He woke screaming.
No sound came out.
The scream lived only inside—a sharp, tearing rupture of consciousness crashing against a frame too small to hold it. Not pain in the usual sense. Worse. The specific horror of a mind that understood precisely what was happening and could do nothing to alter the trajectory.
He tried to breathe.
The lungs answered incorrectly.
Too shallow. Too weak. Air entered in thin, faltering pulls that failed halfway down the throat, as though respiration were a newly acquired skill he had not yet mastered. Muscles fired in erratic bursts. Ribs quivered under skin that registered not as delicate but as incomplete. Not fragile, he corrected himself, clinging to precision even here. Unfinished.
His hands moved—small, involuntary twitches. He raised one into view.
Small. Pale. Skin smooth in the way of erasure rather than youth. No faint scars from lab mishaps. No burn marks from prototype shorts. No calluses where a stylus had dug in during thirty years of revisions. No history at all.
His mind attempted rejection. Overwrite with logic. But every afferent signal converged on the same conclusion, and he had never been the sort of man who discarded inconvenient data.
This body had never signed a contract. Never gripped a soldering iron. Never entered an orbital override sequence. Never sat across from directors who decided the cleanest solution to a crisis was the man presenting the data.
Never lived.
Memory arrived in surges—not linear, not ordered, but fragmented and violent, too vast for the new container.
Glass conference table. Obsidian surface reflecting cold light. The chairwoman's hands flat and still. The room already decided. Dominic Farrell's voice folding ethical compromise into procedural phrasing: "Your recommendations are extreme, Aaron."
Clear water in the glass. The slight refractive bend at the rim that told him the verdict before anyone spoke it.
Then warmth spreading.
Then nothing.
Then this.
He reran the sequence. Habit, not hope. Check models twice. Assumptions three times. Accept outcomes only after every alternative is eliminated.
Every alternative had been eliminated.
Grief arrived late and quietly.
Not for the life lost—he had made terms with that forty stories above the city, watching toxin trace slow patterns across the water's surface like a classified memo. What settled now was colder: the death of the argument. The proposal left unread while men who had never run his numbers dismantled the work.
He had been right.
It had changed nothing.
The grief receded—not gone, merely distanced where it could not disrupt analysis.
Gravity registered incorrectly. Not cinematic disorientation—just subtly wrong, a sensor offset by fractions. Too immediate. Too body-bound rather than environmental. He lay horizontal on a surface that yielded slightly—layered fabric, not composite paneling. The air carried scent: wool, skin, a faint floral note. Organic. Alive in the way sealed environments had not been alive for decades.
He attempted movement again.
Limbs responded in lagged bursts, signals traveling longer neural routes than he remembered programming. Finger flexion returned clumsy, delayed—not impaired, merely novel. Pathways still calibrating.
He recognized the delay. Biological latency.
The engineer in him noted it with detached interest.
Almost interest.
Thoughts reached for language and found the bridge collapsed. Concepts remained intact—orbital economics, governance fragmentation curves, predictive stabilization matrices, collapse mathematics in seven variable sets. All present. All precise.
But the vocabulary to externalize them—the syntax, the output interface—remained inaccessible. Like attempting to execute high-level code on primitive hardware. Processing capacity intact. I/O protocol mismatched.
He understood this with devastating clarity.
The core processor had survived.
The architecture had not.
A sound cut through.
Human. Close. Raw—not the modulated sorrow of corporate memorials, but unguarded, wet, trembling. Private crying that had gone on long enough to outlast relief.
Someone wept.
He forced visual stabilization. Light arrived over-contrasted, edges forming before centers—the way aging optics fought dynamic range. Shapes coalesced slowly.
A face leaned over him.
Pale gold hair falling free. Eyes dark with sustained anguish—not shock, not new grief, but hours-deep exhaustion of the mechanism. The crying that continues because stopping would require deciding to stop.
She spoke.
Syllables reached him empty of denotation—shape without semantics. He tracked phonemes, breath cadence, lip movements—mind still parsing signal even when meaning failed.
One pattern repeated.
A name.
Not his.
She cupped his face—gentle, the specific gentleness reserved for things that might fracture—and repeated it. Closer now, as though volume or proximity could restore comprehension.
It did not.
But his pulse jumped.
