Their apartment was painful to look at. Harry stumbled through its rooms, ignoring the eclectic decor, the wild portraits that crawled up the walls.

Upon entering their bedroom, he focused, turning to face the wall monitor they had installed across a plane of the room.

This was it, Harry thought, surrounded by the objects that constituted his life, meaningless now. He ignored the strewn socks, the unwashed brushes. Instead, he reached for a remote that had been placed on a bedside table.

Quickly, before he had time to change his mind, Harry initiated the video call.

Despite the late hour, he knew his mother would be awake to receive it. Years of tucking himself into bed as a child was evidence enough for that.

And sure enough, her face blinked into view. Behind her, the sterilized landscape of the lab was white and glaring.

Harry and his mother shared the same dark, unruly hair; the same sharp patrician features, dark eyes, coffee-milk skin. When he was younger, he'd ask her what his father looked like.

She'd simply glance at him and shrug, waving off the question, "look for the differences in your own face." But all he saw in the mirror was her.

"Hello, Harry." His mother said. She wasn't looking at the screen, her eyes focused on the paperwork arranged before her.

"Hello, Erica." He responded. It had been mere seconds, but his mood was already darkening, if that was even possible. She'd always insisted he refer to her by her name; Erica hated 'pet names,' as she called them.

"This isn't a check-in." She phrased it like an observation. "What do you want from me?"

Harry stared at a face that hadn't glanced up once to acknowledge him yet. The dark flood of exhaustion was threatening to spill over, and for a moment he wanted to just hang up and accept defeat.

It was sheer, stubborn tenacity that pulled him back from the precipice. He looked down, breaking the one-sided gaze. "I need your help."

Harry fought to keep his voice steady. Emotions would only serve as a detriment here- Erica lived for facts and numbers. He recounted his day; the Undoing, Annika's parents and their refusal, and finally, his final, desperate plea.

It was only after he fell silent did she look up at the camera for the first time.

"So." She said, scrutinizing him. "The girl's gone."

"Yes." Harry said, too tired to even glare at his mother. "The girl's gone."

She made a mmph sound, something noncommittal, but he could tell she was interested now. Her eyes glittered, her pen poised. "How does that make you feel?"

"How does that-" Harry stopped, giving himself a moment to tamp down the sudden anger. Erica would often speak to him like this, as if he were one of her experiments, experiences reduced to stimuli.

"I feel sad," He said, finally. "And empty. Like a part of myself- my life- has been ripped away from me. I was angry," he added as an afterthought. "But now I'm just tired."

Erica didn't respond, but he could hear her fingers, unseen, clacking away on a keyboard. After a moment she spoke.

"Annika Reyal. Opted-in to the Reclamation project six years ago. Weekly baseline uploads." She paused. "Do you see the issue here, Harry? Her parents were Purists; they did not allow her to be mapped throughout her childhood. It does not matter whether or not you get their legal permission. There hasn't been enough time for a total upload. It's why we recommend families to start young- it takes almost a decade of uplinks for a totally accurate replica."

This was all delivered to him with total impasse, no more dramatic than if she'd been commenting on the weather.

Harry couldn't even bring himself to respond. Why was it so hard, he wondered, to just bring back one woman? He felt like the universe in its entirety was conspiring against him, sending him a message with brutal repetition.

He'd been looking down at his own hands, crumpled amidst the bedsheets. Now, he glanced up again, expecting the feed to have cut off. But his mother was still there, regarding him silently.

"You feel frustrated, don't you?" She asked him, finally.

The question threw him, but Harry responded. "I do. Until today, I never really acknowledged how impossible being Undone was."

Erica sniffed. "You all must see the older generations as afraid and delusional." She laughed, suddenly. It was a rare, shocking sound. "But radicals like the Purists don't even realize how close they are to the truth."

For a moment, Harry felt the scratchings of curiosity. "The truth?"

"Please, Harry. I'm a biochemist from the inner sanctum of New Matrica government. You have no idea the burden that can be."

Fleetingly, Harry had thought his mother, for the first time, was going to confide in him. The revelation had been a brief current of shock. But he realized she was simply lording her own self-importance over him again, the way she'd done to him as a child.

It had just been the two of them back then. He'd suffered under her unfeeling gaze; the endless shifts at the lab, her unwillingness to coddle him, extend her contact any more than necessary.

Annika always joked about his 'parental issues,' between both his mother and her's.

Now, he realized that her prediction was right- eventually, he would snap.

"You're a fucking witch," he hissed at Erica, to her chagrin- and his own shock.

"Excuse me?" She raised an eyebrow, aloof as ever.

"You don't have any 'higher calling' in that lab," Harry was coming dangerously close to hysteria. "You dangled your work over my head for years, as justification, almost, for the way you treated me. There's no big secret, no threat you have to protect the 'common' citizens from- it was just a way to get away from me, wasn't it? The leftovers of my father. You wouldn't even let me call you mom."

He was breathing heavily, a strange, entraling mix of anger and euphoria swirling through him. He'd never spoken to Erica like this before. Never vented the animosity that had grown over the years: for her, her work, the strange bio-technology she obsessed over.

He wanted her to scream at him in response; to take offense to the horrible way he was addressing her. He just wanted her to react to him. To show some compassion now that he was at his lowest.

But a few barbed words were not nearly enough to elicit a reaction, Harry realized almost immediately. Why would they, after all? She was a brick wall, immovable.
So it was almost terrifying to see the crease in her forehead, the sudden slope of her shoulders. Harry suddenly noticed details that he'd overlooked before: the gray threads in her hair, the shadows that ringed her eyes.

"There are secrets in this city," she said, finally. "Sometimes too much information is a bad thing." Erica sighed, looked away. "You think I feel guilty over you? In a way, I do. You, and Annika, are more a product of this city than you'll ever know."

Harry did not care about her cryptic confessions. "Can you bring her back, or not?" He needed an answer; needed this day to finally end.

Erica continued to murmur, ignoring him. "Maybe it's time to show you," her voice took on a musing tone. "It would be the ultimate 'mirror-test,' wouldn't it? A true assessment of self awareness-"

"Erica!" Harry screamed at her, his wits fried down to a pathetic nub. She gave him a dark little smile, any weakness in her expression hidden again.

"You want to know what happened to your fiance? Come to my lab." The screen went dark, and Harry stared at his own warped, distraught expression.

...

The Matrica Parliament building was a monstrosity. Technically outside the borders of Central proper, it served as the district's most imposing sentry to those venturing past. It was not a very architecturally exciting building- the most notable feature was the gap in its structure, placed several stories up. It marred the otherwise mirrored facade like an oversized bullet hole, the airail lines snaking through it like thread in the eye of a needle.

Despite its existence as an eyesore, Parliament almost demanded the built-in train station: the sheer volume of workers that toiled in the building made it necessary.

Externally, Parliament seemed like the ultimate homage to the city: the tallest, coldest, sleekest tower in a place defined by such monuments.

But inside, the sense of tranquility was broken, a humming, endlessly churning bureaucratic beehive.

The place was reduced to a skeleton crew in the early-morning hours, but there was still far more people present than Harry had been expecting. He'd stepped off the deserted station platform, passed through security, and found himself surrounded by a miserable group of late-night workers.

Because of the nature of the building's structure, Harry didn't view the ground floor as the main entrance- that role was delegated to Parliament Station.

It meant that his mother's laboratory, in the building's basement, was more of a trip than it should have been. As he continued on to lower and lower floors, the amount of people tapered off. By the time he reached the lab, Harry was convinced that Erica was the only person still working.