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19:30 Wednesday 24 March 2084
In a small restaurant on Deokjeokdo, a beautiful small island of delightful beaches and shaded pine forests off the north-west coast of South Korea, Ki Hwa Ye was celebrating her seventh birthday. Ki Hwa’s mother, In Hwa, and her father, Gil Soo, had owned the restaurant for over ten years and family birthdays had been celebrated there every year. As well as her parents, her ten year old brother, Joon Hyeong, and her younger sister, three year old Soo Won, were looking forward to the party. All her aunts, uncles, cousins, and - of course - her grandparents were there, eagerly looking forward to the traditional birthday meal of freshly prepared miyuk gook (seaweed soup), jaengban gooksu (soba noodle salad), and galbi (grilled short ribs). The adults were laughing, swapping tales of what the island’s tourists had got up to recently, and the children were doing what children all over the world often do at such events – running around between tables playing tag. However, once the food arrived they broke off their playing and sat at the table, ready to play the part of model diners. The promise of a visit to MacDonald’s the next time the family visited Seoul had seen to that.
The scene inside Ki Hwa’s mind was vastly different. Inside the memory cortex of her brain, there was a battle going on; a battle that the memories of Simon Jones, Jake Griffiths, Thomas McCall, Marcus Gallagher, Liam Hillary, and all Ki Hwa’s previous incarnations were never going to win. Previously past life memories had merged with their host’s present day memories seamlessly; the path from where the past life memory was stored gave easy and free passage to her day-to-day memory. But now it was as if a heavy metal door had been welded shut creating a vacuum seal that nothing could pass. The FS virus had done its job admirably. Her past life memories were trapped in the recesses of her mind for eternity.