“Consider this your promotion out of podcast squad.”

Ambrose laughed. Sometimes Len could be okay.

“Problem?” his father called up from the floor.

Ambrose shook his head. It was time.

The next six hours passed like a fever dream. Inside the tube, he wasn’t awake and he wasn’t asleep. His body felt suspended within a vast empty space, even though it was lying supine in an area no bigger than half his bed. His mind never shut off completely, but he struggled to hold on to the basics of his life: the contents of his bedroom, the details of his job, his thousands of Friends in Unison. Eventually, he felt so disconnected that he had no choice but to stop thinking. His last thought before his mind blanked was that it was impossible not to think about anything.

When he was completely oblivious, the scalpel beam pierced his skull and brain stem. It tracked his hypothalamus and widened to envelop it completely. The beam sizzled through the membrane and vanished.

Modification.

Ambrose drifted lazily back to the surface of his thoughts. He felt spent and exhausted, like he could sleep for days. But of course he would never sleep again. Panic filled the space carved out by the beam. Something was wrong. He searched for the correct Process Flow to lead him to a comforting outcome, but there was nothing. Something had changed, something he’d never planned for.

The transmission.

It had implanted part of itself before he’d deleted it, and now he was trapped inside the hardcoding. The woman with the accent had more to tell him, something elemental that couldn’t be communicated until he was under the laser, receptors inside out. Something he wouldn’t understand unless he was helpless to deny it and push it out of his mind. Her message was part of him, and he had no choice but to receive it.

Her message was his dream.

The familiar scene flooded back. A baby lay strapped inside a scan-tube. The lid opened and watery eyes focused on the world for the first time. Martin Truax, not a projection but fully human, shone a blue light up and down the tiny, squirming body. Technicians externalized charts.

His dream was a memory.

One of the technicians flipped a palm and the image of a baby appeared. Attached to the baby were dozens of metallic wires. The technician traced one with his finger, and Ambrose felt a prickly tingle in his arm. The wires were attached to his body. They were building him. He was the baby.

The memory was real.

He accepted this with no struggle or hesitation because part of him had always known it. Somehow the woman knew it, too.

He had never been born.

His closest relatives were the lab technicians who had created him.

Suddenly his brain abandoned the transmission, or the procedure abandoned his brain. Either way, the dream memory vanished.

They were pulling him out.

Created for what purpose? He strained to hold on to the transmission, but it was gone. Was that the end of the procedure, or were they panicking and yanking him out before he could learn the whole truth?