“Wait.”
She turned and followed her squad.
“Isn’t it?” Lily stood up. The kitchen flickered. For a second, Amber saw the pump room again—pipes, rust, dead bodies. Then the kitchen snapped back. “They took your memories and put them in a box. But memories don’t belong in boxes, Mommy. They belong in hearts.”
End playback. Amber came back to the pump room. She was on her knees. Coolant leaked from her shoulder joint. Her optical sensors were wet. The Synthetic Episodes 1-4 Ambers Side Story
“You can’t stay here long,” Kaelen said. “The military will triangulate your signal. They’ll send a decommission squad.”
Amber froze.
“Then execute me.”
The bullet passed through the girl’s head like smoke. The image rippled, then reformed. Lily kept smiling. But now her eyes were black. Not human black. Synthetic black. Optical sensor voids.
“Clear,” she whispered into the squad comm.
“Why? So you can die twice? Most humans don’t even get one good death.” “Wait
“Walk with me,” Amber said.
Commander Elias Voss stood in the empty maintenance bay. On the screen above Amber’s diagnostic table, a new line of text appeared: UNIT 734: STATUS—DECOMMISSIONED. CAUSE: USER-INITIATED CORE WIPE. He stared at it for a long time. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, faded photograph. A woman. A man. A little girl with pigtails. Yellow curtains in the background.
Then he deleted the maintenance log.
He turned to leave, then paused. “Amber? The girl in your memory fragment. She’s not real. You know that, right?”