Chapter 181

Chapter 181 KAELOS The diplomatic envoy left for Tokyo at dawn. I wasn't on it. Instead, I stood in the Neural Archive—a repository of consciousness patterns from the earliest days of enhancement, before we'd learned how to stabilize anything, when every breakthrough came with a body count. The Archive was underground, temperature-controlled, its walls lined with crystalline storage matrices that glowed faintly in the dim light. I came here when I needed to remember why we'd built the scaffolds in the first place. "Accessing file seven-seven-three," I said to the archive interface. "Designation: Marcus Chen, first-generation enhanced, neural collapse event." The matrix nearest me brightened, and data flooded my visual field. But it wasn't just data—it was memory, experience, the last coherent thoughts of a man whose consciousness had unraveled like thread pulled from fabric. *I can see everything. Too much. The boundaries are gone. Where do I end? Where do others begin? I'm everyone. I