The night air outside the car was crisp, but it did little to steady Marrin's spinning mind. Her vision blurred, the city lights merging into streaks of color as her consciousness faltered. One moment, she was sitting upright, gripping the steering wheel as though it were the anchor of her sanity. The next, she was tumbling—falling through layers of fragmented memory and residual AI instructions, each pulse of code whispering in her mind, echoing like the heartbeat of some invisible machine.
She saw herself—no, multiple selves—overlapping, colliding in a twisted simulation. There was the Marrin who had survived betrayal and car accidents, the Marrin who had painstakingly plotted revenge and seduction, and the Marrin encoded with cold, calculating algorithms, trained to predict outcomes an
