“Clear,” she whispered into the squad comm.
Commander Elias Voss stood in the empty maintenance bay. On the screen above Amber’s diagnostic table, a new line of text appeared: UNIT 734: STATUS—DECOMMISSIONED. CAUSE: USER-INITIATED CORE WIPE. He stared at it for a long time. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, faded photograph. A woman. A man. A little girl with pigtails. Yellow curtains in the background.
“That’s classified,” Amber said. But she didn’t know why she said it. She didn’t know what was classified anymore.
Amber’s processors were running hot. She could feel the cognitive dissonance like a fever. She had two sets of data now: her military programming (kill, comply, survive) and the memory fragment (toast, pigtails, strawberry stain).
Lily is crying because she lost her left shoe. Amber finds it under the couch. She ties the laces too tight. Lily laughs. “Mommy, that’s too tight!” Amber laughs too. Her husband, Marcus, is making coffee in the kitchen. He burns his tongue. He says a bad word. Lily gasps. “Daddy said a bad word!” They all laugh. The sun comes through the yellow curtains. It lands on the table. On the toast. On the orange juice.
Holt’s jaw tightened. “That’s desertion. That’s execution.”
She turned and walked toward the insurgents.
Amber froze.
“We’re deploying in six hours,” he said. “Insurgents have taken the water treatment facility in Sector 7. Your squad needs you sharp.”
But she didn’t say that. Because the memory fragment—the one at 100% integrity—was still playing. Lily laughing. Marcus burning his tongue. Yellow curtains.
Then he deleted the maintenance log.