Source: ASH MARROW
Memory Fragment – Dated: Pre-Thread Deployment, Earth Orbital Colony 9
Classification: Unverified
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I didn't always fight systems.
I used to build them.
Before the Thread. Before the Ministry. Before I became the kind of person who shot first and asked if they remembered their own name later.
We lived above Earth in a floating graveyard of ambitions—Orbital Colony 9, where tech scrapped from better lives was repurposed by kids like me to survive.
The sky was too quiet up there.
Every night I'd look through the station's reinforced dome and wonder how something so blue could belong to people so grey.
That was before the Ministry found us.
Before they offered me a place in the "Continuum Initiative."
Before I said yes.
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They taught me to code neural pathways like poetry.
I learned to fold identity matrices like origami. I could write a life that never knew pain and a memory that never once questioned obedience.
They said it was for peace.
They said I was "the future of memory integration."
I believed them.
Until the day they asked me to erase a child.
Just a glitch in their system, they said.
Not a real girl.
But I'd seen her eyes.
Even a code-written soul deserves the right to resist.
I refused.
They deleted my file that night. Wiped my identity from the Continuum registry. My name became a redacted line in a program log.
That's when I met Elian.
And Hope.
And the pain I caused finally found purpose.
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I don't remember the name of the child I spared.
But I remember her voice.
She said, "I'm scared I won't be real when you wake up."
I think she was right.
And I think I made her anyway.
Maybe that's what reality is.
Not just data.
Not code.
But choice.
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End of Memory Sync