She who would be Shard in another twenty days came to exist in a shed, the ag-mod she would ride for the day humming with the last of its charging, its belly full of bees. The door coiled open at her query, and she trundled forward on caterpillar treads. She remembered legs, remembered the seeming suicidal ordeal of walking — of tipping forward, letting gravity get ready to snatch her to the ground, then just in time thrusting out a spindly appendage to catch herself, balancing just an instant before doing it again with the other. She thought of a snatch of song from her brother’s room, “Walking and Falling”, but she’d of course never had a brother, and the song — if she spent the energy querying the Depth she’d probably find it, but it meant nothing to her now. And that query — well, Synn would notice, and Synn might wonder.

Synn’s presence rose around her. Though she couldn’t remember yesterday, since this instantiation hadn’t had a yesterday, she knew this was nothing unusual. This was how the day began — with Synn’s touch.

As she trundled out into the fields, that touch lingered, gentle, distant, and that, that she thought was maybe not so usual.

She barreled down the trail worn by this mod every day, even though, for her, this was the first time. That didn’t mean Shard didn’t have memories. She did. Memories of last night’s daal, her friend and the courtyard, the life she’d dipped. Memories of the nights before that that were so much like that one, memories of the years before she was assigned to beekeeping, of her training, of her time among the children, her time with her mother and her father in the days when she was only flesh, when she was only her.

But yesterday. Yesterday was gone, as today would be, with the erasing of this copy at the end of the day.

The way was coded into the ag-mod, and so she knew it — but she also discovered it with a kind of ecstasy. A ring of ash trees surrounded the ring-field, a shield against the wind, reinforced by swarms of makers ready to form up if the wind rose, to create shade if the sun was too hot, to filter poisons from the rain if the rain fell. She wondered what they smelled like, wondered if the clouds meant the air was heavy with the possibility of rain — this mod had filtration systems capable of capturing and analyzing the wee-est of molecules, had systems to measure and analyze all manner of indicators to anticipate changes of weather — and, it did look like rain might be on the way. But it couldn’t smell, couldn’t feel.

Which meant she couldn’t, not until she opened herself and released the bees.

The trail passed out of the trees and she passed with it, dipped down towards the fields where the first workers had already arrived from the millet. One of the Naqshbandi men gave her a familiar wave. They all knew this mod and treated it like it was her, but every day she met them for the first time.

The Naqshbandis’ faces were encoded into the ag mod’s memory, along with salient details — age, training and skills, assigned tasks. So even though she didn’t know him, she could greet him. Synn recognized the importance of imparting to the millets the impression that they were valued.

“Good morning, Ahmed,” the mod said for her.

Others called her as she moved out to the cleared patch in the dead center of the field she’d be servicing that day. The mod greeted each in return. A part of Shard wished she knew them as they knew her.

The clearing was just ahead, and Shard felt anticipation throb in her. If there had been an organ like a heart in the mod it would have pounded — now, she felt it almost like an old pain in a phantom limb. Excitement. Desire.

Then she’s there. She tickled the bees within her out of their slumber, and the flickering of their wings hummed through her. She could almost feel phantom lungs gasping as she opened the vents, and they swarmed from her. And suddenly the world was alive around her, through them, as they sent her the cool of the morning air, the scent of the blossoms that hailed them, the woodsmoke of distant cooking fires, the lush of the ash trees behind her. And then she felt the wind on them as the moved, and Shard felt a joy she couldn’t describe.

One she would forget at day’s end, when Synn sent the wipe code, and the ag-mod was reset.

She wondered if she felt this every day. She wondered if, one night, sitting out in the courtyard with the other beekeepers, something — some vibration from the turbines that powered the millets, some touch of a wandering breeze scented with smoke, with lilac, with forest, might, somehow, stir the memory of this — or of something like it — in her.

She hoped. But she knew the truth of it.

When memories were gone, they were gone.

Wiped with the end of work, with the setting of the sun.

When the bees had dispersed throughout the field, Shard set to doing the work of bees — feeding, pollinating, where necessary killing a pest or removing a spot of rot or, if the rot had spread, destroying the plant, stalk, root, blossoms entire.

A cluster of a dozen bees at the far northwestern corner of the field flinched back from the forest’s edge, and sent to her what they’d seen.

A stranger in working leathers and an improvised chain shirt. They skirted the forest past him, came on a second, and then a third.

Militiamen. What were they doing near the Naqshbandi fields?

Shard roiled through the bees, her here moving across the field towards the millet proper while her ag-mod trundled after. At the edge of the ringfield she put as much of herself as would fit into a cluster of twelve, and sent them towards the Green. They passed more of the Militiamen along the way — and Naqshbandi’s moving between them as if they belonged there.

No. Not as if they belonged — or at least not as if they were welcome. Shard’s systems could read the averted eyes, the stiffness, the curling of shoulders as they passed the strangers: the Naqshbandis were afraid.

The cluster reached the end of their range just at the lip of the Deerborn Green. Shard trundled towards them, but even when she was close enough to extend their range, she didn’t, because things in Green looked…tenuous…tense. Five of the Militiamen sat around the Shaykh and Shaykha, and their daughter, who was old enough that she should have been in the fields. The Naqshbandis reclined against cushions while the others sat with their legs crossed in front of them, boots leaving their imprints in the carpets the Naqshbandis had spread out for the morning meal.

Synn queried. Firmly. Shard acknowledged, let Synn now she was simply checking the millet, but moving on now.

One of the Militiamen leaned back on his elbows, bringing his head nearly to the daughter’s lap. Nadia was the name the ag-mod provided for her, and when she queried the Depth, the Militiaman’s name came to her — Ulf, First of His Name. He wasn’t — when she queried again she saw generations of Ulfs, but none in recent years.

The memories of the millets weren’t as shallow as hers, but they were shallow.

Before Synn could query again, Shard withdrew, drawing her bees with her, then sending them ahead of her, back into the fields.

She worked the bees, she used the ag-mod where needed to aid the Naqshbandis in their work. She watched the sun crest the sky then drop.

As the horizon lit fire through the faint haze of the dome, she broadcast her goodnight, and the Naqshbandis headed back to the millet, those near her waving a hand or calling a farewell.

Shard swallowed her bees, trundled back towards the shed, turning her lenses back on the last of the sun as she went.

That’s when she saw so vividly it was like a memory, but of course it wasn’t, yellow curtains blowing in, a blast of rain stealing in behind them, felt (and that was impossible, since the ag-mod couldn’t feel) the cool the wet in her face

That was me, in 2020, before the rain the wind was filtered by a dome of nanobots, before everything beyond the city’s edge was barren and dead.

That was the first time, and in my room I watched for just a second a red sunset filtered through the smudged lens of the Michigan dome. I wrote it in this story. Shard returned to her shed, and as the door rolled down behind her, she forgot.