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The pregnant woman in front was blocking my way to the till. I cut her, dumping her residue of memories and thoughts into a temporary cache. I approached the till, submitted my card to the cashier who checked it, then pasted the requested amount directly into my pocket. Neat. I walked into the street. The sun was sending semi-random patterns of light that played across windows and water and seemed to merge with the movement of cars, the motion of people. I got lost for a few minutes as I followed the patterns, emerging with some alarm at the other end of the road, near the park. Confused, I initiated a route trace, only to discover that several of my in-between nodes were unrecognisable. Where have I been? I considered the possibility that my loss of concentration rerouted me through some out of the way locations, but it seemed unlikely. I scanned myself briefly, checking for possible corruption, and was dismayed to discover an unpleasant smell was emaciating from my left ankle. A whiff of corruption in the kingdom of Denmark... I searched through my internal memory, found to my alarm that it was receding at a constant rate. I began to desperately dump memory blocks on to my external storage, losing in the process long-buried memories, summer dreams, random acquaintances; losing parts of my identity as they were imperfectly copied. I panicked. The swirling patterns of identity gained in urgency and I felt myself drowning inside their whirlwind. I had no control over it, and things were migrating across the storage, propagating into my internal memory, my thought processes, my self that was no longer mine. The baby! The woman I cut and stored in cache must have used my confusion to fight back. She was pushing her baby on me, his little thoughts barely more than a whisper, but so insistent, so pervasive! His blank little mind is dismantling mine with a careful joy and I am hungry for milk. I open my mouth and dribble, and my lungs open wide in a scream, as we are born into the world...
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