The corridor was dim. Good. Two months ago, the dim would have been a problem. Now it was a relief.
Moss walked the long curve of Habitat Prithvi's inner ring, keeping his left hand near the wall without touching it. Balance was still wrong. Not bad — wrong. His body weighed the same as it had before the modification, or close enough, but it distributed the weight differently. Less in the shoulders. Less in the legs. His center had shifted upward, toward the ribs, and every step required a small correction that his old body had never needed.
Like sailing a hull that had been re-keeled.
He passed an intersection. Two Antarctikans — a man and a woman, both short, pale, moving with that frictionless economy that still made his skin crawl — glanced at him. The man's pupils dilated slightly. Recognition. The woman said something in Satya too fast for Moss to catch and they walked on.
The outsider. The changed one.
He was a curiosity and he knew it. They watched him the way his people watched strange fish brought up in nets — with interest, with caution, with the faint discomfort of encountering a thing that did not fit any known category.
He reached the refectory. The light was brighter here. Full-spectrum panels in the ceiling, mimicking a sun these people had never stood under. Moss squinted. His pupils contracted, but slowly, reluctantly, the new architecture of his irises lagging behind the demand. For three or four seconds the room was a white blur, details burned out of it. Then the world resolved.
This was the trade. See better in the dark. Suffer in the light.
He picked up a tray. Rice — always rice, or something like rice. A steamed green he could not name. Protein paste the color of wet clay. He ate standing. The food tasted like its temperature. Warm things tasted warm. Cold things tasted cold. The flavors were there, underneath, muted, as though someone had wrapped each taste in cloth before placing it on his tongue.
His body processed it faster now. More efficient, the medical team had said. Fewer calories needed. The muscle mass he had carried across the ocean — the sailor's bulk, the rope-hauler's shoulders — was gone. The new metabolism did not see the point of it. He was leaner. Lighter. Quicker, maybe. He was not sure he wanted to be quicker. He wanted to be what he had been. That option had been removed.
He finished the food. Set down the tray. Walked back into the dim.
They were in the common room on Level 3 — the one with the curved benches and the low ceiling that Moss liked because it felt like a hold. Four of them. Vihaan, who Moss knew. Three others whose names he had learned and could now pronounce in passable Satya: Nitya, a water systems engineer with steady hands and a voice like a closed door. Taran, younger, excitable in the restrained way Antarctikans allowed themselves to be excited — a slight lean forward, a fractional widening of the eyes. And Mira, who said little and watched everything and reminded Moss, painfully, of Kael.
The pidgin had grown. Six hundred words now, maybe more. Enough for directions, for medicine, for basic questions about food and sleep and the location of things. Enough, barely, to ask a question that was not basic at all.
"When you were children," Moss said. He spoke slowly. The pidgin required it — each word placed like a foot on uncertain ground. "What do you remember?"
Vihaan tilted his head. The gesture was becoming familiar. Antarctikans tilted when they were accessing the mesh — querying that web of implants that connected their brains to every recorded fact their civilization had ever stored.
"I can retrieve records from age four onward," Vihaan said. "Sensory-tagged. Date-verified. My first recorded memory is a maintenance walk with my parent-unit in the geothermal corridor. Ambient temperature: 34.2 degrees. Humidity: 78 percent. I was holding his hand. His hand was dry."
"I can access mine from age three," Nitya said. "Earlier records exist but are flagged as low-confidence. Sensory data degrades below a reliability threshold."
Taran: "Four years, two months. My first verified memory is auditory. My mother singing. The melody is preserved. The emotional tag reads: contentment, mild curiosity."
Moss sat with this. His hands were on his knees. He looked at the floor — a smooth composite, lighter than any floor he had ever known. No grain. No knots. No history in it.
"You can access them," he said.
"Yes."
"All of them."
"All verified records, yes."
"But do you carry them?"
Silence. The particular silence of people who did not understand a question and were consulting their meshes for clarification. Moss watched it happen — the four of them going still for a fraction of a second, their eyes losing focus, then returning.
Mira spoke first. "Clarify: carry."
"In your body." Moss put his hand on his chest. "Here. Without asking for them. Without looking them up. Do the memories live in you, or do you go and find them when you need them?"
