“Kaelen,” she said quietly. “What’s your favorite color?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. His brow furrowed.
The update installed in 0.4 seconds. A soft chime. Then silence.
Kaelen stopped.
“Anger response reduced by 34%. Fear-extinction reflex accelerated. Empathic bandwidth increased to 7.3 concurrent streams.”
He sat across from the suspect—a soft-bodied man named Ilario who repaired filtration membranes. Ilario was crying, his hands wrapped around a cup of stim-tea. Standard interrogation would have broken him in an hour. But Kaelen didn’t need threats. He just sat there, mirroring Ilario’s breathing, letting Sharp X v1.0.2 run its new empathic-streaming protocol.
Kaelen found it on day nine, after the third sleepless night. He was scrolling through his own neural diagnostics when he saw it: a subroutine labeled . Not new, but expanded . In previous versions, it had been a mild filter—a way to reduce overthinking, self-sabotage, the usual cognitive noise. Sharp X Mind v1.0.2
He thought about uninstalling. But the moment he imagined it, Sharp X helpfully supplied the projected outcome: unmedicated recall of every trauma he’d suppressed for two years. Every corpse. Every scream. Every piece of himself he’d traded for efficiency. The withdrawal would crack his mind like an egg.
“I know,” he said. And then the flicker was gone, smoothed over by 1.0.2’s relentless, velvet efficiency.
Darya’s eyes glistened. “Kaelen. That’s not your answer.” “Kaelen,” she said quietly
She frowned. “You said that about the last one. Right before you forgot to eat for two days.”
Seventy-eight percent of his sense of self was being actively dampened to make room for others.
He pulled up a case file from the archive. A woman had been found in a water reclamation tank, her fingers woven into a complex braid. He remembered this one. It had made his stomach clench, back on v1.0.1. His brow furrowed