Marcus pointed at the raging inferno on the viewscreen. "That's not the sun, kid. That's your ego. You thought a perfect pilot doesn't make mistakes. So when you made one, your mind ate itself. You didn't shatter because of the radiation. You shattered because you couldn't handle being human ."
"You failed, Kaelen! You flew into a sun and you broke! That's the truth. Now what are you going to do about it?"
The moment he entered, the storm hit.
His apartment was already stripped. The Bureau was efficient. Only one thing remained: a single, outdated physical letter on his magnetic table. No sender ID. Just a name: Kaelen Voss. xpt trainer
He’d expected it. For six months, he’d been a ghost in the system, illegally rewiring the broken minds of veterans the Bureau had discarded. But knowing it was coming didn't stop the hollow ache in his chest.
But Kaelen stood up. He walked past Marcus and faced the agents. "Stand down," he said. His voice carried the weight of a man who had walked through a star and lived. "This man is under my protection. And I'm filing a formal petition to reinstate his credentials. With testimony from a Class-A pilot."
Illegal. Dangerous. If the Bureau caught him running an unauthorized XPT session, it wasn't just revocation—it was neural-prison. They’d lock his consciousness in a one-second loop for a decade. But Marcus had never been able to walk away from a broken mind. Marcus pointed at the raging inferno on the viewscreen
Kaelen looked into the Mirror. He didn't see a failed pilot. He didn't see a prodigy. He saw a young man who had been told he was perfect since birth, and who had believed it. He saw the loneliness of perfection. The terror of the first mistake. The relief, buried under a mountain of panic, that he didn't have to be flawless anymore.
The shard looked up, shocked. No one had ever said that. Everyone had whispered, "It's not your fault. You did your best."
He found the core shard—the original Kaelen, a small, terrified figure curled in the captain's chair, repeating, "I have to be perfect. I have to be perfect." You thought a perfect pilot doesn't make mistakes
He found Kaelen in a private sanatorium, paid for by a wealthy, desperate family. The young man sat in a white room, staring at a wall. His eyes were open, but no one was home. The official diagnosis: "Catastrophic Executive Fragmentation." His sense of self had shattered into a thousand terrified shards.
Kaelen’s mind wasn't just broken. It was a supernova of fear. Marcus found himself standing on the bridge of the quantum-freighter, alarms blaring, the viewscreen a blinding white. A hundred Kaelens ran past him, each one screaming a different terror: "The radiation spike!" "We're going to burn!" "I made a mistake!" "I killed them all!"
The letter wasn't a plea. It was a single sentence: "The Labyrinth is the only way out."
Marcus activated his XPT trainer's final, forbidden tool: The Mirror. It didn't show you what you wanted to see. It showed you what you were.
The screen in Marcus’s neural-link flickered, displaying the cold, official seal of the Federal Bio-Augmentation Bureau.