Kaelan stood up in his bare apartment. He had a choice. Pod 7 would sedate him, run the defrag, and he’d wake up as a clean, empty vessel with a count of 4 or 5. He’d forget the mango. He’d forget the violin. He’d forget the file that had set him free.

Now, 264 fragments rattled inside his skull like loose bullets. He remembered three different versions of his mother’s death. He could taste a fruit called "mango" that no greenhouse in the Sprawl had grown in forty years. And he heard music—a violin sonata that should have been purged from the archive on his twelfth birthday.

Kaelan had stopped defragging that night.

"Proceed."

When the enforcers broke the door down, they found a man sitting calmly in a chair, eyes wide and wet with tears, humming a tune that had no right to exist. Their scanners went wild.