My grandmother died six years before I was born. My mother died when I was five. The BCI in my head was my grandmother's first, then my mother's, then mine. I got it when I was seven. The clinic guy said the factory reset went clean. He said it was like new. He was wrong, or he was lying, or he didn't know. I think he didn't know. Most people don't know what ghost weight feels like from the inside.

I don't have memories. I want to be clear about that. I don't see my mother's face or hear my grandmother's voice. It's not like that. What I have are reflexes. My hands do things before I decide to do them. I flinch at the sound of pressure seals releasing — that hiss-click that airlocks make. My mother was in a decompression accident when she was sixteen. Three people died. She survived. I didn't learn this until I was fourteen and an aunt told me. By then I'd been flinching at that sound for seven years. My body knew something my mind didn't. My body has always known things my mind doesn't.

I know my way around the Gulch. I have never been to the Gulch. I could draw you a map of the market stalls on level three, tell you which vendor sells the best synth-protein wraps, tell you where the CorpSec cameras have blind spots. My grandmother lived in the Gulch for thirty years. I carry her navigation like it's my own. Last year I walked the route without thinking, from the B-line station to an apartment that was demolished in 2208. I stood in front of the empty lot and cried and I didn't know why.

At night, when the feed goes quiet and the Shelf settles into its version of silence, I feel something in the device. Not my mother. Something older. It doesn't move. It doesn't speak. It doesn't push thoughts into my head or images into my eyes. It holds still. Perfectly, absolutely still. Like something curled up in a small space, breathing slowly, waiting. I've felt it since I was seven. I used to think it was a glitch. Now I think it's my grandmother. Not her memory. Not her data. Something that was pressed into the machine by the weight of her living in it for forty years. It doesn't want anything from me. It just listens. It has been listening for a very long time.

People ask me if it scares me. It doesn't. What scares me is the idea of a BCI with no ghost weight. A clean device. Empty. That sounds like loneliness in a way I can't describe. At least I'm not alone in here.