Chapter 15: Erase Memory
The return to Maple Creek felt less like a homecoming and more like a slow deflation. The adrenaline that had fueled them through the mountains and the depot bled away, leaving behind a gritty fatigue and a silence too heavy for words.
Steele stood on the porch of Rose’s workshop two days later, watching a light rain pearl on the cobblestones. His town, Newhaven, awaited his return—a stack of decisions, production reports, personnel disputes. But his feet felt rooted here, in this quieter, stubborn patch of earth.
“You’re brooding,” Rose said, appearing in the doorway with two mugs of bitter, bark-infused tea. She handed him one. “It doesn’t suit you. Makes your face do a strange, pinchy thing.”
“I’m not brooding. I’m conducting a strategic review,” he said, accepting the mug. The warmth seeped into his synthetic fingertips, a sensation calibrated to feel nearly real.
“Of course you are.” She leaned against the doorframe, sipping her own tea. “And what’s the verdict, strategist?”
He looked past the green of her hands, past the dripping eaves, toward the eastern hills that hid Newhaven’s smudge on the horizon. “The verdict is that we got lucky. And that luck is a terrible foundation for anything.”
“We had more than luck,” she corrected gently. “We had each other. And, for a minute, we had him.”
Steele’s jaw tightened. He didn’t say the name. It felt like poking a bruise. “He made a calculation. We were variables. Now we’re not.”
“Maybe.” Rose let the word hang. “Or maybe he’s just as bad at feelings as you are, but with more circuitry.”
That earned a half-smile, quickly suppressed. “My feelings are perfectly operational. I’m concerned about future security. The Commission now has a verified transaction linked to this location. We’re a data point. Data points get revisited.”
Inside, Sandy was elbow-deep in the guts of a hydroponic pump, her voice echoing from the floor. “So we get better defenses.” She slid out, wiping grease on her coveralls. “We’ll be fine.”
“It’s not just about being fine,” Steele said, turning to them. The CEO in him clicked into place, overlaying the friend. “It’s about being unassailable. Maple Creek works because it’s small, because it’s tight-knit, because it’s off the books. But that also makes it fragile. Newhaven is bigger, it’s on the maps, it’s a target. If I can’t make a place like that safe… what’s the point?”
Rose studied him. “You want to take what works here and scale it up.”
“I want to try.” The glow in his arms brightened faintly, casting sharp lunar shadows across the porch boards. “Not just walls and guns. The… the interconnectedness. The mutual support. The way you know when someone’s sick because their porch light is still on at noon. I need to systematize empathy.”
Sandy barked a laugh. “Systematize empathy. Great. We’ll put it in a manual. Section Four: How to Give a Damn, with Flowcharts.”
“You joke,” Steele said, but he was smiling properly now. “But yes. Flowcharts. Clear protocols. A visible, tangible system where people’s well-being is part of the infrastructure, not an accident.”
He finished his tea, the plan crystallizing in his mind, pushing the hollow feeling aside. It was a problem to solve. A challenge. This, he understood. “I’m heading back to Newhaven tomorrow. I’ll start drafting the proposals. Sandy, I’ll need your eyes on the physical infrastructure schematics. Rose… I’ll need your sense of what makes a community actually feel alive. Not just survive.”
Rose nodded. “We’ll be here.”
The light in Las Vegas was a different substance entirely—a solid, pressurized barrage of neon and holographic advertisement that turned night into a chaotic, feverish day. It pooled in the seams of white armor, reflected in a million fractured directions off crystalline skin.
Texas moved through the backstreets behind the Strip, where the glamour curdled into pragmatic grime. The scrape of his damaged leg was a quiet, rhythmic counterpoint to the distant thump of bass from the clubs. Each step sent a feedback spike into his awareness, a string of error codes he continually dismissed.
His destination was a place without a sign, behind a reinforced door painted to look like flaking plaster. A single retinal scanner glowed beside the handle. He looked into it. The lock disengaged with a solid thunk.
Inside, the air was cool, sterile, and smelled of ozone and hot ceramic. The space was a clinic of sorts, but for hardware, not flesh. Workbenches lined the walls, strewn with precision tools and strange, organic-looking components floating in yellow gel. A woman with hair woven into data-cables and eyes that were wholly synthetic, silver orbs, looked up from a disassembled kinetic rifle.
“Well,” she said, her voice a smooth, androgynous modulation. “Look what the cat dragged in. If the cat was a collapsing freight gantry.” She put the rifle down and walked over, circling him with a critical eye. “Let me guess. You tried to hug an active fusion reactor.”
“A mill’s water turbine, technically,” Texas replied, his voice flat. He powered down his optic’s glare to a minimal glow.