Another silence. Longer this time. Vihaan looked at the others. A semantic packet passed between them — Moss could not see it, but he had learned to recognize the tiny pause, the shared micro-nod, the way their attention synchronized and then released.
"I can access it," Vihaan said. His tone was patient, careful, the way it always was when he suspected Moss was asking something that had no productive answer. "Why would I carry it?"
The words landed in Moss's chest like a thrown rope hitting water — a sound and then nothing.
He leaned forward. He looked at his hands. The amber-streaked eyes saw them clearly in the low light: the calluses thinning, the skin paler, the hands of a man who no longer hauled lines.
"My mother," he said.
The room shifted. Not visibly. Something in the quality of their attention.
"I remember my mother picking me up after I fell. I was — " He calculated. Continental years, not this place's standardized cycles. "Five. Maybe six. I fell off a wall. Stone wall, near the harbor. My knee was bleeding. She picked me up and I remember the smell of her. Salt and something sweet. Cooking oil, maybe. Or maybe I invented the sweet part. Maybe she smelled like sweat and fish, which is what everyone smelled like. I do not know. The memory is not verified. It is probably wrong in most details. But when I think about it, I can feel her arms."
He held up his forearms. The gesture was not planned.
"I feel them here. The weight of being held. It lives in my body. I did not ask for it. It is always there."
They watched him. All four. Still. Their faces held an expression Moss had come to recognize over the weeks — the look of people encountering something their framework had no category for. Not confusion. Not rejection. A kind of focused emptiness, like a hand reaching into a box and finding a shape it could not name.
"The data is unverified," Nitya said.
"Yes."
"The sensory details are unreliable."
"Yes."
"And it produces a physical response. In your body. Without voluntary activation."
"Yes."
Nitya looked at Mira. Mira looked at her hands.
"This is inefficient," Nitya said, but the word carried no judgment. She said it the way a navigator might note an unexpected current — as observation, not complaint.
"I will tell you something," Moss said.
He did not plan it. He was not a man who planned speech. Words came when they came, like weather.
"When I was young. Six, maybe seven. I was at the market with my mother. Big market — open air, stalls, people selling fish and rope and cloth. Loud. Hundreds of people."
He paused. The pidgin was straining. He supplemented with his hands — drawing the space in the air, sketching the crowd with spread fingers.
"I lost her. She was there and then she was not. I turned around and she was gone. The market was — " He used a Continental word, had no pidgin equivalent. "Full. Everything was full. People, sound, smell. I was small. I could not see over the adults. I walked. I called for her. Nobody heard."
The four Antarctikans were motionless. Not the stillness of boredom. The stillness of attention.
"I was terrified. Do you have this word?"
"Fear beyond management," Vihaan said.
Close enough.
"I walked until I found a wall and I sat against it. On the ground. I remember the ground was wet. Or dry. I do not know which. I think I remember wet, but I also think it had not rained. Maybe I am wrong. It does not matter."
He rubbed his palms on his knees. The old gesture. Salt-roughened hands on canvas trousers, steadying himself against a swell. Except there was no swell and the trousers were Antarctic-issue thermal weave and the hands were lighter than they should have been.
"A man found me. A stranger. Old, I think. He had a beard. Or maybe he did not — I see a beard when I think of him, but I was six, and all old men had beards in my memory whether they did or not. He gave me bread."
Moss paused.
"The bread was warm. I remember it warm. In my hands, warm, and the smell of it — yeast and char. But I have thought about this many times and I think the bread was probably cold. It was afternoon. The bakers finish in the morning. By afternoon the bread is cold. But I remember warm. The warmth is part of the memory. It will not come out."
He looked up. They were watching him with an intensity that made the hairs on his arms rise.
"The man took my hand and walked me through the market. He asked me questions I do not remember. He found my mother. She was at the spice stall, looking for me, her face — " He stopped. Swallowed. "I do not have words for her face. Not in your language. Not in mine."
The room was quiet. The hum of the habitat's air systems was the only sound — that constant, low-frequency breath that Moss had learned to sleep through but never to stop hearing.
"That is the story," he said.
Taran leaned forward. That fractional lean, the widened eyes. "The factual elements are contradictory. The bread temperature. The ground condition. The man's appearance."
"Yes."
"The emotional content is disproportionate to the event. A child lost briefly in a market. The resolution was positive. The fear was temporary."
