The man turned to him, and like a feral beast, he rushed at Ray.

Ray dodged to the side, his movements fluid and economical. He took a stance, his gaze flickering left and right. The alley was empty. No witnesses.

The man charged again, moving with a surprising, twitchy speed.

He has a Z-Dragger installed, Ray concluded, as a blade sliced through the air where his head had been a fraction of a second before. But it's a much lower quality model than mine.

Ray saw his opening. He grabbed the man's right arm and sent a strong electric current from his Zapper Arm into the limb. The prosthetic servos buzzed and grinded as they short-circuited. The man howled, lifting his other arm to try and bring his second blade to bear.

Ray let go and jumped back, creating distance.

The man leaned forward, blood now dripping from his eyes, nose, and ears.

His nervous system is overloading, Ray analyzed with a cold, detached clarity. The man then pitched forward and spewed a torrent of blood onto the ground before collapsing into the puddle he had just created. His vitals ceased.

Ray walked to the body and rifled through the pockets of the man's ragged, blood-covered pants. He found a single, crumpled photo. He zoomed in. It showed the man, younger and without the desperate, feral look in his eyes, sitting in a small, cramped apartment, cracks visible along the walls. With him were two kids—a boy who looked to be about thirteen, and a young girl, slightly older, both smiling at the camera.

He glanced from the photo to the dead man, then dragged the body behind a large trash container, hiding it from view. He looked up at the broken window the man had jumped from. Ray pulled up his hood and neck gaiter.

He made his way inside the building easily, the locks on the abandoned structure no match for his nanites. As he reached the second floor, it became apparent that Ray had not been the first person the man had attacked.

He glanced at the carnage inside. Bodies. At least ten of them, all brutally killed, covered in vicious blade wounds, their eyes still wide with the final, terrible shock of their own deaths. Medical equipment was strewn about, some of it still covered in blood. In the center of the room was a modding chair, its surface stained dark. A woman was slumped in it, her head sliced vertically in half. She had likely been the first one attacked.

A reapers' nest, Ray concluded. He moved to a large, industrial refrigerator on the side of the room. He dissolved its lock and opened it. Inside, at least a dozen human organs were preserved in transparent, sterile bags.

As he was about to leave, his glance landed on a datapad, its screen half-covered in blood. On it, a video was playing on a loop. A pit fight. The man who had just attacked him was fighting another man, both using the same kind of low-quality, mismatched mods. It looked like two savage beasts tearing each other apart.

This is a Red Obsidian pit fight, Ray concluded, the memories he'd absorbed from Red providing the grim context.

He accessed the rest of the data on the pad and found a series of encrypted messages. It was about a man named "Sharpy." The sender was telling someone that Sharpy wouldn't last long, that his body seemed to be rejecting the new mods. But either way, they had had their fun with him. And the pay from his kids was a good bonus.

Ray glanced at the message for a few seconds, the pieces falling into place. He tossed the datapad aside and walked to one of the bodies, one whose head was still intact. He placed his hand on the dead man's forehead.

The memories of the reaper flowed into him. He saw them bursting into the man's small apartment, kidnapping him and his two children. He saw them sell the kids to a man. He stood by a sleek, black corporate vehicle. The man's face was a doll-like mask of smooth, unblemished synth-skin, his features sculpted into an unsettling, artificial perfection. His hair was like spun black glass, cut with a geometric precision no human barber could achieve. His eyes were deep, black optics that seemed to absorb the light, with no visible pupils. He wore a high-collared, stark white tunic made from a self-cleaning, nano-weave fabric, its perfect surface unmarred by a single crease or speck of dust. But on the pristine white of his cuffs, Ray saw a single, small, almost invisible speck of dried blood.

Sharpy—his real name was Ralph—was on the modding chair. They cut his legs and arms out. Without numbing. They drugged the living fuck out of him, scrambled his brain, and threw him in the pit fight.

He walked out of the building and back into the alley where he had hidden Ralph's body. He placed his hand on him, and his nanites crawled over his body, consuming him.

He could smell the cheap liquor on their breath. He felt the phantom, agonizing pain of the saw biting into his own limbs, the disorienting, chemical haze of the drugs they pumped into him. And when he saw his children being hauled away, he felt Ralph's overwhelming, paternal terror—a feeling so pure and so powerful it almost shattered his own cold, detached consciousness. A life of struggle. A factory worker. His kids smiling, Max and Selena. The reapers. The pain. The drugs. The brain surgery. The fight with Ray. Death.

Ray stood, the memories of a dead man now a part of him. He felt the weight of another man's tragedy settle in his soul, a cold, heavy stone amongst the others.

The door hissed shut, the sound of the lock engaging a final, metallic punctuation mark on Ray's departure. The silence he left behind was a physical presence, a crushing weight that filled the small, sunlit apartment.

Stolen novel; please report.

For a long moment, neither Lina nor Alyna moved. They stood frozen, their hands still outstretched from their failed attempt to hold him back. The comforting aroma of real coffee and the remnants of their happy, normal breakfast now seemed like a cruel, mocking joke.

Alyna rushed to the door and into the hallway. She desperately glanced around, but there was nothing. He was gone. She stood there for a few moments, staring at nothing, her fists clenched. She quickly wiped her tears and rushed back inside the apartment.

A choked sob escaped her lips, and she stumbled back to the couch, collapsing into its cushions, her body wracked with a grief so profound it was silent. She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them as if trying to hold herself together.

Lina watched her, her own face a mask of weary sorrow. She slowly wheeled herself over to the couch, her movements quiet and deliberate. She didn't speak. She just rested a frail, trembling hand on Alyna's shaking shoulder, a silent, steadying presence in the storm of the young woman's grief.

