Conrad didn’t move. He was staring at his hands. They were old hands. Scarred. They had held dying friends, fired countless shots, built and destroyed entire worlds. And now they had just erased the closest thing to peace he’d ever been offered.
He thought of Maya’s smile. The boy’s black eyes. The guilt over a friend who never existed. All the lies he’d told himself to keep moving forward— I did the right thing. I saved who I could. I’m still human. Flashback 2-FLT
Conrad shoved the door open and stumbled into another memory: the control room of the Titan Explorer , the ship where he’d first encountered the Morphs. Alarms blared. A younger version of himself was frantically typing at a console. Conrad didn’t move
“Don’t press that button,” Conrad shouted. “It triggers the cloning vats!” Scarred
He burst through one and found himself in his childhood bedroom in Neo-Brooklyn, circa 2182. His mother was humming in the kitchen. The smell of synth-pancakes filled the air. A young boy sat on the bed, drawing a picture of a spaceship.
Conrad moved deeper, past a row of empty stasis pods. One of them still had a nameplate: Subject 07 – C. Hart . His blood went cold. He touched the glass, and a holographic log auto-played.