His processors stopped. He was glad, in that moment, that his nanite body was incapable of vomiting. The video showed Arty, grinning like a maniac, firing turds from a modified t-shirt launcher at a squadron of flying drones. It was grotesque. It was absurd. It was, somehow, far, far worse than the picture of him in pink bunny ears tied to a bed.

"Arty just sent the video," Synth said, his voice flat, unable to process the sheer chaos he had just witnessed. "Yeah." He made a new subroutine: schedule a full cleanse after every interaction with Arty.

He glanced up. Selena was staring daggers at him, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The prank had landed badly.

"Sorry. I may have gone too far." He held up a hand, palm open as a gesture of peace.

"I was only telling the truth," she shot back, turning away to get a glass of water, her movements stiff. "I didn't know you had such a fragile ego."

"I thought it would be funny," Synth admitted, picking up his datapad from the floor. He swiped the screen, and a video began to play—a recording from his own perspective of Selena screaming and launching herself at him. "And it was. But I won't do it again." He tilted the screen towards her. "See? If it were me, you would have been rolling on the floor."

"Haha, how funny," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm, though she couldn't stop her eyes from flicking to the screen.

Synth swiped again. A new video played, this one a deepfake he'd generated in microseconds. The roles were reversed. It was him, shrieking in terror while Selena, looking bored, pointed at an imaginary spot on the wall.

A reluctant smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She fought it for a moment, then lost. "Yeah, okay," she conceded, the tension in her shoulders easing slightly. "It's pretty funny. But don't do it again." This time, her voice was serious.

Synth gave her a thumbs-up.

They finished their meal in a less charged silence. Selena retreated to her laptop, losing herself in a complex engineering schematic that bloomed across her screen. The quiet settled back in, but now it felt heavier.

"How are you feeling?" Synth asked, his voice cutting through the silence.

Selena didn't look up from her screen. "Fine. Now that my heart rate is back to normal."

Synth offered a nod she didn't see. "Today," he said, the words precise, deliberate, "I arranged the surgery for the removal of your implant."

Her fingers froze over the keyboard. Her gaze snapped towards him, her eyes wide, the engineering schematic forgotten. A profound, unsettling silence fell over the room, swallowing the hum of the electronics and the distant city noise.

Her hand drifted unconsciously, inevitably, to the back of her head, her fingers tracing the hard metal at the base of her skull.

Synth reached out and gently placed his hand over her forearm. His touch was cool, steady. A silent promise. She met his gaze, and all the bravado, all the anger from the prank, melted away, leaving only a raw, shared vulnerability. She gave him a single, sharp nod.

Synth's gaze shifted to the corner of the room, to the futon, where Max, with the MemStream headset on his head.

The world shifted. The cramped apartment dissolved, replaced by the impossible green of a simulated park. This was Max's world, a sanctuary built from code. The grass was a flawless, uniform emerald; a perfect, cloudless blue. It was a place with no shadows, no decay, no pain. A beautiful lie.

Synth saw Max sitting on a bench, his small back to him. He was methodically shaping a piece of digital clay. Synth's footsteps made no sound on the perfect grass as he approached and sat down beside him, leaving a respectful distance. For a long time, the only sound was the faint, digital squelch of the clay being worked in Max's hands.

Synth closed his eyes for a moment.

"Max," he began, his voice soft, careful. "I need to talk to you about something. Something very important."

Max gave no response. His focus remained entirely on the lump of clay.

"Selena and I have talked. Today, I'm going to remove her implant." He paused, letting the weight of the statement settle in the sterile air. "It's an implant that could… help you. With what you've been through."

Max's hands stopped moving. He did not look up.

"This is your decision, Max," Synth continued, his gaze fixed on the boy's profile. "Whatever you choose, I will support it. There are three options."

"First, we do nothing with the implant. It will be removed and destroyed, and… you will live with the memories."

He saw Max's small fist clench, crushing the delicate clay sculpture of a T-Rex into a formless, grey smear. A king of a forgotten world, reduced to nothing.

"The second option," Synth said, his voice even, "is that I use the implant to mute the memories. You will still know what happened, but the emotional impact… the pain… will be lessened."

"And the third… is complete deletion. Those memories will vanish forever. You will not remember them, at least, not actively. They might return, sometimes, as echoes when you sleep. But the story of what happened to you will be gone."

He watched the boy, a child forced to carry a burden that would have broken most adults. He deserved to make this choice.

Max's fists were white-knuckled, his gaze locked on the ground with an intensity so fierce it seemed he might crack it with his stare. The silence in the perfect, artificial park stretched into an eternity.

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His jaw trembled. At last, he looked up, and the perfect, sterile world of the simulation seemed to fall away. The boy's eyes carried a chilling weight, a seriousness that no child's face should ever wear. "Which one would you choose?"

The question landed in the quiet between them, a stone dropped into a deep well. Synth did not answer at once. The memories within him stirred, a chorus of broken men, killers, and survivors. When he finally spoke, his voice was a low, deliberate hum.

"In my case… I would leave them there," Synth said. "But you have to understand, Max—I have seen too much. Faces, broken. Homes, burning. Pain, so constant that I became numb to it. I'm… desensitized. But you? You are you, and I am I. We do not see the world through the same eyes."

He leaned forward slightly, the park's artificial light glinting off his silver eyes, turning them into pools of mercury. "If I were truly in your place," he continued, his voice softer now, "I might choose to dull it. Not to erase it, not to pretend it never happened—because a pain that is ignored will only rot in the shadows. Pain is not just suffering, Max; it's memory. It's will. It's the mark left by something that mattered. To carry it is to be reshaped by it. And you… if you choose to live with it fully, it will take your childhood. It will change you in ways you cannot undo. The things you've seen will follow you into every smile, every laugh. You may try to drown it—with drugs, with distractions, with anything that burns louder than the ache inside. Many do. Too many."