"How could he just leave?" Alyna finally whispered, her voice thick with tears and a burgeoning, righteous anger. "After everything he said… after everything I said… how could he just walk away?"

Lina sighed, a sound heavy with the weight of a lifetime of similar pains. "Because he loves us," she said simply, her voice soft but clear.

"This isn't love!" Alyna shot back, lifting her tear-streaked face. "This is… this is giving up! He's letting himself believe he's just a ghost!"

Lina's gaze drifted to the clean, ungrimed window, looking out at the glittering, distant towers, their corporate logos burning like cold stars. "They all think the armor will keep the world out," she murmured. "They never realize it just traps them inside." She turned her steady, sorrowful eyes back to the distraught young woman. "Alyna… you are a genius. You see the world in code, in systems, in logic. You need to listen to the logic of what he said. Not just the pain."

Alyna looked at her, confused, her anger momentarily quelled by Lina's unnerving calm.

"He told us the truth," Lina continued gently. "He was shot. He died. And something else, something new, woke up in his place." She paused, her words careful, precise.

"Just like the Ship of Theseus," Alyna whispered.

"It's a good metaphor. But what if we're asking the wrong question? It's not about whether it's still the same ship. It's about what happens when the original ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and the ocean itself rises up, takes on the perfect memory of the ship, and pretends to be the vessel, just so the passengers don't have to drown."

The strange, terrifying metaphor hung in the air. Alyna stared at her, her sobs quieting, her mind racing to process the horrifying implication.

"The being that just walked out that door," Lina said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper, "it has all of Ray's memories. It has his face. And, from what I can see, it has his heart, his fierce, stubborn, self-sacrificing love for us. It is a perfect, inorganic simulacrum of my son."

"So… so you believe him?" Alyna asked, her voice small, fragile. "You believe Ray is… gone?"

Lina finally looked down, a single tear tracing a path down her cheek. She nodded slowly. "I saw it in his eyes, Alyna. Just now. When he looked at me, I didn't just see my son. I saw the ghosts of all the other men I have loved. My father… he was a monster on the streets, but at home, his hands, calloused and scarred from a hundred street brawls, were always so gentle when he'd fix my favorite toy. Then his father, James… doing things he never told me about, all 'for our own good.' And now him, my son. They all become monsters to protect their family, and they think we can't see them trapped inside."

She took Alyna's hand, her grip surprisingly strong. "The being that is here now is walking that same path. It has decided that its monstrous nature is a threat to our safety, and so its cold, perfect logic has dictated that it must remove itself from the equation. It is leaving… because that is the most logical way it knows how to protect us."

Alyna broke down then, a fresh wave of grief washing over her.

Lina pulled her into a hug, like a mother comforting a daughter, two women left behind in the wreckage of a tragedy they didn't ask for.

"But he's wrong," Lina whispered fiercely into Alyna's hair. "My father was wrong. James was wrong. And Ray… Ray is wrong. Their love isn't a liability. It's their anchor. And without it, they drift into the darkness and never come back."

She pulled back, her eyes blazing with a sudden, powerful resolve. "We are not going to let that happen. We are not going to lose him."

Alyna wiped her tears, her sapphire eyes hardening with a new, fierce resolve. The grief was still there, a sharp ache in her chest, but now it was forged into something else. Something sharper. Something dangerous.

"You're right," she said, her voice no longer fragile, but sharp with the intellect of a netstrider. "His logic is flawed. His 'self-sacrifice' is an inefficient solution based on incomplete data. If he's a machine now... then he can be reprogrammed. And I'm the one who's going to write the code."

The truth was out. The monster was revealed. And in the quiet, sunlit apartment, two women, bound by a shared love for a man who was no longer a man, began to formulate a plan.

The rain fell in a steady, greasy drizzle, washing the grime of Virelia into the gutters. It was an hour after he had consumed Ralph, but the ghost of the man's final, desperate moments still clung to him like the city's oppressive humidity. Ray sat with his back against the cold, wet brick of a forgotten alleyway, hidden from the indifferent, passing headlights. The city's neon glow painted shifting, restless patterns on the wet pavement, the colors bleeding into one another like a corrupted data file.

The only sounds were the steady, rhythmic drip of polluted water from a rusted pipe overhead and the distant, mournful wail of a city siren.

He was meditating, or trying to. He was attempting to find that quiet, internal space the monk had shown him, a stillness behind the storm. But tonight, the storm was too strong.

In his hand, he held the crumpled, water-stained photo he had taken from Ralph's pocket. He stared at the smiling faces of the two children, Max and Selena, their images already starting to fade, their happiness a fragile, ghostly echo.

His logical processors, the cold, efficient part of him that was now the core of his being, screamed at him.

This is a waste of time and resources, it calculated. They are not your children. You have no biological or social connection to them. This mission has a zero-percent probability of personal gain and a high probability of extreme risk.

He remembered Monica's words on the highway, her voice a mixture of teasing and genuine insight. "That's what I like about you, Ray. You are always so careful, always running the numbers. You want a logical reason for everything."

He looked at the photo, at the smiling faces, and knew she was right. But he also knew, with a certainty that defied all his internal calculations, that there was no logical reason here.

A memory that wasn't his own surfaced, sharp and painfully clear. Ralph, standing in a cramped, overheated kitchen, a cheap cake with a single, flickering candle on the counter. Selena, turning sixteen, her eyes shining with a joy so pure it was almost painful to witness. Ralph had worked two double shifts at the factory, his body aching, just to afford that stupid, sugary cake. He had done it just to see her smile.

Ray felt a phantom ache in his own chest, a hollow echo of Ralph's paternal love. His hand, the one not holding the photo, clenched into a fist, a gesture of protective anger that wasn't his own, but Ralph's. It was a ghost, wrapping its tendrils around his own cold, digital soul.

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