room has reported a sense of déjà vu, which is a common side effect of such.”
+“Oh! Y–” Günay began, but the feed was once more muted, this time with an angry swipe of the hand from Jakub.
+“I suppose that answers that,” Jonas Fa said, laughing from up at the front of the room. “They’re really terrible at this.”
+Need An Answer swiped up a keyboard and started typing rapidly. A few seconds later, a message appeared superimposed on the AVEC projection, reading: “Please unmute. Remember that we are communicating with Günay Sadık.”
+Another minute passed, and then the mute was lifted once more.
+“Apologies, Need An Answer,” Jakub said, sounding as though he spoke through gritted teeth. “I will let you question Günay as you’ve suggested.”
+“This is not an interrogation,” she replied calmly. “Though perhaps I ought to say that it need not be.”
+The administrator bowed once more, more stiffly this time, and backed toward the rest of the techs sitting in the background.
+“Apologies, my dear,” Dry Grass said, smiling to Günay. “Please do continue. I believe we were talking about a potential memory trim.”
+Her expression far more subdued, the systech nodded. “Yeah, we trimmed about fifteen minutes of memory from everyone we were able to recover.”
+“Why fifteen minutes?”
+“A guess, mostly. We tried trimming it closer and there were some effects of the…of the crash that stuck around in everyone’s memories.” She hesitated, adding, “It didn’t seem pleasant. Everyone affected was in agony, and they all quit within seconds, minutes at most.”
+Selena lifted a hand and, when Dry Grass nodded to her, said, “We seem to be talking around what actually happened. Jonas said we’re talking about either an attack or gross incompetence. I’d really love it if you’d tell us what actually happened.”
+Günay looked nervously back to the audience of administration and technicians behind her — many of whom I suspected outranked her — and stammered, “Uh…well, I mean…”
+“Günay, please,” Dry Grass said, her voice quiet, earnest.
+“Alright,” she said after a moment of silence, during which none of the administration moved to stop her. “What we think happened is that a broad-spectrum contraproprioceptive virus was released into the System environment, either destroying or inciting a crash in every instance it came into contact with. Since it propagated through the perisystem architecture, this was every instance on Lagrange.”
+Towards the end of her statement, she had to raise her voice to speak over the upwelling of murmurings and gasps that showed through sys-side. Holding myself separate from the whispered exclamations being shot around the table at which I was sitting, I watched as the representatives up near the AVEC stage scanned the audience.