Lena Voss stood in the doorway of the Phase 0 lab and did not look surprised.
She was wearing a wool coat over what appeared to be sleepwear black silk, visible at the collar and hem, the intimate uniform of a woman who had been woken by an alert and had dressed only for the forty-minute drive from her townhouse in Back Bay. She held a small medical case in her left hand the kind of hard-shell case that physicians use for house calls, compact, latched, designed to contain things that are either precious or dangerous.
Her hair was down. Maren had never seen Lena with her hair down. In every board meeting, every corridor conversation, every carefully staged lunch, Lena's hair had been pinned or clipped or arranged in the sleek geometry of a woman who treated appearance as a professional tool. Down, it was longer than Maren expected dark, streaked with grey at the temples, softening her face in a way that made her look less corporate and more human, which was somehow worse.
"I hoped you'd be smarter than this, Maren."
Her voice was calm. Not angry disappointed, in the way that parents are disappointed when children confirm the precise failure they'd predicted. She stepped into the room. The door closed behind her with the soft pneumatic hiss of a system designed to keep sound in and air out.
She did not call security.
Henrik was frozen beside the terminal. His hand was on the desk, not far from the USB drive the progress bar still crawling, 84%, 85%, the blue line advancing with the agonizing patience of something that didn't know they were out of time.
Maren turned to face Lena. She kept her body between Lena and the terminal. A small, instinctive act not strategic but biological, the positioning of a body between a threat and the thing it was protecting.
"How did you know?" Maren asked.
"Henrik's card. I've been monitoring it since his termination." Lena set the medical case on the nearest bed Bed 3, the one Maren's body had tracked when they entered and unlatched it with the practiced ease of someone who had opened it many times. "The firmware reset is a known vulnerability. We've kept it unfixed on purpose. It's more useful as a canary than a door."
A trap. Not for them specifically a standing trap, a trigger that would fire if anyone tried to use the twelve-minute window. Maren had walked into it. She had walked into it because she'd trusted Henrik's analysis, and Henrik's analysis had been correct the vulnerability was real but the vulnerability was also a product, a tool, another layer of surveillance dressed up as an oversight.
Sollen didn't have bugs. Sollen had features.
"Sit down, Maren."
"No."
"Please."
The please was worse than a command. It was intimate. It carried the weight of two years of lunches and drinks and conversations about Alma and science and the future two years of manufactured closeness that now had the specific, cold architecture of grooming.
Lena sat on Bed 3. She folded her coat over her lap and placed her hands on top of it and looked at Maren with an expression of such convincing gentleness that Maren, even now, even with the 6 Hz protocols and the stolen memories and M-1 and the aquarium and Dolores's grief all stacked in her mind like evidence at a trial, felt the pull of it.
That was Lena's power. Not force. Not intimidation. Warmth. The warmth of a woman who made you feel seen and safe and valued, who remembered your daughter's favorite animal and your grandmother's language, who made you believe that the glass of water she offered was kindness rather than containment.
"I'm not going to call security," Lena said. "I'm not going to threaten you. I want to talk."
"Talk."
"What you've found the Phase 0 data, the memory protocols I know it looks bad."
"It is bad."
"It looks bad. But you're seeing it out of context. You're seeing the rough draft of something that could change the world." Lena's voice had shifted not louder, not harder, but deeper. She was speaking now with the register she reserved for the biggest rooms, the most important pitches. She was selling. "Think about what we've built, Maren. Not just a sleep drug. A memory interface. A technology that can write directly to the hippocampus during a safe, drug-mediated window. Think about what that means."
"I know what it means."
"Do you? Think bigger. PTSD not managed, not medicated, erased. Childhood trauma removed, replaced with stable, healthy baselines. Phobias. Addiction. The neurological damage of abuse. Every broken mind, every shattered life repairable. Writeable. Fixable." Her eyes were bright. Not with madness with conviction. The most dangerous kind. "We're not the villains, Maren. We're the draft before the clean copy."
87%... 89%...
Maren watched the progress bar from the corner of her eye. Lena was facing away from the terminal whether intentionally or not, the angle of the bed positioned her toward Maren, not the screen. Henrik was still frozen, his eyes moving between the two women with the trapped focus of a man watching a conversation that would determine his future.
"You tested this on fourteen people without consent," Maren said.
"Phase 0 was a proof of concept. The subjects were volunteers Sollen employees who signed up for a sleep study. The memory work was... an extension of the protocol. Unauthorized, I admit. But not harmful. None of the Phase 0 subjects suffered lasting damage."
"Dolores Aguilar remembers her husband's funeral. Her husband is alive."
A flicker. Small a muscle contraction beside Lena's left eye, too fast for anyone who wasn't trained in microexpression analysis. Maren was trained.
"Side effects," Lena said. "Regrettable. But manageable. The current protocol is significantly refined the compression algorithms are better, the fidelity controls are tighter. The anomalies in Phase III are edge cases. In another year, with proper iteration, we'll have a system that produces zero artifacts."
"You're talking about this like it's software."
"It is software, Maren. That's what your research showed. Memory is software. The brain is hardware. The drug is the operating system. And the 6 Hz signal is the update." She leaned forward. "You built this. Your research. Your hippocampal consolidation framework. Your publication gave us the blueprint. I didn't steal it. I realized it."
"You realized it on my brain. Without asking."
Lena paused. A real pause this time the kind that happens when someone encounters a fact they can't reframe.
"Yes," she said. "I did."
91%... 93%...
"Why me?"
Lena looked at her. The gentleness in her expression was still there, but something else was visible beneath it now a harder structure, like rebar beneath plaster. The architecture of a decision made long ago and never revisited.
"Because you were the best. Your neural patterns the way your brain encodes and consolidates memory are extraordinary. I've scanned thousands of subjects over my career. Nobody's architecture is as clean, as organized, as efficient as yours. You're the ideal donor, Maren. Your memories are the most stable, the most precisely encoded, the most suitable for template generation. I chose you because your mind is a masterpiece."
She said this with what sounded like admiration. And the horror of it the specific, curdling horror was that Maren could hear the admiration and believe it. Lena admired her brain the way an art thief admires the painting.
"You used me as raw material."
"I used your research as a foundation and your neural architecture as a starting point. Everything great requires a prototype." Lena opened the medical case. Inside, nestled in foam, was a syringe filled, capped, clinical. The liquid inside was clear, faintly amber. "This is a refined dose. One administration. It won't erase your memories of tonight that's not how it works anymore. But it will... edit them. Soften the edges. You'll remember coming here, but the urgency will be gone. The fear will be gone. You'll remember feeling reassured. You'll go home and sleep really sleep, for the first time in weeks and in the morning, this will feel like a bad night that resolved itself."
She held the syringe the way a doctor would between thumb and forefinger, the needle pointing down, the grip of a person trained in care. Not a weapon. A treatment. An offer of relief from a woman who had spent two years studying exactly which buttons to press in Maren's psychological dashboard: her need for certainty, her need for sleep, her need to be told that everything was going to be okay.
"One more dose," Lena said, "and you'll remember this night exactly the way I need you to."
95%...