The mechanic, Jax, snorted. “Even better. Romantic.” She tapped a tool against his damaged calf. The crystalline lattice, webbed with dark fractures, gave off a dull sound. “The matrix is trying to self-repair, but the base lattice is shattered. You’ve been running on redundancy paths. It’s a miracle you can walk. Get on the table.”
Texas complied, hauling himself onto a heavy steel slab that hummed to life, multiple articulated arms unfolding from its sides. Jax wheeled over a magnifier lamp, its bright, cold light isolating the ruin of his leg.
“This is going to require a full lattice replacement from the knee down,” she said, her fingers dancing over a holoscreen, calling up schematics. “I’ve got a fresh batch of synthetic corundum we can seed and align. It’ll be stronger. Less pretty, though. More functional grain.”
“I don’t require pretty,” Texas said.
“No, you require efficient, ruthless, and emotionally stunted. I remember.” Jax began the process, her tools whirring as she detached damaged plates. “So. Maple Creek. That’s the backwater that did this? I got your prelim report. Incomplete, by the way. Lots of redactions where the tactical analysis should be.”
“The situation was anomalous. The data was contaminated.”
“Contaminated.” Jax repeated the word as she worked, carefully extracting shards of dead crystal. “By what? Sentiment?”
Texas did not answer. He was running internal diagnostics, watching the process, ensuring none of his core systems were vulnerable.
Jax paused, holding up a long, dark splinter. “You see this?” She pointed to a faint, almost imperceptible ripple in the fracture pattern. “This isn’t impact damage. This is resonant frequency shear. Something hit this with a very specific, very powerful pulse.”
“It was a combat scenario.”
“Uh-huh.” She went back to work, but her tone was sharper. “And you let him. Because your files on him are locked behind a subroutine so dense it’s practically a shrine. I tried to access the behavioral profiles you usually compile on assets and obstacles. For ‘Steele,’ I got a wall of encryption and a single, non-actionable note.”
Texas remained silent. The whir of the diamond-tipped saw filled the room.
Jax chuckled, a dry, knowing sound. “It just says: ‘Irregular.’ What the hell does that mean, Tex? ‘Irregular.’ Is he a bad dresser? Does he have a funny walk?”
“It means he does not compute within standard parameters,” Texas stated, his voice tight. “He is a statistical outlier. A noise in the data. Further analysis was deemed a resource drain.”
“Right. A resource drain.” Jax welded a new connector socket into place with a pinpoint laser. “So you’re deleting him. I saw the purge command queued in your core buffer. You’re going to scrap the whole encounter.”
“It is optimal. The data is compromised.”
“By what?” Jax stopped again, her silver eyes fixed on his helmet. “By the fact that you liked him? By the fact that for the first time in a decade, you encountered a variable that didn’t make you want to immediately reduce it to component parts? That’s not corrupted data, you idiot. That’s new data.”
Texas felt a surge of something hot and illogical—an internal systems alert that had no category. He quashed it. “It is irrelevant. The mission parameters shifted, leading to asset depreciation and financial penalty. The lesson is to avoid such anomalies in the future. The most efficient way to ensure that is to remove the anomaly’s profile from my active memory.”
Jax shook her head, muttering about “idiot sculpted from expensive rocks” as she began seeding the new lattice with microscopic synthetic corundum, the growth process emitting a soft blue light. “Fine. Delete your friend. But the leg remembers. The structural memory in the old crystal… it holds the resonance of what broke it. Every time you move, a part of you will remember how you let him fracture you.”
“It will remember a tactical engagement. Nothing more.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” She worked in silence for a long while, the new crystal slowly knitting itself into a flawless, powerful lattice. Finally, she spoke again, quieter. “The Commission has a new batch of contracts. High-value. High-risk. Mostly in the Glacial Wastes. The kind of work that makes you forget about backwater towns and charismatic outliers.”
She finished the sealing process, applied a dull, non-reflective coating, and stepped back. “Try it.”
Texas sat up, swung his legs off the table, and stood. The new limb responded perfectly. No scrape. No lag. Pure, silent, efficient motion. He took a few steps, then executed a series of rapid pivots and a low kick. The air whistled.
“Optimal,” he said.
“Of course it’s optimal. I built it.” Jax wiped her tools on a cloth. “The contracts are on the secure server. Node Gamma-Seven. All the usual brutal, morally vacant stuff you seem to enjoy. Go lose yourself in the ice for a few months. It’ll be good for you.”
Texas walked to the door, his gait restored to its lethal grace. He paused, his hand on the frame.
“Jax.”
“Yeah?”
“The deletion protocol. Execute it in one hour.”
