Page 156 of Fractured Devotion
We dig deeper. A timestamp appears that predates even Celeste’s official file creation. Same file string, same neural encoding format.
“They didn’t start the program with her,” I say. “They built the program around her.”
Reyes clicks again, and we find it.
A funding signature, disguised as a shell grant, routing through three firms.
All of them were tied to one investment group:Meridian Kinetics.
I speak the name aloud, and something about it sticks to the back of my teeth. Reyes stiffens.
“You know them?”
He nods firmly. “They’re not just a venture firm. They bankroll strategic psychological operations, behavioral weapons, and artificial empathy models.”
My jaw clenches.
Celeste wasn’t an anomaly.
She was a prototype.
The more I peel back the history behind Celeste’s files, the more it feels like watching a person be erased in slow motion—scrubbed clean, overwritten, and rewritten again.
Reyes reads out another sequence. “This was pulled from the neonatal development records linked to Project Celestia. It includes a hospital signature—Saint Lyra’s, rural district.”
“That’s not even near here,” I murmur. “That’s across the province.”
“Exactly. And there’s no birth certificate in the standard database. Only a provisional tag listed under a temporary custodial number.”
A child without a name.
I feel my stomach turn.
Reyes pushes a file toward me. It’s a scanned case report. “Her biological father died in a car accident when she was barely a year old. A drunk driver. But her mother remarried within eighteen months. That’s where the trail starts to rot.”
My breath slows as I read.
Domestic disturbances, unexplained injuries, and denied therapy recommendations. Then, a psychiatric referral. It’s listed as a research internship for the stepfather, but his credentials are fake.
Celeste’s mother filed a report once. Just once. But it was withdrawn the next day. Three weeks later, she was found dead. Cause of death: overdose. Ruled as a suicide. But Reyes points out the discrepancy before I can.
“She’d never had a prescription history before that day,” he says. “Nothing. It’s planted.”
“And Celeste?”
“Transferred into state psychiatric care under the care of Dr. Marlen Varon, which, by the way, was a pseudonym. The real name? Dr. Felix Rourke.”
The words hit like acid.
“She wasn’t just a survivor of the clinic,” I whisper. “She was bred for it.”
And somehow, she clawed her way out.
But the scariest part isn’t that they buried her origins.
It’s that they kept her close afterward.
They trained her, promoted her, and put her in charge of the very system that dismantled her.