"Yes."
"But the narrative persists. Unverified. Contradictory. Emotionally distorted."
"It is not distorted." Moss's voice was flat. "It is mine."
A pause. Nitya exchanged a glance with Mira. Taran sat back.
"This is what data looks like without verification," Nitya said.
The words hung in the room's recycled air. Moss felt them the way he used to feel a shift in wind direction — not in the mind first, but in the skin, the neck, the fine hairs that stood before the conscious brain caught up.
Mira had not spoken in several minutes. She sat at the end of the curved bench with her hands folded in her lap, her pale gray eyes fixed on a point between Moss and the wall behind him. When she spoke, her voice was quieter than the others. Measured. The words came with the careful spacing of someone selecting each one from a great distance.
"It is more beautiful without verification."
The room went still.
Not the mesh-consulting stillness. Not the polite-attention stillness. A different kind. The kind Moss recognized from the sea — the moment between the wind dying and the new wind coming, when the sails hung slack and the water went flat and the world held itself in suspension, waiting for whatever came next.
Nobody spoke. Taran looked at Mira. Nitya looked at her hands. Vihaan sat perfectly still, his lips parted slightly, his expression unreadable.
Mira did not elaborate. She did not need to. The sentence sat in the room like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples moved outward through the silence, and Moss watched four people from a world of perfect information sit with the weight of a thought their systems had no protocol for.
Later, walking the dim corridor alone, Moss tried to name what had happened in that room.
He could not.
He thought about the bread. Warm in his memory, cold in fact. Both true. Both real. The warmth was not an error — it was what the bread meant, not what the bread was. His mother's face at the spice stall — he could see it now, clear as the corridor lights, and he knew that what he saw was a reconstruction, a thing his mind had built and rebuilt over twenty-five years, sanding down some details and sharpening others until the memory was as much fiction as record.
But it lived in him. It occupied space. It had weight.
The Antarctikans could pull any moment of their lives from the mesh — date-stamped, temperature-logged, verified against sensor data and corroborating records. They could replay a Tuesday afternoon from age nine with the fidelity of a ship's log. Every detail correct. Every sensation cataloged. Nothing lost.
Nothing carried.
He stopped walking. Pressed his palm against the corridor wall. The composite was cool and smooth and told him nothing about who had touched it before or what had happened here or whether anyone had ever leaned against this wall in grief or exhaustion or relief. The wall had no memory. It had data. Every environmental sensor in the habitat recorded every fluctuation of temperature and pressure and atmospheric composition. The wall's history was complete, accurate, and stored in a system that would preserve it for a thousand years.
The wall remembered nothing.
This was the difference. Not the technology. Not the mesh or the lack of it. The difference was in the relationship to what had passed. Continentals carried their history in their bodies — in muscle and scar and the particular way a smell could buckle your knees thirty years after the last time you smelled it. The past was inaccurate. It was biased. It was heavy. It changed you whether you wanted it to change you or not. You could not set it down. You could not query it and close the file. It was lashed to you like cargo in a storm, shifting with every wave, throwing off your balance, and you sailed with it because there was no other way to sail.
The Antarctikans stored their history in a system. Perfect. Accessible. Unburdened. They could retrieve any moment without being touched by it. Their pasts were tools — useful when needed, shelved when not. Clean. Organized. Complete.
Both had access to what had happened. Only one was shaped by it.
Moss stood in the corridor with his hand on the wall and thought about Mira's face when she said the word beautiful. The way her expression had opened for a fraction of a second — not much, not the way a Continental face would open, but enough. A crack in a sealed door. Light through a gap in a hull plank.
She had recognized something. Not understood it — recognized it. The way you recognize land after weeks at sea: not by knowing what it is, but by knowing what its absence felt like.
Something had stirred in that room. Something these people had no vocabulary for — not because the mesh lacked the words, but because the experience the words would describe had been optimized out of their lives so long ago that even the absence of it had become invisible. You cannot miss what you have never carried. You cannot grieve a weight you have never borne.
But Mira had heard a story — messy, wrong, contradictory, warm when it should have been cold — and she had called it beautiful.
Moss lowered his hand from the wall. He walked on. The corridor curved ahead of him, dim and smooth and endless, and he carried everything with him.
Someone had to.