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But I don’t. I can’t. I have to see it through.

The last thing I see is my own face, reflected in the terminal, eyes wide and black, tears and blood painting a mask across my skin.

Then the world goes white.

And I am everywhere, and nowhere, and myself, at last.

The white-out is total. For a few seconds—minutes?—all I know is the speed of thought, the feeling of being disassembled into bits and reassembled in a different order.

Then, as the static fades, something snaps into focus.

I’m not in the node. I’m not even in the Zone. I’m somewhere else, somewhere old and impossible: a place where the light is real, the air is filtered, and my hands don’t shake. A lab—pristine, Authority standard, not a single fingerprint on the glass. I glance down. My coat is new, fresh-pressed, the name badge still sharp-edged at the corners: Dr. Diana K, Junior Research Fellow.

I remember this day.

It’s the first day at the science division. The real one—not the trenches, not the half-burned disaster that came after, but the real, first-class Authority division, up above the radiation line, above the bullshit. The memory unfolds like a time-lapse: my hair longer, less hacked to hell, my skin a little less sallow. I’m young, and I know it, and I don’t care. I’m a bullet fired from the gun of my own ambition.

The head of Research—Dr. Marquez, a woman built out of gristle and sour coffee—walks me down the aisle. “Your credentials are impressive,” she says, but the words are just set dressing. All I really see is the equipment: the banks of humming centrifuges, the sequencers running their silent marathon, the perfect rows of pipettes gleaming under UV.

They give me a corner workstation and a stack of unread journals. The first time I swipe my badge, I feel the shiver of pride all the way to my bones. I’m here. I made it.

It’s not like the Authority documentaries—no white coats, no gentle mentorship. What it is: an endless barrage of data, protocols so dense it takes a week to memorize the safety sequence, and competition so fierce it makes the rats in the breakroom look like pacifists. But I like it. I thrive on it.

The first big project is the radiation field. They tell us it’s to protect the city, to keep the “good” parts of the world safe from the creeping death of the outer zones. I believe them, because I want to. I bury myself in the numbers: dosimetry curves, field decay rates, the quantum logic of containment. I am so fucking smart, so ruthlessly effective, that within six months they move me up to project lead. I design an array that’s more efficient than anything they’ve tried. My reward is three days without sleep and a bonus that might buy me a drink if the bar was still open.

We test it on rats. Then on monkeys. Then on human cell lines, the ones scraped from the backs of prisoners or grown in vats in the sub-basements. The results are perfect, flawless, better than the simulation. The head of Research slaps me on the back so hard I nearly spit out a tooth.

I remember the day we light up the first real field, out on the edge of the Wasteland. The sky is purple with fallout haze, but inside the dome it’s blue as a photograph. Everyone is giddy, drunk on their own success. Even Marquez cracks a smile, says: “You just saved a million lives, Dr. Kang.”

I go back to my dorm that night, strip off the coat, and stare at myself in the mirror. The bags under my eyes are permanent, but for once I don’t care. I look like a fucking hero.

That’s the first memory cycle.

It skips.

Now it’s a year later, maybe two. I’m older—hard to tell how much, but my hands have that dry, chapped look of someone who stopped using moisturizer months ago. The lab is different now: more security, fewer windows, the equipment all covered in redundant layers of plastic and tape. The work is harder, more secret. We’re not just doing containment anymore; we’re doing something else.

They call it “memory mediation.” At first it’s simple: a patch for PTSD, a way to help the soldiers unsee the things they saw out there. I develop the first prototype myself, a tiny chip that slots into the base of the skull, floods the hippocampus with designer enzymes and wipes out the worst of the trauma. The test subjects don’t even scream—they just go blank, eyes wide and new.

The Authority loves it. They triple the funding overnight.

But I can’t let it go. I keep poking at the prototype, keep finding ways to make the chip work faster, last longer, target specific memories instead of just carpet-bombing the mind. I tell myself I’m doing good, that the tech will save lives. That it’ll help the people the Authority left behind.

The next memory is darker.

It’s a conference room, high security, all glass and white noise. The entire Research brass is there—Marquez at the head, Petrov in Authority blue, the whole cabal. I’m not supposed to be in the room. I’m only a year past intern, but they called me up because the prototype is that good.

Petrov does all the talking. “We need to adapt the protocol,” he says, his voice flat, official. “Not just erase. We need to write. Can you do that?”

I say yes before I even think. I can do anything.

They give me a budget, a team, and two floors of the old hospital. I set to work.

What they want is a way to overwrite memory, to turn the chaos of the outer zones into something manageable. They want perfect compliance. They want a population that doesn’t just forget the bad times, but remembers only what Authority wants them to.

I make it work.

I don’t feel guilt, not at first. The numbers are too good. Every week, we process a hundred new test subjects—prisoners, mostly, but sometimes the volunteers who come in thinking it’s just a scan. They leave with a smile, a brand-new memory of a perfect Authority childhood. They join the workforce, or disappear into the city. The cases of PTSD, depression, suicide—gone.