Chapter Three: The Deleted Thirteen Minutes

[COST: 86,414 WORDS. REMAINING: 910,635. TEMPORARY FUNCTION ACQUIRED: PATTERN CLUSTERING.] Pain drove blood from his nose. He attached Qiao Mi's collector to the bracelet and converted the common template into a verifiable neural signature. “Enough evidence?” he asked. “Enough to prove fabrication, not who ordered it. We need the server room.” The room on basement level three contained no servers, only rows of personal objects: children's shoes, wedding rings, medals, faded photographs, each labeled with a patient number. Cloudrest did not create affection from nothing. It extracted genuine feeling from treasured objects, then fitted obedience templates over it. The fuel for false memory was the victims' real lives.