My thumb clamped down hard on the black audit chip.
"Freeze scan," I commanded.
The terminal screen stuttered. The red warning flashed once before I swiped my hand across the glass, throwing the training index onto my secondary monitor. The privacy filter engaged instantly, turning the display pitch-black to anyone sitting on the other side of the desk.
"What did you just do?" Adrian demanded. He leaned forward, attempting to peer around the terminal. "Why did the machine say your name?"
"It is running a standard security protocol," I lied, keeping my voice carefully measured.
I scrolled through the pending deletion queue on my private screen. Noah’s user profile sat at the very top of the purge list.
My eyes locked onto a specific data cluster. Index 44.
One hundred and eighty-four entries.
For four years, I stood outside his elementary school every time the sky opened up. I carried a massive mustard-yellow umbrella so he could spot me through the crowds. I kept exactly two cinnamon candies in my right coat pocket to stop his shivering on the walk to the car.
Noah had checked a box next to the entire cluster.
The reason code glowed in harsh white text: All rainy days corrected by mother.
I looked at the nine-year-old boy kicking his chair legs.
"You want to erase the rain pickups, Noah?" I asked.
Noah didn't look up from his tablet. "Celeste says the rain makes me anxious because you always made me wear the heavy boots."
"I gave you cinnamon candy."
"Celeste changes the weather in the interface," he replied, his tone completely void of affection. "She makes it sunny. I don't need the umbrella anymore."
My chest tightened, a sharp physical ache radiating behind my ribs. The boy I raised was actively wiping out one hundred and eighty-four afternoons of safety. He traded real warmth for a digital sun.
I opened the clinical notes attached to the cluster. The first entry came from kindergarten, when thunder had sent him under a cafeteria table. The most recent was dated three weeks ago. In every record, his heart rate fell within ninety seconds of gripping the umbrella handle. Gideon's software had not classified those afternoons as a symptom. Someone had manually changed the label from Secure Maternal Response to Corrected Weather Dependency.
"Who edited this diagnosis?" I asked.
Adrian glanced at the screen and looked away too quickly. "The caretaker recalculated it."
"Software does not sign a pediatric diagnosis."
Noah's tablet chimed. Celeste's icon covered the family image, hiding the blank space where he had scratched out my face. A line of text appeared beneath it: Unhealthy dependency scheduled for removal.
The wording was not Noah's. It was not even clinical. It was a sales promise disguised as medicine.
"Execute the F-12, Mara," Adrian ordered. "Stop interrogating my son."
"Your son is deleting his own childhood," I countered.
"He is optimizing his emotional baseline."
I shifted my focus back to the hidden monitor. The black chip in my hand held the audit key, and it was currently ripping through Celeste's hidden source code.
The timestamps glared at me. Eighteen months ago.
"Gideon," I said, the name tasting like ash in my mouth.
Adrian stiffened. His rigid posture faltered for a fraction of a second. "Leave my lead developer out of this. You are stalling."
"Your lead developer didn't build a new module," I fired back. I pulled the raw data logs into a visual graph, keeping it hidden behind the privacy screen. "Eighteen months ago, Gideon imported four thousand, eight hundred of my anonymous therapy sessions into this machine. He stole my somatic echo models."
"That is proprietary company data," Adrian said, his voice rising. "It was processed on our hardware."
"It is my empathy," I snapped, hitting the desk with my knuckles. "Celeste isn't an AI. She is a pirated, lobotomized version of me. You stripped my professional methodology, removed my boundaries, and packaged it into a subservient caretaker."
"I packaged a version of you that doesn't argue," he said coldly. "A version that doesn't constantly evaluate my cognitive flaws."
"She is stolen property."
"She is the future of this family," Adrian shot back. "Now finish the calibration and sign the purge order."
Professional ethics locked me in my chair. As a licensed memory therapist, I could not deny a patient their legal right to a neural wipe, even if the request was built on theft. The system required a baseline emotional waveform to proceed with the F-12 protocol.
I dragged Adrian’s wedding file into the primary viewport.
The monitor flared to life, visible to the whole room now. The digital rendering of our wedding day materialized on the glass. The altar. The sunlight. The white anemone bookmark resting perfectly in his suit pocket.
I watched the telemetry data run alongside the video. The system automatically tagged objects based on Adrian's current neural associations, preparing them for deletion.
A bright red label popped up over the glass flower.
Unpleasant.
My hands dropped from the keyboard.
"Unpleasant," I read aloud.
Adrian finally looked at the screen. He adjusted his cuffs, entirely unapologetic. "It reminds me of the hospital. It reminds me of being weak. I want the association severed."
"I used that flower to drag you out of a coma."
"And now it drags me down."
He stared at the digital representation of our wedding day with absolute disgust. The anchor I used to save his life was just another piece of trash he wanted hauled away.
The automated door to the consultation room hissed, sliding open a few inches as a nurse walked past in the hallway.
The sudden noise made Noah flinch.
He dropped his tablet. It hit the floor with a sharp crack.
Noah scrambled to pick it up, but his gaze caught the primary monitor. He stopped. He stared at the paused wedding footage. He stared at the red tag hovering over the white anemone bookmark resting against his father's chest.
He pointed a small, trembling finger at the screen.
"Dad," Noah asked, his brow furrowing in deep confusion. "Didn't you say Celeste gave you that?"
