The Second First Time

San Francisco, 2056

The clinic on Valencia Street didn't look like much — a glass door between a ramen shop and a bookstore, a small sign that read Tabula in lowercase gray letters.

Inside, Ethan and Mei Chen sat on opposite ends of a white couch, the space between them measured and deliberate.

"Standard or selective?" the technician asked.

"Selective," Mei said. "Each other. Everything."

"Deletion is clean but irreversible. You won't remember meeting, marrying, fighting. You will be strangers."

They signed separately. They didn't say goodbye.

—

Three weeks later, Mei was eating saffron ice cream that tasted like something she couldn't name. A déjà vu she'd learned to ignore — everyone who'd had a deletion carried small ghosts like that. Not memories. Just shadows where memories used to be.

A man at the next table was struggling with chopsticks, laughing at himself. He caught her watching.

"My hands think they know something my brain doesn't."

She smiled. "Muscle memory. They can't delete that."

"Ethan," he said.

"Mei."

Something flickered behind his eyes. Not recognition. Just warmth.

—

By the second month, he was sending her voice notes on his walk to work. He kept sketching houses with two desks in the study and couldn't explain why. She played a piece in A minor she didn't remember learning — something that made her cry without knowing the reason.

"Do you wonder," she said one night, "if we're just replaying something instead of making something new?"

"I asked my sister if I'd ever been in love. She said once. But she wouldn't tell me more."

"I found a wedding photo in my closet. The man was cut out."

The room held its breath.

"Do you want to know?" she asked.

"No," he said. "I want this to be ours."

—

And somewhere in a cabinet at the Tabula clinic, two files sat side by side: Chen, E. and Chen, M., each stamped with the same red text:

Third deletion. Same outcome.

Some people aren't meant to stay together. Some people aren't meant to stay apart. The machine can't tell the difference. It just does what you ask.

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