The coffee machine in my unit takes eleven seconds to heat.
I know this because I count every morning. Eleven seconds of standing in the blue-grey dark of my studio, listening to the pipes knock inside the wall, watching the coil glow orange behind the scratched plastic panel. Eleven seconds of being almost awake.
My name is Freya Halvorsen. I am twenty-nine years old. I live on the forty-second floor of a residential stack in the Lachlan O’Callaghan District — which is not named after a person, it’s named after a property holding company that bought the naming rights to six city blocks in 2041. I work a data-hygiene shift at Vornex Consumer Solutions, third tier, six days a week.
I think of my life as small and manageable. I think of it as mine.
That’s the first mistake.
The morning it starts, I’m eating reconstituted oat paste and scrolling my Vornex employee dashboard on the wall panel. Routine. The dashboard shows my shift metrics, my compliance score, my wellness index — all green, all fine. I barely read it anymore. It’s wallpaper.
Then I notice a new tab I’ve never seen before.
It’s labeled ASSET LEDGER.
I tap it, assuming it’s some new HR rollout. A form to fill, a policy to acknowledge. The screen loads slowly, which is unusual — Vornex infrastructure is fast, aggressively fast, because lag costs money and they’ll tell you so.
The page that opens is dense. Columns. Line items. Numbers.
At the top, in clean grey sans-serif: HALVORSEN, FREYA M. — ASSET CLASSIFICATION SUMMARY.
I read the first line.
I read it again.
My oat paste goes cold.
The line reads: Neural Augmentation Series 7-C (Vornex-Issued, 2037) — Proprietary Asset, Percentage Retained: 37%.
I got the Series 7-C when I was sixteen. Everyone in my cohort did. It was the Vornex Youth Integration Programme — free neural lace for underprivileged kids in the stack districts, installed at a partner clinic, signed off by a parent or guardian. My mother signed. She thought it was a scholarship.
The lace is in me. Has been for thirteen years. It runs my memory indexing, my reaction calibration, my sleep-cycle regulation. I don’t notice it anymore, the same way I don’t notice my own heartbeat.
I own sixty-three percent of my augmented cognition.
Vornex owns the rest.
I close the tab. I open it again. The numbers don’t change.
I’m late for my shift.
For three days I say nothing. I work my hygiene shift, scrubbing corrupted data strings from Vornex’s consumer behavior archives — deleting the purchase histories of dead people, mostly. It’s quiet work. It suits a person who is trying not to think.
But I’m thinking.
On the fourth day, I go to the Compliance Desk on sub-level two. A woman with a shaved head and a Vornex lanyard looks at my query, looks at me, and types something I can’t see.
“The Asset Ledger is a transparency initiative,” she says. “You were notified at time of augmentation.”
“I was sixteen.”
“Your legal guardian was notified.”
She gives me a pamphlet. The pamphlet is older than I am.
I take the elevator back up. The walls of the elevator are mirrored, and I study my own face: dark circles, dry skin, the faint silver trace of the lace port behind my left ear, almost invisible unless you know to look. I press my fingertip against it.
Thirty-seven percent.
Of what, exactly? Of my processing speed? Of my memory? Of me?
I start asking questions in places I shouldn’t.
There are forums — old, ugly, text-only, routed through anonymizing relays that make everything slow and paranoid. I find threads about the Youth Integration Programme. I find other people from stack districts, other cohorts, other cities. The percentages vary: twenty, forty, in one case sixty-one. The language in the original contracts varies too, but the core clause is consistent.
Vornex retains operational access to proprietary augmentation components for the lifetime of the asset.
Lifetime.
I find a name. Gideon Thornbury. Former Vornex data architect, went dark three years ago. His last post in one of the forums is a single line: They can do more than observe. Ask what the 7-C throttle protocol is.
I ask.
The forum thread is deleted within an hour.
I screenshot it first.
The stranger finds me on a Tuesday.
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