Page 145 of The Atom Between Us

Marquez throws a party the night the first batch cycles through the system without a single relapse. She gets drunk, tells me: “You’ve done something amazing, Diana. History will remember your name.”

History. As if the Authority hadn’t already written it in advance.

The next cycle is even worse.

I’m in the lab late, hunched over a debug console, when I spot the error. It’s a simple parity mismatch, an old bit flipping in the wrong direction. I trace it, step by step, until I see the pattern.

Someone is running a parallel protocol—an admin override, using my own code to erase not just trauma, but entire lifetimes. Political dissidents, failed operatives, anyone who doesn’t fit the script. They’re not fixing people; they’re deleting them.

I go to Marquez. I confront her in the lab, in front of the entire team. I say: “We’re supposed to be helping them. We’re supposed to⁠—”

She cuts me off. “We are. We’re helping the Authority survive.”

I try to leak the logs. I try to send the code outside. Security catches me in less than twelve hours.

The last memory is the worst.

I’m in a small room, the walls padded, the lights so bright I can’t see the ceiling. My arms are restrained. I taste blood in my mouth, and something sweet and chemical underneath. Petrov stands above me, immaculate as ever, holding the first gen memory chip between his thumb and forefinger.

“We can’t kill you, Diana,” he says, almost regretful. “You’re too valuable. But we can make you forget.”

I want to spit in his face, but my mouth is dry, tongue too thick to move. The chip comes down, and the world goes dark.

For a long, perfect second, I am nowhere.

Then I’m awake, in the Zone, hands covered in dirt, a blue flower in my fist and a memory of a life I never lived.

I scream, but no one hears it.

And in the present—in the node, in the core, wherever I really am—I realize: I’ve done this before. Not once, not twice, but hundreds of times. Every time, Authority brings me back, wipes the slate, and lets me loose to see what happens. Every time, I rebel. Every time, I remember.

Every time, I lose.

The memory ends with me, standing alone, stripped of everything, as the node resets itself. My body is gone, but my mind—my mind is still here.

I brace for the next cycle. I know it’s coming. I know I can’t stop it.

But this time, I remember.

This time, I want to see how the story ends.

The next round hits even harder. No gentle boot sequence, no fade-in; just another quantum leap sideways, all sense of time erased.

This time, I know what’s happening. The memories come like a slideshow, but the Authority’s logic can’t keep the cycles clean, so they all overlap, one on top of the other. My brain parses them in parallel.

Cycle 43: The first time I meet Kang, I’m in Authority blue, not black. He’s just a name on a manifest—a recently demoted captain, more muscle than brains, assigned to Security Oversight in the Eastern perimeter. I have to clear him for access to the experimental labs, because the previous Security head “forgot” too much. He’s in the waiting area when I step out, arms crossed, eyes scanning every inch of me with that clinical, predatory precision I’ll grow to love and hate in equal measure.

He stands when I approach, posture so precise I half expect his vertebrae to snap from the tension. “Doctor?” he says, voice clipped. The surprise is mine, because I’ve never met someone like him in the Authority, and certainly not one with his face. It’s a perfect mask of indifference, until he smiles, and then the whole world gets three degrees warmer.

We exchange credentials. The conversation is painfully polite, Authority protocol drilled into every syllable. I hate him on sight.

Later, I realize I only hate how much I want to impress him.

Cycle 19: This time, he’s the interrogator. I’m the one in the cell, hands cuffed behind my back, head full of half-remembered code and the weight of what I’ve done. He comes in, boots echoing on the tile, and sits across from me. No uniform, just Authority civvies. His fingers tap a rhythm on the table: three beats, pause, two beats, repeat.

He doesn’t look at me. Not directly. Instead, he reads the file, lets me sweat, lets me stew in my own terror. When he finally speaks, it’s almost gentle: “You know why you’re here, Diana?”

I say nothing, because I do, and because I know he already knows.