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A flag came up on one of my Govweb connections, one I had forgotten that I still had marked.

Ulysses Front.

My heart seemed to contract deep into its own folds, then sputter heavily back into action. A line of electricity coursed through me and it was a long moment before I could breathe.
I must have never taken the flag off of his name for all these years—figuring he’d never come up again, or figuring maybe…just maybe he would.
Ulysses has been gone for just over eight years, there is no reason for him to show up on Govweb. I explored the link, it is part of a huge bank of names attached to medical records that are being transferred to a new location. Surprising that the code would pick it up, but even more surprising that they’d be moving this record.
There is something archaic about med companies. They deal with the very basic, unchanging form of humanity: the body. But they also keep records. Extensive records from the moment of birth: genetic structures, developmental predictions, all the check-ins and illnesses and accidents, DNA samples.

Samples.

Remnants.

There is something left of Lys, more than his dust floating through the darkness, more than the memories and the life he gave to me. A refrigerated, viable piece of life in a tiny box in a huge bank of other boxes. I have one, too, somewhere back on Earth, attached to my old name and number.

The company is shipping the records to a new location, a bigger warehouse in a larger hospital in Chongqing-2. There it will reside, a tiny impersonal cell, until the ends of history.

Now that my heart has begun beating again, there is only one thought in my head. I can get it. I have to get it.