Marrin sat in her high-rise office, city lights flickering through the panoramic windows as the night deepened. Her laptop glowed with spreadsheets, market trends, and real-time financial feeds, but her mind was elsewhere. The residual echoes of her past life—those glitches of AI-embedded calculations and half-formed commands—whispered faintly at the edges of her consciousness. She could feel them urging her toward precise, cold, calculated maneuvers, yet something inside resisted.
"I am not a program," she muttered under her breath, staring at the cascading numbers. "I am Marrin Reeves. I am human. I make my own mistakes."
Her hands hovered over the keyboard, hesitating for a moment as if acknowledging the duality within her. The systems, the data, the probabilistic algorithms—these wer