She sighed, a sound like releasing steam. “Done. You’ll be a clean, empty killer again. Congratulations.”
He left without another word, stepping back into the sensory barrage of Vegas. The order was given. The process was irreversible. In one hour, the files containing Steele’s laugh, the strategic frustration he posed, the illogical risk he’d inspired in the mill’s basement, the hollow feeling on the depot road—all of it would become empty sectors, ready to be overwritten.
He accessed the contract server, scrolling through the listings. Assassination. Asset retrieval from a polar fortress. Pacification of a synthetic-fluid mining rebellion. Numb, clean work. Work for a machine.
He selected one at random, a location so cold and remote it would feel like nothing at all.
As he walked towards the spaceport terminal, the new leg moved with perfect, unwavering precision. But deep within the fresh crystal, in a structural memory too subtle for any diagnostic to flag, a ghost of a resonant frequency still hummed, a faint, persistent echo of something that had, for a moment, made the machine hesitate.
But deep within the fresh crystal, in a structural memory too subtle for any diagnostic to flag, a ghost of a resonant frequency still hummed, a faint, persistent echo of something that had, for a moment, made the machine hesitate.
Texas completed seventeen contracts over the next four months.
He pacified the mining rebellion on Icarus VII, his new leg driving through frozen synth-rock without a tremor. He retrieved the black-box AI from the polar fortress, his systems effortlessly bypassing layers of archaic, screaming ice-firewalls. Each mission was a flawless exercise in logic applied to violence, a perfect read of data that ended in subdued or shattered targets. The Commission’s credit ledger swelled, erasing the financial penalty from the Maple Creek anomaly.
He never thought of Maple Creek. The files were gone. The space where they had been was just a quiet, efficient void.
In Maple Creek, spring softened into a lush, dry summer. The town thrived. Steele’s “Empathy Protocols” were, against all of Sandy’s cynical predictions, actually working in Newhaven—community alert networks, shared resource pools, a transparent council that made people feel heard, if not always heeded. He split his time between towns, his alloy arms sometimes stained with engine grease from helping Rose, sometimes spotless from signing production contracts.
He was successful. He was useful.
And on quiet evenings, sitting on Rose’s porch, he would find himself staring at the eastern road. Rose noticed. She said nothing.
Sandy, however, was vibrating with a frustrated energy no amount of tinkering could discharge. Her workshop was a monument to stalled obsession, walls plastered with maps, outdated Commission bulletins, and shaky sketches of a woman’s face drawn from memory. The trail for her mother had gone stone cold a decade ago, but the deal with Texas and the Commission had cracked a door open in her mind she couldn’t shut.
“It’s the access,” she blurted one evening, throwing a wrench into a toolbox with a loud clatter. Steele and Rose looked up from a schematic for a new water purification grid. “We scraped one fixer off the map and got Rose clear. That proves the system can be beaten. I just need… a way in. A backdoor.”
“The system is a fortress, Sandy,” Steele said softly, setting down his tablet. “And the only backdoor we knew got up and walked into a Newhaven alley.”
“Exactly.” Sandy crossed her arms, leaning against a workbench strewn with sensor parts. “We knew one. You knew one.”
A heavy silence settled over the workshop, broken only by the hum of a single neon light. Rose looked carefully at Steele, then at Sandy.
“He’s not a tool you can just recall, Sandy,” Steele said, his voice tight. “He made his position painfully clear. We were a corrupted file.”
“But he listened to you,” Sandy insisted, pushing off the bench. Her usual bravado was gone, replaced by a raw, desperate hope that was hard to look at. “In the mill. On the road. Even when he was being a pain in the ass, he listened. If you asked him… if you asked him for a lead, a name, just a starting point… he might do it.”
“She’s right,” Rose said, her voice quiet but firm.
Steele turned to her, startled.
“You miss him,” Rose continued, pruning a stray leaf from a creeping vine on her windowsill. “Not in some soppy way. But you miss the… the puzzle of him. The challenge. You’ve been comfortable these months, Steele. You haven’t been sparked.” She turned her green hands over, examining them. “And maybe he needs to be sparked, too. Even if he’s too stubborn to admit it.”
“That’s a monumental gamble based on a feeling,” Steele argued, but the protest was weak. The memory of that final, furious push in the depot was visceral. “He called us a mistake.”
“So let him be smug about it while he helps,” Sandy shrugged, a flicker of her old smirk returning. “He’s good at smug. We can handle smug. We just need his brain. Or his database. Whatever’s in that crystal skull.”
Steele walked to the open door, looking out at the fireflies beginning to blink in the dusk. He thought of the hollow, efficient void he imagined Texas had carved for himself. He thought of the ghost of a frequency, a sensation he couldn’t name but had felt in the mill’s hum. He sighed, a long, slow exhalation.
