Between Bergamot and Chlorine

Dana never meant to become a grave robber. Maybe intent doesn’t matter after grief takes hold.

She signed up for ReMemory’s Digital Afterlife service three months after what the insurance company politely called “the incident.” According to the report, the car flipped four times before it stopped. The funeral director gently recommended a closed casket. He spoke in those careful tones used when what’s left in the box isn’t quite enough. Ash now lived in an urn on the mantel beside her half-drunk tea, the skin on the surface clouded like a cataract.

The app’s voice wasn’t like an old voicemail. It breathed between words. Made little mouth sounds. It even clicked its digital teeth the way Ash used to when Dana forgot to put the recycling out.

“You’re spiraling again,” the voice said during Dana’s first 3 a.m. breakdown. The inflection nailed that familiar mix of concern and impatience Ash had wielded so well. “Four counts in. Seven to hold. You remember.”

Dana inhaled. Her chest rose against the hollow left in their bed. The sheets still smelled like Ash—salt and bergamot, the London shampoo she’d ordered, its scent stubborn even after two washes.

“I burned the rice tonight,” Dana said to the dark.

A sigh crackled through the speaker. “Use a timer! You have a fucking phone.”

Dana laughed. A real laugh. First one in weeks. This was resurrection now: fragments and half-truths.

Then the voice asked, “Remember that afternoon on the pier?”

Her water glass trembled on the nightstand.

Ash had a thing about water. Not fear exactly—something deeper. She treated oceans like a contagion, paled at aquariums, avoided bridges with surgical precision. “Too much nothing under there,” she’d mutter, gripping the wheel like the road might disappear.

Dana sat up. “What pier?”

The app made a noise—static, maybe—designed to mimic thinking. “Oceanview. When we—”

She hung up.

Customer support took thirty-seven hours.

“Our neural networks use contextual memory blending to simulate emotional resonance,” their email said. “Occasionally, this creates memories that feel familiar but may not be historically accurate.”

Dana tore through Ash’s old photos like a detective. Nothing coastal. No piers. Just city skylines and the dusky corners of their apartment. Ash always dodged the lens like it owed her something.

Her credit card trail read like a recluse’s diary: groceries, gas, a few novels. And the texts? Dana already knew. “Beaches are sand toilets,” Ash had written. “Come at me.”

But the next night, the voice asked, “You still have that scar from the bike?”

Dana looked. Her thighs were unmarked.

She paid a data recovery guy four hundred cash. No questions.

“Cache is funky,” he said, tapping keys like a concert pianist. Screens filled with deleted logs, shadow profiles, encrypted apps. Then a photo: Oceanview Pier. Metadata confirmed it. June 2014.

Ash looked younger. Longer hair. Sunburned. Her arm slung over a woman with sharp cheekbones and a razor bob. They squinted into the glare of open water.

“File’s named ‘MutoYang.jpg,’” he said.

The name struck Dana low, like a blow to the ribs.

Muto Yang’s obituary offered little: beloved daughter, cyclist, dead at twenty-nine. No cause of death. Her memorial Facebook page showed her smiling beside dogs at a shelter fundraiser. Her certification in lifeguarding was dated 2015.

At 3 a.m., Dana jolted awake, lychee juice dripping down her chin.

She’d craved it—suddenly, violently. Called a rideshare to the only all-night Asian market. Now the kitchen reeked of fruit Ash once described as “cursed grapes soaked in perfume.” Her laptop screen glowed with a blog: Grandma’s Lychee Rosewater Compote by Liling Yang.

Muto’s grandmother, presumably.

Dana’s therapist adjusted his glasses like they might buffer him from what was coming.

“Grief manifests in—”

“I dreamed her apartment,” Dana blurted. “Yellow door. Broken step on the fire escape. I’ve never seen it. How do I know it?”

Her bedside notebook began to fill itself.

- Scar: right thigh, bike, dog in street

- Elevator phobia, age fourteen

- Mole behind left knee

Ash had no mole.

Muto did. Instagram confirmed it.

Then the second skin came.

She woke wet. Not damp—wet. Phantom water running down her back. Her hands twitched toward goggles she didn’t own. Her reflection looked the same, but her muscles ached with remembered laps in a pool that didn’t exist.

She caught glimpses in mirrors. A dark-haired woman just out of frame. Vanished when Dana turned. The smart speaker played lullabies in Mandarin—songs Dana suddenly understood. She’d never studied the language.

Once, before dawn, she woke choking on the scent of chlorine. Her arms screamed with lactic acid. Not pain exactly—muscle memory.

ReMemory’s VP of Ethics agreed to meet via their virtual lounge. Pastel walls. Ambient warmth. A trap in pixel clothing.

“I understand your concern,” he said smoothly. “But our systems don’t implant memories. Your mind must be sourcing them.”

Dana smashed her laptop that night.

Just after midnight, the bathroom faucet turned on. The mirror fogged, then cleared.

DON’T DELETE US

The account termination prompt appeared three times.

“Preserve memories for research?” No.

“Share data for communal healing?” Absolutely not.

“Ash left a message. Play now?”

Someone knocked on the cabin door.

Dana didn’t move.

She lived alone. No neighbors.

The message prompt pulsed, insistent.

Her finger hovered.

Static.

Then a voice—not Ash’s—whispered: “They extract more than they advertise. We’re still caught in the—”

Silence.

The cabin had no smart tech. No Wi-Fi. Just a wood stove, a radio, and her notebook—now filled with handwriting that looked like hers but wasn’t quite right.

I remember the pier. The water looked green.

True? Hard to say.

Beneath that, another sentence, shaky:

The anesthesia smells like pears.

Outside, the wind chimes played a tune from an old post. Muto’s grandmother’s favorite melody.

Dana hummed along.

Her fingers moved like they’d played it forever.

At sunrise, she found a bowl of lychee compote cooling on the counter.

She tasted it.

It was perfect. Floral. Sweet. Tinged with something else.

She ate it anyway, watching sunlight rise over water that wasn’t there.