Thirty-Seven Percent Belongs to Them

He picks it up. Reads it. His expression doesn’t change, but his hand tightens slightly on the paper.
“This will take time,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
He leaves.
It takes eight months.
Vornex does not surrender gracefully. There are counter-filings, delays, a brief suspension of my employment that Prudence gets reversed in three weeks. There are mornings when I sit with my coffee and feel the absence of that background pressure and remind myself what it felt like before I knew it was there.
In the end, the settlement is not a victory by any dramatic measure. Vornex does not admit wrongdoing. The Youth Integration contracts are quietly reclassified as non-compliant with updated augmentation ownership law — a law that, Prudence tells me, exists partly because of the documentation Gideon Thornbury spent two years compiling.
I receive a formal release of the thirty-seven percent.
I receive it in a document. A PDF. No ceremony.
I lose my job at Vornex — technically a mutual separation, technically my choice, technically everything. I have four months of savings and no immediate plan.
But here’s what I have that I didn’t have before:
All of my memory. All of my processing. All of my sleep.
All of me.
I stand at my window on the forty-second floor and look out at the stack district, at the layered light of a thousand units, at the ventilation columns breathing slow white steam into the dark above the city. Somewhere down there, a noodle counter is steaming. Somewhere, a man with a patched jacket is eating alone, or maybe not eating, maybe already gone.
I don’t know what happened to Gideon Thornbury. I hope he’s somewhere with weather.
I count to eleven.
I drink my coffee.

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About the Author

Fred Marlowe — an interstellar economist tracing corporate warfare and sabotage across whole colonies. His emprie is so powerfull he ones sold Jupiters moon by mistake and his accountant even did not notice.

— Fred Marlowe

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Categories: Cyberpunk, SCI-FI

Tags: 10min stories, body autonomy, corporate control, cyberpunk, dystopia, first person, neural augmentation, sci-fi, short story, slow burn

August 8, 2026

10min-stories