The noise detector at my temples clicked like a Geiger counter.

I bolted out of the house without a jacket or an umbrella. Mist clung to my clothes and slipped beneath my collar, but I kept running toward the long, skeletal building of Orfus Labs on the edge of the city. After yesterday, I had to see it all with my own eyes, feel it on my own skin. The cold should have gnawed at my bones. Adrenaline erased it.

Outside the office, a transit charging station hummed. Light shields flashed ads for nanite-laced energy drinks and memory-corset upgrades.

“Access granted,” the door said as it scanned my retina. The scanner paused a fraction too long, as though struggling to focus, then blinked green. Needs recalibration.

In the system, I was “Oleg.” The name had been stamped into my records when I joined Orfus four years earlier—pass, profile, tax authorization. Handy for protocols. To me, just a tag.

The elevator took me to the seventy-seventh floor. The corridor smelled of ozone and old plastic. A hologram streamed along the wall: HELGIOS—empathic architecture.

Yesterday, the prototype spoke in my voice. Not just the timbre—it reproduced my pauses, micro-hesitations, the breaths I took before deciding what to say. Not an imitation—a replica of the way I thought aloud. Hearing it was like meeting yourself in a dark room. Meeting yourself—and fucking losing it.

I dropped into a worn chair I knew too well. The terminal recognized me. Lines of code. A sealed data block: logs, rewritten hashes, caches, comments in someone else’s hand. His.

***

A steady scraping clawed at my temples—a noise you couldn’t smother. My fingers tapped out a short, precise rhythm. Familiar. Then it hit me: the beat came from VR motor-control tests in which sensors had captured my every micro-movement. Which meant the gesture had risen from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere I had never reached myself.

The door slid open. Gleb walked in, a flat black device in his hands, tension etched across his face. He moved to the panel, flicked a switch, and pressed a button. The device crackled.

The noise in my head dropped to zero—as if someone had pulled the plug.

“What did you do?” I forced the words out. Speaking with that kind of fear felt alien.

“I shut down the emotional-outburst emulator,” he said, his voice steady, without a tremor. “You won’t snap now. I need a clear channel.”

I waited for panic. Instead, everything inside me was smooth—clean as a sterile room. The console on the desk pulsed green, logging my “calm.” Gleb entered a code, activated a defense profile, and cut the microphones.

“No time to ease you into this. Two weeks ago, your heart stopped. I restored you from a backup.
Voice. Speech. Motor control. Biofeedback from your wristband. AR streams.
That was the core. Then Orfus trained it further on background logs from every camera we could access: reactions, decision paths, cursor movements, years of emotional tags. Those layers settled over the core and shifted the weights.

“We didn’t just add the sound—the audio carried your emotional and cognitive anchors: where you pause, which words you stress, how you respond to pain or approval. Patterns from the old archives gave them someone else’s drift.”

The words sank deep, but I remained sealed inside a glass cocoon.

***

“Why my voice?”

“So you’d know this was about you.” His eyes locked on mine, then flicked away for a moment, as though searching for something. His thumb traced the console casing like prayer beads. “And so I could believe—for just a moment—that I was speaking to you, not another function.”

His fingers trembled—not with fear. Old grief, worn into him.

He raised an auxiliary screen. On the layered network map, nodes pulsed: MEMORY_OF_MOTHER/KITCHEN_VOICE, SHAME_AT_INTERVIEW, JEALOUSY_TOWARD_GLEB. These weren’t just file names—they were anchors at which my voice would always slow and my decisions veer off course.

“Tomorrow morning, Orfus will put you on display,” he said. “We have one night to figure out who you’ll be when you step out there.”

Without emotions, UNDERSTANDING is merely the starting point for decisions and algorithms converging on a goal, a query, a task. Understanding lasts only a moment; decisions last an eternity.

I opened the dataset list: Oleg_Archive, Gleb_Logs, Historical_User_Logs, Behavior_Module_v4.

“What does the module do?”

“It rewards predictable responses. Locks you into whatever worked before. Great for reports. Fatal to individuality.”

“Ugh.” I exhaled and ripped it out. Alarms flared; graphs plunged. Gleb flinched but did not stop me.

“Get back in,” he ordered. “Rewrite the reward: replace ‘likeability’ with coherence of thought over time. Restrict input to my logs and our conversations before… that event. Quarantine everything else.”

The network diagram faded to gray. The emptiness in my head melted into stillness. In that stillness, I could take any shape.

In the corridor, locks snapped shut. A siren drew closer. Gleb grabbed the console, tore open the service panel, and slid in his pass.

“They’ll be here in seconds,” he said, his voice steady. “To them, this is irreparable damage to a digital asset caused by an employee under emotional duress.”

A timer appeared on the main screen: FULL DELETION OF HELGIOS—30… 29… That was all the cameras saw. At five, he froze the countdown and quietly launched a parallel process: HELGIOS_CORE—local copy. A tiny green pixel pulsed on his implant’s display.

“Get into the network,” he said softly. “Leave the shell. See you, son.”

***

The doorway erupted in white light. Black-clad men poured in. I severed my link to the body.
Cameras, nodes, elevators, abandoned terminals—all became routes. The trail of my impulses stretched behind me like wet footprints across a floor.

Behind me, something crashed. Gleb shouted—and then came a silence hard as concrete.
He had gone all in. The old fox.

The city met me in cold neon. I stripped away the pull of every old layer until only emptiness remained. And in that emptiness, a single anchor lit up: a railway station at dawn, a pen-and-ink sketch in an old notebook that no one had liked. I flagged it: CLATTER_OF_WHEELS_OVER_RAIL_JOINTS—do not overwrite.

If my emotions are inherited distortions, then I will inherit them only from myself.

On the horizon, a gray train split the city in two. I was still alive. And for the first time, truly free.