Chapter 14: Buried Memories
The storage room hummed. The portable tuning rig sat on the reinforced worktable, a compact console of brushed metal and pulsing blue interface lights. Wires spilled from its back like clear intestines, terminating in pads the color of fresh bruises.
“This will feel wrong,” Marcus said, peeling the conductive pad from its backing. The gel was cold. “The initial synaptic handshake creates a pressure behind the eyes. Like a headache born in your spine. It passes.”
Erin sat on the edge of the treatment chair, her posture erect. She had shed Jane’s borrowed casual clothes. Now she wore only a simple gray tank top and shorts she’d found in a drawer, utilitarian garments that left her arms and legs bare for the electrode placements. Her skin was smooth, a perfect uninterrupted plane.
“Will it show you the golf?” she asked. Her voice was flat, the Romanian accent muted.
“It’ll show me the structure. The architecture of you.” He pressed the first pad to her temple. The cold made her flinch, a minute contraction of the muscle along her jaw. He worked methodically, placing pads at the base of her skull, the nape of her neck, the column of her spine. Each touch registered as a small shock of temperature against his fingers. Her body was warmer than it should be, a steady, low-grade furnace.
When the last pad was placed, he moved to the console. His fingers called up the holographic diagnostic menu. Green glyphs and scrolling data strings filled the air above the table. He initiated the deep scan.
He expected chaos. The jagged, overlapping waveforms he’d seen in Jane’s early readings, where the Michelle++ template had been a screaming broadcast drowning out the weak civilian signal of the original mind. A brutal overwrite. It had taken weeks of delicate, terrifying adjustments to weave the two into something stable, a tense and fragile coalition that required constant monitoring.
Erin’s neural mapping resolved on the display.
Marcus leaned forward. His breath stopped.
It was clean.Ordered. The foundational pattern—Erin Ortega, the golf coach—was not a damaged ghost in the machine. It was intact, a strong, coherent core signature. Woven through it, intertwined with a gentleness that defied all logic of the NewYou process, was the Huntress template. It was not a layer. It was not a shell. It was a filter, a set of behavioral parameters and physical enhancements laid over Erin’s psyche with a surgical precision Marcus had never seen. The template wasn’t suppressing Erin. It was… blending. Erin’s core identity was already adapting, integrating the template’s capabilities, its instincts. The aggressive hunting protocols were there, but they were being contextualized, shaped by Erin’s own memories, her own desires.
It was not a hammer. It was a snowfall. A delicate, uniform dusting that was already changing state, becoming one with the ground it covered.Marcus stared. The equipment in this private lab was good, but it was for maintenance. For fine-tuning a known quantity. This was a new quantity. He needed spectral analyzers, cortical mappers, the full diagnostic suite of a primary facility. Or a mobile lab.
His mind clicked. The wreck. The mobile lab where this began. Its core systems might be salvageable, might hold logs, the original hack parameters. A way to understand this impossible synthesis.
He terminated the scan. The hologram winked out.
He peeled the pads from Erin’s skin. Each removal made a soft tacky sound. “Get dressed,” he said. His voice had a new weight. “We’re leaving.”
She rubbed the places where the gel left shiny circles. “What did you see?”
“I saw you growing through a costume,” he said. “I need to see the costume’s blueprint. We’re going back to the mobile lab.”
Erin stood. She moved past him into the walk-in closet. Marcus walked from the storage room into the vast, quiet living area. The morning light cut through the distorted windows in sharp, skewed angles. He went to the bedroom door, pushed it open a crack.
The room was a warm, dark cave. Serena lay on her side in the center of the large bed, buried under a duvet. Only the pale gold of her hair was visible against the pillow. Her breathing was deep, regular, heavy with sleep.
Jane sat in a low upholstered chair by the window, a glass of water in her hand. She wore a simple silk slip. The white bandage on her shoulder was a bright square in the dim light. She looked at Marcus. Her movements were slow, fluid. The focused intensity she normally projected was softened, blurred at the edges.
“She’s down hard,” Jane said. Her words had a warm, loose quality. “Erin took a lot. Not enough to cause damage. Just enough to ensure a long, deep reset. She’ll be out for hours.”
Marcus nodded. “We’re going to the crash site. The lab. I need data.”
Jane took a slow sip of water. Her eyes tracked his face. “You didn’t come in last night.” It wasn’t an accusation. It was a curious observation.
“No.”
“Why?”
He held her gaze. The truth was simple. He didn’t try to dress it up. “I don’t like to share you. And when I decide to be with you, I want it to be my choice. Not something I get pulled into. Not something that happens because the air is too thick to think.”
Jane considered this. A smile touched her lips, a real one, without calculation. It made her look younger. “That’s fair.” She let her head fall back against the chair. “The venom makes everything… slippery. My thoughts are warm water. It’s hard to hold onto edges.” She closed her eyes. “Be careful at the lab.”
“I will.”
He turned to go.
“Marcus.”
He looked back.
Her eyes were still closed. “She’s beautiful when she’s not performing, isn’t she? Just Erin.”
He didn’t answer. He closed the door.
Erin was waiting by the main elevator. She had raided Jane’s professional wardrobe.
She wore a severe, single-button blazer in a charcoal so dark it was almost black. It was tailored to within an inch of its life, nipped at a waist that didn’t need emphasizing, flaring just so over her hips. Beneath it was a shell of cream-colored silk. The trousers were wide-legged, falling in a perfect break over a pair of Jane’s sleek black stilettos. She had pulled her voluminous hair back into a severe, low ponytail. The power suit did not diminish her. It weaponized her. She was a corporate siren, a vision of boardroom domination.
She saw his assessment. “I thought it might help if we encounter anyone,” she said. Her voice had adapted, too. The accent was still there, but the cadence was sharper, cooler. “I look like I belong.”
“You look like you own the place,” Marcus said.
The elevator arrived. The doors slid open with a hushed sigh. They stepped inside, and the city, warped and leaning in the tower’s glass, began to fall away beneath them.