He paused, letting the silence of the perfect, artificial world ache with the weight of his words. "But hear me—enduring pain for the sake of endurance is foolish. Don't confuse suffering with strength. Pain—whether in the body or the mind—is a signal. A warning. It tells you: something is not right. If you ignore it, if you clutch it like a trophy, it will eat you alive. But if you face it… if you understand it… pain can become something else. Maybe a teacher."

Max's gaze fell to the ground, his small hands trembling in his lap. Synth's tone softened further, a carefully modulated frequency of compassion, as though he feared his words were pressing too hard on a fresh wound. He raised a hand, and from his palm, a small metallic bird unfurled its wings. It shot into the flawless sky, a gleam of silver against the simulated twilight, a fragile, manufactured hope.

"You are not alone in this, Max," Synth said gently. "Pain isolates us, but it also connects us—because every soul knows it. You have your sister. You have me. And one day, you will find others who will stand beside you, who will share the weight you carry. Pain is not meant to be endured in silence—it is meant to be shared, so that it doesn't break you."

His silver eyes turned back to the boy, their gaze sharp yet compassionate. "Suffering may change you, but it does not have to define you. The choice is yours, Max. Always yours."

The modding chair hissed softly as it reclined. Selena was already asleep, her face peaceful under the sterile, white light of the operating room, a stark contrast to the storm of emotions that had brought them here.

Synth's hand went to the small vial on the tray beside him. It was filled with medical-grade nanites, the best money could buy on the black market. A tool for a delicate task.

His own nanite swarm flowed from his fingertips, a silver tide that enveloped the vial, consuming it and its contents. The medical software was instantly assimilated, a new set of instruments added to his limitless collection. There was no need for scalpels, no need for lasers. He was the only tool required.

He placed his hand at the base of Selena's skull, his touch impossibly gentle. The nanites went to work. A microscopic river of silver flowed over her skin, seeping beneath it, mapping the intricate network of the implant's infrastructure. They moved with meticulous purpose, dismantling the device piece by piece from where it was woven deep into her brain stem. With his other hand, he picked up a second vial, this one filled with a bloody, nutrient-rich substance. He swallowed it, and his internal forges immediately began replicating the specific cellular structures needed to seamlessly rebuild what the implant had displaced.

As his nanites removed the last shard of foreign metal, a second wave began their work, replacing the missing flesh, weaving new nerves and tissue with perfect precision. When the surgery was over, there was no scar, no trace that the implant had ever been there.

A few minutes later, Selena's eyes fluttered open. Her gaze swept across the sterile room, finally landing on Synth, who sat beside her, his hand resting gently over hers.

"You can move," he whispered. The chair slowly rose to a sitting position. Her hand, hesitant at first, went to the back of her skull. She felt nothing. No lump, no port, no seam. Just skin, and the soft roots of her own hair.

"Was it a success?" she asked, her voice raspy.

Synth offered a single, affirming nod. "No complications. No scarring. Just make sure not to move your neck too fast for the next few hours. The new cells are still connecting."

Selena closed her storm-gray and green eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath. She slowly opened them again and stared at the ceiling, at the blank, white canvas of a future she could now write for herself. She was finally free of the cursed piece of metal that had stolen her past.

Synth carefully helped her stand, and they walked out of the modding room, Selena leaning against his solid frame for support.

The door hissed open, revealing a small, stark hallway. Sitting on a simple plastic chair was Max. In his hands, he held the small, metallic bird just like the one Synth had created in the simulation.

His gaze lifted, and for the first time since Synth had met him, there was a spark in his eyes, bright and steady as a newly lit console light in the darkness. He rose to his feet, his legs wobbling slightly, and walked towards them. Selena moved forward, and they met in a fierce, silent hug, two survivors clinging to each other in the quiet aftermath of their shared storm.

Synth watched them, a small, almost imperceptible smile touching his lips.

Max's eyes meet his, over Selena's shoulder. The haunted, distant look was gone, replaced by a quiet, steady focus. He was present. He was here.

The car moved through the city's steel and glass canyons, a silent bubble in the afternoon traffic. In the back, Max's head rested against Selena's shoulder, his gaze lost in the blur of the world rushing past the window. An unspoken peace, fragile and new, had settled between them since the surgery. There were no questions, no grand declarations. Synth knew the words would come when they were ready, and not a moment sooner. He was content to be the silent chauffeur, the steady guardian.

His gaze remained fixed on the road ahead, processing the flow of traffic, the swarm of delivery drones, the endless river of faces on the sidewalks. And in the quiet hum of the electric engine, his mind drifted. To the silent, internal war where one man's life ended and his began.

The space was a concept of pure, cold thought. There was no up or down, no light or shadow. There was only the nanite swarm, presenting axioms and injecting a series of perfect, irrefutable truths directly into the core of his being.

All biological life ends.

The nanites showed him the heat-death of the universe, the slow decay of stars, the inevitable slide of all matter into entropy. It showed him a baby, dying peacefully in its sleep, knowing no pain. It showed him an old man, body riddled with a century of grief, loss, and suffering, dying alone in a sterile room. Both conclusions were the same. Why endure the journey when the destination is fixed?

Suffering is the baseline state of existence. It laid out the logic with surgical precision. To live is to want. To want is to lack. To lack is to suffer. Joy is a fleeting, inefficient chemical anomaly. Love is a biological imperative for propagation, doomed to end in loss. Friendship is a transactional contract for mutual survival. Every peak of happiness is merely the prelude to a deeper valley of pain.

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