Not fear. Not cognition. Something subcortical. Breathing, already erratic, quickened toward her warmth.
He did not know her.
This body did.
That recognition landed heavier than gravity.
He had been dissecting rebirth mechanics since waking—the physics, the discontinuity, the leap from boardroom to this ceiling. Equations demanded mechanism. There was always mechanism. He would locate it.
Her hands against his skin severed the thread.
The issue was not mechanism.
The issue was occupancy.
This body had existed before insertion. It had history here. It had already been held by these hands. Not cognitive memory—nothing in his accessible record—but pre-cognitive imprint. Skin that recognized specific temperature gradients. Nerve endings that responded to touch signature before cortex could veto.
He had not entered a blank slate.
He had entered occupied territory.
Whatever had occupied this body before—whatever unfinished, mostly-instinct thing—had already centered its small universe on this woman's face.
He was inheriting attachments.
Without negotiation. Without opt-out.
She spoke again. The name. Then more—soft, continuous stream. Voice dropped to murmur. Rhythm registered before lexicon: soothing, repetitive. Cadence designed to regulate both speaker and listener.
He attempted response.
Constructed the sentence internally first, as always—complete architecture before transmission.
I am not who you believe I am. Allow me to explain. Give me time to explain everything.
What emerged: thin, high, uncontrolled sound. Not words. Not even approximation.
She made a soft, wordless reply—older than speech—and drew him closer.
Her arms enveloped him. Warm. Structurally secure without force. He did not resist. Motor control remained insufficient for resistance, and the body had already voted independently.
This was not how he had pictured termination.
He had not pictured termination having an afterward at all.
The door opened.
Soft hinge creak—unengineered, human-scale imperfection preserved.
Footsteps. Heavier. More measured than hers.
A second voice—male, lower, roughened by interrupted rest. "How is he?"
She answered without turning. Short sentence. Distress still present but re-registered—contained now that company had arrived.
"You need to sleep," the man said.
"I'm fine."
"You've been in here three hours straight."
Silence. Then, quieter: "He was making sounds earlier. Small ones. I didn't want to leave in case—"
"He's alright." The man's tone carried the effort of reassurance made audible. Not falsehood. Attempt to make statement true through repetition.
Aaron parsed the exchange the way he once parsed boardrooms—reading subtext beneath procedure, fear beneath certainty.
They were afraid.
Not of him.
For him.
The distinction struck differently.
He had spent decades as the dominant variable in any space he entered—feared, respected, contested, contained. Leverage made him matter transactionally.
This was different.
He was small. Incapable of independent survival. And these two feared for him on that basis alone.
The man drew closer. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. Fatigue etched into carriage rather than face. He placed a hand on her shoulder. She leaned into it briefly, then straightened.
"Come to bed," he said. "Just an hour."
"One more hour here. Then I'll come."
A pause.
The man reached down. Large hand—calloused, shaped by actual labor—rested against Aaron's head. Warm. Steady.
No words. Only contact.
Aaron's pulse leveled.
He resented the reliability of it. The way the autonomic system accepted comfort without executive override. Hardware optimized for attachment. Software running foreign protocols.
The man withdrew.
She remained.
Crying had eased. Breathing steadier. She stayed close, one hand maintaining contact—small, constant warmth his nervous system had classified as regulatory necessity. Remove it, and respiration shallowed immediately.
He stopped logging the reflex. Some inputs were not actionable.
He did not know her name. Did not know the man's. Did not know date, location, era—whether his civilization persisted or had become strata.
Nothing.
For a man whose identity rested on knowing—on analysis followed to conclusion, on moral weight of being correct about what mattered—ignorance constituted its own disaster.
He inventoried what remained.
Alive.
Small.
Housed in a body that recognized these people as primary environment.
Mind intact—every equation, every prediction, every final proof delivered over poisoned water.
Time existed.
Duration unknown. But whatever process had delivered him here—physics, anomaly, or terminology yet to be invented—had not invested this much discontinuity for brevity.
He would adapt the hardware.
Recover output language.
Map the world.
Then—when interface bandwidth allowed—he would determine what purpose attached to a second iteration the mathematics of the first had declared statistically null.
She began to hum. Soft. Wordless.
Eyes grew heavy—override impossible.
He was not dying.
He had died.
What commenced now belonged to another category.
He permitted darkness.
This time it carried no finality.