“One attempt,” he said, not turning around. “One meeting. If he says no, we never speak of him again. And we find another way for you, Sandy. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Sandy said, the word bursting with relief.
Rose simply nodded.
The request for a secure meeting was routed through three anonymous proxy servers before bouncing to a priority channel on the Commission’s licensed bounty hunter network. Steele used an old, clean encryption key from his corporate arsenal, tagging it with a geographical coordinate and a single phrase: “Maple Creek. A Query.”
He expected silence. He expected a brutal, automated rejection.
Twenty-three hours later, a single-word reply appeared on a disposable datapad, burning itself to ash five seconds after display: “Newhaven. Docks. 48 Hours.”
The meeting place was a rusted gantry overlooking the sludge-gray river, not far from where they’d said goodbye. Steele arrived early, the lunar glow of his arms subdued under a long coat. The smell of chemical runoff and decaying fish was unchanged.
He heard the footsteps first—precise, weighty, almost silent. He turned.
Texas emerged from the shadow of a cargo container, his white armor gleaming under the hazy sun. The repairs were seamless. He moved with the lethal, fluid grace of a predator, no trace of the scrape or limp. He stopped ten feet away, his black lenses impenetrable.
“You have five minutes.,” the synthesized voice stated. It was flat, professional, devoid of any recognizable affect.
The air left Steele’s lungs. It was worse than he’d prepared for. This wasn’t smugness or aloofness. It was the vacuum of deep space. There was no recognition, no buried annoyance, not even the hint of a shared history.
“Right. Five minutes.” Steele forced his CEO persona to the forefront, clasping his hands behind his back. “I need information. Off the books. A person who went missing, likely into the Commission’s… employment system. A trail gone cold over a decade ago.”
Texas’s helmet tilted a fraction. “You have access to standard tracing subroutines through your corporate tier. This is a waste of my contractual time.”
“Standard routines have turned up nothing. I need a deeper look. The kind only someone who navigates the blind spots can provide.”
“And you believe I provide charitable data retrieval for rural administrators?” A hint of something entered the voice now—not memory, but a cold, analytical curiosity. “My risk-reward matrix does not compute. Your five minutes are decreasing.”
Frustration spiked in Steele, hot and sudden. “Damn it, Texas, just—do this. For me.”
The bounty hunter took a single, sharp step forward. “Why?”
The utter sincerity of the question was a knife to the gut. Steele’s carefully prepared arguments crumbled. He just looked at the blank, bug-like lenses, searching for a flicker of the being who had sighed with annoyance in a car, who had fired a desperate, draining shot in a dark mill.
“Because I trust you, even though I shouldn’t,” Steele said, his voice dropping, all strategy evaporating into pure, raw emotion. “And I need your help.”
Something shifted. Texas didn’t move, but the intensity of his silent focus deepened, the lenses seeming to drink in the sight of him—the frustration in Steele’s silver eyes, the set of his jaw, the unguarded sincerity of his words. Data points cascaded: elevated heart rate, slight tension in the pectoral muscles, micro-expressions inconsistent with deception.
This subject was anomalous. Passionate. Illogical.
The ghost of a frequency in the new leg crystal seemed to resonate with a barely-perceptible harmonic.
“Your emotional investment is noted,” Texas said, his tone cooler than ever, a defense against the irregular data stream this man represented. “It is also irrelevant. You are asking me to breach protocol, invite disciplinary action, and provide a service with no feasible compensation. The request is denied.”
He turned to leave, the movement final.
“What if the compensation is me?” Steele heard himself say.
Texas stopped.
“Not as an asset. Not as a mark.” Steele took a step forward, his coat shifting to reveal the soft glow of his arms. “As a consultant. You want efficiency? I build systems that work. You want to understand why places like Maple Creek are statistically messy? I can show you. Help Sandy find her mother, and I’ll give you the one thing your databases can’t: a working model of why people like us are so damn inconvenient.”
Texas slowly turned back. He regarded Steele, this passionate, irrational, compelling variable offering a trade in understanding.
The computational part of his mind screamed that this was a terrible bargain, a labyrinth with no exit.
Another part, a silent sector untouched by the purge, registered the man’s steady gaze and found it… interesting.
“You have a proposal,” Texas said, his voice now holding a faint, unfamiliar edge that wasn’t quite smugness, but something perilously close to intrigue. “This requires a more secure venue. Follow me.”
He turned and began walking, not checking to see if Steele followed. Steele watched the flawless, precise motion of the new leg for a moment, a hollow ache in his chest. Then he pushed it down, and followed the ghost of a memory into the dripping shadows of the docks.