Page 46 of Human Reform
“Every goddamn time,” I muttered, wiping angrily at my tears.“Every time I let someone in, I lose them.”
Tim’s bracelet felt like a lead weight on my wrist, a reminder of everyone I’d ever loved and lost.Now Daxon had joined that list, and it was my fault.Again.
I sprinted back to my private office, my boots echoing on the composite floor.My datapad lay where I’d left it, the screen still unlocked.Of course he’d been able to access it.I’d been too emotional to follow even basic security protocols when I stormed out.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I muttered, scanning through the system logs to see what he’d done.
The timestamp confirmed it.While I’d been outside having my little pity party, Daxon had copied my patch prototype to the portable drive.But as I dug deeper into the logs, my breath caught.
“You clever, reckless bastard,” I whispered.
He’d created a complete neural framework backup and sent it directly to my offline system.The file size was massive—not just core memories or protocol functions but everything that made himhim.Including, hopefully, his memories of me.
Hope fluttered in my chest, a fragile, dangerous thing.I couldn’t trust it, not yet.Not until I knew I could restore what we’d lost.
“Why couldn’t you just wait?”I asked the empty room, my nimble fingers flying over the interface as I examined the backup.“We could have figured this out together.”
The backup was intact, but implementing it would be tricky.For one thing, Daxon would need to agree to it, and this new version of Daxon, this stranger with my lover’s face, had no reason to trust me.
I dropped my head into my hands.“He thought he could do both,” I realized aloud.“Save both the colony and us.”
The worst part was it might have worked if the patch had been better designed.But I’d created it as a prototype, a first attempt—and Daxon, with all his logic and calculation, had gambled everything on something I hadn’t even finished testing.
I straightened my spine and took a deep breath.Self-pity wouldn’t get me anywhere.I had work to do.
“All right, Daxon, if you think you can get rid of me that easily, you’ve got another think coming,” I said as if he could hear me.
My fingers moved across the datapad, analyzing the neural backup and comparing it to the patch prototype.There had to be a way to merge them without causing further damage—to give Daxon back his memories without reintroducing the glitches we were trying to eliminate.
“We didn’t come this far just to lose each other now,” I promised, my voice steadying as determination replaced despair.“I fix things.That’s what I do.And I’m going to fix this if it’s the last thing I do.”
My fingers moved across the datapad in frantic patterns, lines of code blurring together as I pushed through exhaustion.Three hours had passed since Daxon had walked away from me as if I were a stranger.Three hours of desperate coding, searching for a way to bring back the man who’d held me just this morning.
“Come on, you stubborn code,” I muttered, brushing my hair from my face.“Give me something to work with.”
The patch prototype sat innocently on my screen, deceivingly simple in its elegance.Next to it, Daxon’s neural backup pulsed with life—everything that made him the man I fell in love with.His memories.His experiences.His growing emotions.His love for me.
I touched Tim’s bracelet on my wrist.The small chain links caught the artificial light from my monitors, each one representing a connection and a memory.Just like the neural pathways I was trying to rebuild.
“There has to be a way,” I whispered.“A bridge protocol maybe?Something to integrate the backup memories without overriding Daxon’s current neural framework’s security parameters.”
I built a simulation framework, testing various integration methods.Each failed attempt felt like another piece of my heart chipping away.But with each failure came new data and new possibilities.
On my seventh attempt, the simulation stabilized.The memory integration held for a full minute before collapsing.
“Progress,” I said, allowing myself the tiniest smile.
I refined the approach, building a layered implementation protocol that would gradually reintroduce Daxon’s memories without triggering his current neural framework’s defensive measures.The integration would be slow and steady—his memories returning like a slow dripping faucet rather than all at once—but it might work.
“This could actually?—”
“Knock, knock.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin as Sage appeared in my doorway, her tall frame leaning casually against the metal frame.Her blonde ponytail was slightly disheveled, as if she’d been running her hands through it.
“Sorry.Didn’t mean to startle the genius at work,” she said with a wry smile.
I straightened, suddenly aware of how I must have looked—frazzled, exhausted, and desperate.
