"Yeah, that works."

Elspeth makes a to-do list on her phone. And plays chess. She's no good at it.

Peter's better. His stint practising with someone else did impart some knowledge, if not as much as that person got with their magic form of learning that just taught them how to play the correct moves more often.

Eventually he checkmates her and she snorts and puts the game away. Goes to make spaghetti. "Is there anything special about you and me, I wonder."

"I'd say something like 'above average tendency for introspection' but there's no way that's all it is. It doesn't explain the cereal."

"I mean something that made us be people in the first place - I don't think I existed at all last week, there weren't any traits for me to have then to get me to pass a filter. It could be something about the house, or the timing, or - the specific thing I was about to do before I noticed it was impossible was call my parents, did you have something like that?"

"Kind of. I was about to look for a job when it occurred to me that it was very unlike me to have moved to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere without a job secured already and then it occurred to me that I couldn't think of any specific memories that backed thinking it was unlike me."

"So this is consistent with there being - a process that generates most people's actions, and sometimes it has errors where things don't match up, and that causes - this. But that's too specific a guess on too little information to be exactly right. It does suggest a test, though. If you're making friends with someone by complimenting their hair fifty times then you could maybe - ask them if you're their best friend, ask them to recall all the things you've done for them, see if they try to come up with more than one example and can't?"

"Maybe, but I think I had actually, ah, 'woken up' before that and just didn't notice until then. I may be deluding myself a little bit, and it's been a year so I can't trust my memories that far, but when I was trying to probe my head for when stuff stopped being fuzzy and started being sharp I had the thought that it was as soon as I arrived at my new place. Actually let me check my notes from back then, I started writing things down on a text document to make sure I wouldn't be fooling myself..."

He grabs his phone and starts tapping at it.

"I think I woke up right after I decided to call my parents to tell them I'd arrived at my new house safely."

Tap tap tap "Oh, here it is. Yeah, I did write down that I thought I had properly woken up upon moving but I only wrote that a while afterwards so I wasn't entirely confident in that thought and might have been fooling myself. I very definitely was awake when I started looking for a job, though."

"I suppose it could be slightly gradual onset. Maybe it wouldn't have occurred to me to call my parents at all if I hadn't started waking up."

"It does seem like they mostly just skip thinking about anything like that unless explicitly prompted and even then it's iffy."

"Yeah. Except they do call you if you make friends, do they do that to each other?"

"...I would assume so but I actually have no idea. They do seem to have, you know, lives going on, I've had coworkers get married and move in with other people—or just plain moved—and have kids and all that."

"Can they tell you about how they met and fell in love and stuff?"

"Yeah but it's the same kind of direct statements with no depth as usual. We met at a park, we met over the internet, we met at a friend's birthday party, but no supporting details. Maybe they just think I'm too nosy."

"I did have one tell me when I asked if he had parents that that information was personal!"

"—I was joking. Really, he considered whether he has parents to be personal?"

"In his defense he was my doctor."

"Maybe it was just the default reply for when you hit a forbidden topic. They do seem to resist prodding into that kinda stuff some and to forget everything about it—or at least act like it—more quickly than they do other subjects."

"Most people will tell me if they have parents but some of them look uncomfortable if they're like 'I live with my dad' and I say 'what about your mom'."

"I once tried to point the cereal thing out to someone and they said 'huh' and moved on."

"Did they remember the conversation later?"

"I don't think I've ever had any one of them remember specific conversations. The best I've gotten was some annoyance if I ask the same question too many times in a row which eventually gets them to stop replying if I keep going but if I break it up with other stuff in the middle or wait a while between instances of asking it they don't care."