The Silver Lining

ELEVEN

Place: Stanley Street of Whitefield, Manchester

Time: 12.15 Hours GMT

THE peculiar silence occupied that old red-brick house that was comfortably situated around the corners of an old-fashioned barely-populated ally.

The only sound that pierced that veil of quietude and echoed through the walls of that house was of Oscar.

In an instinct, Lisa was about to climb up the staircase to break open the doors, if she had to, to check up on her recently discovered brother.

"Don't..." Maya pushed Lisa away from the staircase so hard that Lisa almost lost her balance. "He doesn't like to be disturbed when he is... in to his memories. The he gets anxious and ... violent! "

"His memories?" Lisa didn't quite understand what Maya was referring to, "You mean 'his thoughts' or something, right?"

While moving her head from left to right and again right to left, Maya pulled Lisa on to the sofa where Maya had been glued to, ever since they walked in to this house few hours ago.

"We, at the agency, have a very advance technology. We usually use it to extract our memories and revisit them to derive the lost or forgotten facts in the assignments." Maya casually explained while pulling put a device that looked a little similar to a model of 3D Virtual Reality Glasses. "At the time of our induction, a small tracker was injected into our systems that synchronises, from time to time, each and every memory that we have, things that we have seen, heard, experienced or even felt."

Lisa was in utter shock. Her brain was taking her thoughts back to the sharp gasps coming from Oscar's room.

"Is it possible that his memories include me or my parents?" Curiosity oozed through her question when Lisa asked her doubt. "How far can they track?"

"Well.." Maya fixated her sight on the screen of television, as if busy in watching that random show. "He has spoken of it, for sure. He remembers his father training him in his accents of various languages; he remembers meeting you and your mother, their wedding day, his visit to London just to meet his newly born sister, Agency taking him in to break the news of death of his parents, your affection to blue miniature toy-car and fear of dying due to tickling!"

"Rubbish!" Lisa almost bellowed. "I hate blue and I do not fear of people tickling me to death!"

"He did warn me that you would deny like you used to as a child!" Maya laughed hard at Lisa's words, "See, You were part of his world, Lisa...until it was all gone in a blink! He remembers everything about you and your parents."

"So ... like brain-mapping sort of thing, huh? How often can you do that? It is legal?" Lisa was curious, not just to know what her brother's habits were but also to understand why a person would want to re-live the bad memories over and over again. Also, she wanted to cover her joy over gaining a caring brother for no apparent reason. "How often does he use that...device-like-thing?"

"Do you really want to know, Lisa?" Maya simply nodded in negation while asking and that silenced Lisa from further questioning.

'She is right', Lisa thought to herself while smiling at Maya. 'The little I know, the better. All I need to do is to find out how I can get back to my grandma.'

Lisa's mind was constantly revolving around her family.

The family who had raised her..

The family who had cared for her for her whole life.