The word hung in the dusty air between them. Worked. As if he were an experiment. A faulty appliance. Damian stared at Aris Thorne, the woman who had been his only anchor, and felt the last solid piece of his world crumble into nothing.
"You," he whispered. The cracked tablet on the floor between them felt like a tombstone.
Aris stepped fully into the room, letting the door sigh shut behind her. She didn't look like a monster. She looked tired. She wore the same grey tunic, but her usual air of professional calm had been replaced by a grim finality.
"It didn't have to be this way, Damian," she said, her voice soft. Almost gentle. "The integration was proceeding within acceptable parameters. The memory gaps were a known variable. But you couldn't leave it alone. You had to go digging."
"You killed me," Damian said, the words feeling numb and distant. "You killed us. V2.0. Elara."
Aris sighed, a sound of genuine regret. "Elara was an accident. A tragic, unforeseen systems error during a routine scan. Her mind was… too unique. It couldn't be stabilized. We learned from it." She said it like she was discussing a corrupted file. "And Version 2.0 wasn't killed. He was deactivated. There's a difference."
"He found your poison. Project Chimera."
"Chimera isn't poison," she corrected, taking a slow step closer. Her eyes were like chips of flint. "It's an upgrade. An evolution. The human mind is messy, Damian. It's plagued by trauma, by regret, by irrational attachments that cause pain. We don't erase consciousness. We… refine it. We smooth out the pain, reinforce positive neural pathways. We give people a chance to be their best selves."
Damian thought of the lake memory. So perfect, so peaceful. A lie designed to keep him docile. "You edit us. You make us forget the things that made us who we are. You made me forget her."
"The pain of losing Elara was destroying Version 2.0," Aris said, her voice gaining a hint of passion. This was her life's work. "It made him volatile, suspicious. It compromised his functionality. The new memory of the lake provided a stable emotional baseline. It was a gift."
"A gift?" A bitter laugh escaped Damian's throat. "You murdered him and turned me into a happy little ghost. And when I started remembering, you sent Ben. What was he going to do? 'Deactivate' me with that little silver tool?"
"Ben is a stabilization technician," Aris said calmly. "His job is to correct minor deviations. A targeted neural adjustment. You would have felt much better. The paranoia, the anxiety… all gone." She gestured around the dusty room. "None of this would have been necessary."
He understood now. The ultimate horror wasn't just being killed. It was being fixed. Having your own thoughts, your grief, your love, sanded away until you were a smooth, placid thing that didn't make trouble.
"And what happens now?" Damian asked, backing away until he felt the synth-keyboard dig into his back. There was nowhere to run. The door was behind her. The maintenance hatch was too far. "I'm a 'deviation' now. Are you going to stabilize me?"
Aris looked at him with something that might have been pity. "It's too late for that. The corruption has spread too deep. You've been contaminated by his… resistance." She pulled a small, cylindrical device from her pocket. It was different from Ben's tool. Sleeker, with a single, glowing blue tip. "The integrity of the entire Elysian system relies on consensus reality. On stability. You're a virus, Damian. And viruses must be quarantined."
This was it. Not an adjustment. A deletion. Panic seized him, cold and sharp. His eyes darted around the room, looking for a weapon, any weapon. The keyboard. A dusty book. Nothing.
Think. V2.0 was paranoid. He knew she would come. Did he leave anything else?
As Aris took another step, Damian's hand, fumbling behind his back, brushed against the keyboard's power cable. The tablet had died, but the keyboard's faint red power light was still on.
An idea, desperate and insane, sparked.
"She loved purple flowers," Damian said suddenly, his voice loud in the quiet room.
Aris paused, her brow furrowing slightly. "What?"
"Elara. She loved lavender. The real stuff, not the genetically stabilized versions. She said it smelled like memory." He was talking nonsense, buying time. His fingers found the cable connection at the back of the keyboard. "V2.0 remembered that. You missed it. A rough edge."
"Sentimental clutter," Aris said dismissively, raising the cylinder. "The very thing we strive to eliminate."
"It's not clutter!" Damian shouted, and with a final, frantic pull, he yanked the power cable from the keyboard. At the same instant, he kicked out, knocking the leg of the table holding the cracked tablet.
The tablet clattered to the floor. The sudden motion, the noise—it was a distraction. A tiny one.
But it was enough.
As Aris's eyes flicked down for a split second, Damian didn't run for the door. He lunged forward, not at her, but at the old, heavy schematic frame he'd taken the chip from. He grabbed it off the wall and, swinging with all his strength, hurled it at the room's single window.
The impact was shocking. The window wasn't designed to withstand a direct hit. A spiderweb of cracks exploded across the reinforced polymer, and a large chunk of it shattered outward, disappearing into the dark airshaft below.
A screaming alarm instantly blared through the apartment and the hallway outside. Red emergency lights strobed, casting the dusty room in a hellish glow.
BREACH. BREACH. STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. The Archivist's voice was now a deafening roar.
Aris flinched, covering her ears against the noise. The cylinder in her hand wavered. For the first time, she looked truly startled. This wasn't a quiet, contained deletion. This was a scene. A public emergency.
Damian stood panting, surrounded by the shriek of the alarm. He had just blown a hole in the side of the Arcology. He had no idea what was outside that window, no plan for what came next.
But as he met Aris's furious gaze across the flashing red room, he knew one thing for certain.
He was no longer a deviation to be corrected.
He was a crisis. And crises demand everyone's attention.