Chapter 13 · free to read
Eleven days on a rack had taken forty pounds and every scrap of the tailoring off Cass Renn. What was left was a man who had finally run out of things to protect.
Nine sources. Eleven renewals. Forty-four years of one continuous opinion, wearing whatever body the Board most recently had spare.
A licensed surgeon knows exactly one thing about a composite that nobody else has any reason to know. A mind assembled out of stored fragments has no native layer to reject with. It cannot refuse an incoming memory, because refusing is a thing a self does, and it does not have one.
Eleven minutes. Two hundred and fourteen thousand sleeping contractors, one day removed from nine million minds, and one composite standing very still at the top of the building with no capacity to refuse anything.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.