The man in the hospital room had no name.
I stood in the doorway, looking at the gaunt figure in the bed. His eyes were closed, his face pale. The machines around him beeped in a steady rhythm, monitoring his vital signs. He'd been like this for three weeks—catatonic, unresponsive, his mind lost somewhere in the network.
"He was one of the first," Freya said, appearing beside me. "One of the people the network reached out to during the expansion. But his mind couldn't handle it. It overloaded."
"Can we help him?" I asked.
Freya shook her head. "I don't know. His consciousness is fragmented. Spread across the network. I've been trying to piece it back together, but it's not working."
I walked closer to the bed, the network pulsing in the back of my mind. I could feel the man's presence
