The soft hiss of the sliding cell door broke the silence.
He looked up. My mother stood there, motionless, framed by the dim corridor light behind her. She had aged again—grief pressing new lines into her face like the erosion of stone under rain.
She didn't speak right away. Her eyes lingered on him with something between sorrow and study.
"What happened to him?" he asked finally, voice gravelly with sleeplessness and something dangerously close to concern.
She swallowed. "I don't know yet."
He leaned forward, the overhead lights casting long shadows across his face. "You were there. You saw how far he was slipping. That weapon—he wasn't supposed to finish it. Not like that."
"You sound like you care," she said, arms folding across her chest.
A pause. He looked down.
"I care about consequences."
She didn't reply. And in that silence, something unspoken passed between them. Regret. Maybe recognition.
The next morning, he woke to pain—a stabbing headache, a mouth dry as ash. His mind reeled from the night before: his slurred laughter, the celebration over a device capable of collapsing matter upon itself.
There was no time to linger. The simulations resumed.
Brutal. Beautiful. Endless.
Each one a lifetime. Each one a test of his soul.
He became lovers and leaders, rebels and tyrants. Felt the warmth of children crawling into bed beside him in families that weren't his. Buried the men he'd killed only to raise their orphans under a false name. Cried with strangers over the deaths of friends he never really knew. Each memory was a thread, weaving into a tapestry he couldn't escape from.
In one simulation, he knelt over a dying soldier—his supposed best friend—and felt the same guilt in his stomach as he had when Lup died. In another, he looked into a mirror and didn't recognize the eyes staring back.
He lived moments of quiet joy—dinners with soft music, hands held in silence. And moments of horror—bombings in refugee camps, children screaming in smoke-filled ruins.
He began to blur.
"They're all the same," he muttered one evening during a reset cycle, forehead resting against the cold steel of a bench. "Everyone we kill. Everyone we protect. The difference is just geography and timing."
Suru sat beside him, silent.
"I've had children in these dreams," he whispered. "They've said they love me. One of them sang to me before bed. She had a missing tooth and asked me to be her hero."
Suru's voice cracked. "You remember their names?"
"Every one."
The nights grew heavier.
He no longer knew how much of him was left untouched.
On the final day before the real call came, the simulation took him back—to a scenario hauntingly close to his own past.
This time, he wasn't the child. He was the operative.
He watched through another man's eyes as a father was eliminated. Took his place. Raised the boy, grew to love the boy. Married the mother who would never know the truth. And over years—compressed into hours—he saw the boy grow, begin to call him "Dad."
He felt the guilt. The self-loathing. The slow decay of sanity trying to pretend.
Then, one day, the boy asked, "Did you know my real father?"
And he had no answer.
Tears fell in simulation—and in reality. They wouldn't stop.
When the training ended, he tore off his headset and ran. Down the corridor. Through the cold steel halls. Past the stares of his team.
He found her in the greenhouse wing, pruning flowers that barely bloomed in artificial sunlight.
He collapsed into her arms like a boy again.
"I get it now," he sobbed. "I think... I think I get it."
She didn't ask what. Just held him.
That night, she returned to the cell.
He looked up, surprised.
"I think... he's changing," she said.
The man who looked like my father didn't move. His expression didn't shift. But something behind his eyes flickered. Something that might have been hope.
Or fear.