Chapter 192

CHAPTER 192 RIVER The weight of being proof was heavier than I'd expected. Three days after the examination, Chen's report went live across the Collective medical network. Comprehensive, detailed, and unequivocal in its findings: the framework worked, my autonomy remained intact, and the procedure represented a viable treatment for cascade conditions. Within hours, my private message queue had exploded. Hundreds of requests. Thousands of questions. People in various stages of cascade, their families desperate for hope, medical practitioners wanting protocol details, philosophers demanding I justify my choices, purists calling me a traitor to Collective principles. And through it all, the question that kept appearing in different forms: *Are you still you?* I sat in the common area of the medical wing, my tablet displaying the endless scroll of messages, feeling simultaneously validated and overwhelmed. Dr. Vasquez—Elena, she'd asked me to call her after everything we'd been through—sat