Flashback 2-flt -

The station’s emergency lights pulsed a sickly amber. Every surface was covered in tangled fiber-optic cables, pulsing with faint blue light. It looked like the nervous system of some enormous, dying beast.

“Conrad,” she said, her voice warm and utterly wrong. “You’re early. We haven’t finished uploading you yet.”

It was Dr. Maya Shen, his old mentor. The woman who had taught him to navigate the morphogenetic field. The woman he had watched die on Titan, twenty years ago. Flashback 2-FLT

He thought of Maya’s smile. The boy’s black eyes. The guilt over a friend who never existed. All the lies he’d told himself to keep moving forward— I did the right thing. I saved who I could. I’m still human.

He snapped the disk in half.

Conrad slid behind a maintenance conduit, catching his breath. “So the FLT is a drug. A lethal one.”

“Don’t press that button,” Conrad shouted. “It triggers the cloning vats!” The station’s emergency lights pulsed a sickly amber

“Experiment 07. Memory extraction: Conrad B. Hart, age 34. Baseline established. Beginning fractalization of emotional anchor points.”