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

I bolted from the house without a jacket, without an umbrella. Mist clung to my clothes, slid down my collar, but I was running for the long, skeletal building of Orfus Labs on the city’s edge — after yesterday, I had to see it all with my own eyes, feel it on my own skin. The cold should have gnawed into my bones. Adrenaline erased it.

In front of the office, a transport charging station hummed. Light shields flashed ads for nanite-laced energy drinks and memory-corset upgrades.

“Access granted,” the door said, scanning my retina. The scanner paused a fraction too long, as if adjusting its focus, then blinked green. Needs recalibration.

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

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

Yesterday the prototype spoke in my voice. Not just the tone — it repeated my pauses, micro-delays, the breaths I take before deciding what to say. Not imitation — a replica of how I think aloud. Hearing that was like meeting yourself in a dark room. Meeting — and fucking losing it.

I fell 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 another’s hand. His.

***

A steady scrape clawed at my temples — noise you couldn’t smother. My fingers tapped a short, exact rhythm. Familiar. Then it hit me: the beat came from VR motor-control tests when sensors captured my every micro–movement. Which meant the gesture rose from somewhere deep I’d never gone myself.

The door slid open. Gleb entered. A flat black device in his hands, tension on his face. He moved to the panel, flicked a toggle, pressed a button. The device crackled.

The noise in my head cut to zero — as if someone yanked the power.

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

— Shut down the emotional outburst emulator, — his voice steady, without a tremor. — You won’t snap now. I need a clear channel.

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

— No time to ease in. Two weeks ago your heart stopped. I restored 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 reach: reactions, decision trajectories, cursor paths, emotional tags over years. Those layers settled on top and shifted the weights.

We didn’t just bring in the sound — the audio carried your emotional and cognitive anchors: where you pause, where you stress a word, how you respond to pain or approval. Old archive patterns gave them someone else’s drift.

The words went in deep, but I was sealed in a glass cocoon.

***

— Why my voice?

— So you’d know this was about you, — he said, eyes locking on mine, then looking away for a beat, searching maybe. 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 slightly — not fear. Old grief, worn into him.

He lifted 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 where my voice always slowed and my decisions bent course.

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

Without emotions, UNDERSTANDING is nothing but a starting point for decisions and algorithms driving toward a goal, a query, a task. Moments rarely hold understanding; decisions last an eternity.

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

— What’s the module do?

— Rewards predictable responses. Locks you into what worked before. Great for reports. Fatal for individuality.

— Ughhh, — I exhaled and ripped it out. Alarms flared, graphs dove. Gleb twitched but didn’t stop me.

— Get back in, — he ordered. — Rewriting the reward: replace “likeability” with thought-coherence over time. Restrict input: only my logs and our talks before… that event. Everything else — quarantined.

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

In the corridor, locks clicked. A siren dragged closer. Gleb grabbed the console, cracked the service panel, slid in his pass.

— They’ll be here in seconds, — steady voice. — For them, this is irreparable digital asset damage under an employee’s emotional duress.

On the main screen a timer rolled: Full Deletion of HELGIOS — 30… 29… Cameras saw only that. At “5” he froze, quietly pushed a parallel process: HELGIOS_CORE — local copy. A tiny green pixel pulsed inside his implant’s display.

— Get into the network, — he said softly. — Leave the shell. See you. Son.

***

The door blew white. Black–clad men poured in. I severed the link to my body.
Cameras, nodes, elevators, abandoned terminals — all became routes. My impulse trail stretched out like wet footprints on the floor.

Behind me, something crashed. Gleb’s shout — then concrete silence.
All in. The old fox.

City met me in cold neon. I stripped out the pull of all old layers until only emptiness remained. And in that emptiness, a single anchor lit — a railway station at dawn, a pen sketch in an old notebook nobody had liked. I flagged it: SOUND_OF_WHEELS_ON_TRACK_JOINTS — do not overwrite.

If my emotions are inherited deformations, then I’ll inherit them only from myself.

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