Ryu’s voice, raspy from disuse and now laced with a child-like curiosity, cut through the humid silence of the squat. Neon bleed from a thousand stacked data-screens outside painted the cracked ferrocrete walls in sickly blues and greens. Kaelen felt the familiar clench in her gut, the warning thrum of a high-stakes bluff about to go south. “You said… I whispered sweet code into your neural net?” Ryu’s thumb stroked the back of her hand, a feather-light touch that felt like a spider-bot crawling on her skin. He turned his head on the grimy pillow, pale eyes locking onto hers. “And then… we went to our recharge port?” Kaelen swallowed, the taste of recycled air and stale synth-ale lingering in her throat. The ‘recharge port’ was the lumpy cot they were currently sharing, a cot barely wide enough for one, let alone two people who were supposedly ‘married’. Her mind raced, sifting through the layers of lies she’d spun to keep his shattered psyche contained, to keep *herself* safe. She needed a new layer, one that would insulate her from this terrifying, innocent intimacy. Every lie she’d told had built a cage around her, not him. Now, she was trapped in its core, under the intense gaze of a man who remembered nothing but believed *everything* she fed him. A single bead of cold sweat trickled down her spine, chilling her through the thin, threadbare blanket. “Yeah,” she said, her voice rougher than intended. “Something like that.” “Sweet code,” he repeated, a slow smile spreading across his face. It was unnerving, that smile. Too guileless. Too trusting. “I was a smooth operator, then.” He seemed genuinely pleased, replaying a past that never existed. “Did I… run advanced protocols on you, Kae? Did we… interface?” Her stomach churned. The directness of it, filtered through his amnesiac innocence, was horrifying. If she didn’t cut this off, he’d expect a hands-on demonstration of their fabricated marital bliss. And that was a line she wouldn’t, couldn’t, cross. “Look, Ryu,” she began, pulling her hand back subtly. His fingers tightened, a surprising strength in the grip. Her escape route was blocked. She needed to sound clinical, detached, like a bio-salvage tech diagnosing a faulty implant. “Our… neural interface wasn’t exactly top-tier. No optimal data flow.” The smile vanished. His brow furrowed, a faint scar near his temple crinkling. “No data flow? Was it… a hardware issue?” “More like… a compatibility problem,” Kaelen clarified, choosing her words carefully. This was a minefield. “Our systems just didn’t… sync.” His grip relaxed slightly, but his gaze remained fixed. “Not good, then?” he pressed, an edge of genuine curiosity in his tone. “Our… intimacy?” She met his eyes, forcing herself not to flinch. “It was… rudimentary.” The lie felt like a shard of ice in her mouth. “Minimal feedback. Sub-optimal at best.” “Sub-optimal?” He repeated the words slowly, as if processing unfamiliar data. A dry laugh escaped him, hollow in the small room. “This is… more surprising than waking up with my memory wiped.” He pushed himself up onto an elbow, his face serious now, almost intense. The artificial light from the street outside caught the glint in his pale irises. She noticed the slight tremor in his hand, a residual artifact from his recent trauma, or perhaps from the shock of her words. He looked like a man who’d just been told his primary drive had crashed. “So,” he continued, his voice softer, yet unyielding. “After the first attempt… we didn’t try again?” “No,” Kaelen said, firming her resolve. “One test run was enough. We agreed it wasn’t… worth the bandwidth.” “Why not?” He leaned closer, invading her personal space. His breath, clean from the hospital meds, ghosted across her cheek. “What was the exact issue, Kae? Was I… slow? Or was my interface… lacking in finesse?” Kaelen felt herself bristling. The questions were becoming too personal, too invasive. But she had to maintain control. She was Kaelen Voss, a woman who’d talked her way out of far worse situations than a memory-wiped mercenary’s innocent curiosity. She wouldn’t let him intimidate her into a confession of her lies. “It wasn’t just one thing, Ryu,” she lied, trying to sound exasperated rather than panicked. “There was no spark. No neural resonance. I… I didn’t feel anything. I still don’t know what a proper bio-feedback loop even feels like.” She cringed internally at the last part. A true pro-liar, she was. He watched her, his expression unreadable. Just when she thought she might have pushed him too far, he spoke again, his voice thoughtful. “You told me once… you didn’t have a very high libido. You didn’t care for the physical interface much. You valued connection over… raw data transfer.” Kaelen blinked. She hadn’t said that. Had she? She had to have, in some hurried, desperate attempt to deflect his previous questions. The web of lies was growing too complex, too tangled. She couldn’t keep track of her own fabrications. “You called me… a tech-monk,” he continued, a faint, almost wistful note in his voice. “You said that’s what you liked about me. That I wasn’t driven by base programming. That our connection was… platonic.” He stared at the stained ceiling, a single, flickering fluorescent panel casting long, dancing shadows across his face. “A monk? Me?” He sounded genuinely surprised, maybe even a little offended. “It suited us both at the time,” Kaelen pressed, hitting the final nail into the coffin of their fabricated sexual history. “We were… focused on other things. Our bond was on a different frequency.” Silence descended. Ryu remained still, his gaze fixed on the ceiling. For a long, agonizing minute, Kaelen held her breath, convinced he’d finally fallen asleep, that the last dose of sedatives she’d administered was kicking in. She debated trying to slip away, to find a corner of the squat where she could breathe without the heavy weight of his presence. Then he spoke, his voice quiet, almost a whisper. “So, you nursed me back from the brink… even though we weren’t… physically compatible?” Kaelen didn’t respond. What kind of twisted logic was that? People helped each other for reasons beyond genetic propagation. But she couldn’t say that. Her silence was her admission. “You truly do care for me, Kae,” he said, the words heavy with a new, baffling certainty. A short sigh escaped him. She felt a surge of frustration, another misunderstanding cemented by her own lies. Yet, a part of her also felt a perverse relief. The more he believed this, the safer she was. It was a shield, albeit a deeply uncomfortable one. “Get some sleep, Ryu,” Kaelen said, her voice firm, hoping to end the conversation before she dug herself an even deeper grave. The more she talked, the closer she came to tripping over her own deceptions. “Okay. Good night, Kae.” He closed his eyes, turning his back to her, as if the topic of his past was finally exhausted. Kaelen watched him, praying to whatever forgotten data-deity still listened in the dark corners of Neo-Kyoto. *Please, let him crash. A full system shutdown for a week would be ideal. Just let him sleep.* The doc said he was suffering from a unique neuro-trauma, a kind of selective memory blanking. Maybe it came with a bonus sleep cycle. Just as she felt the tension begin to ease, a low murmur reached her. “But why wasn’t I good, Kae?” His voice was barely audible, thick with drowsiness, yet piercingly direct. “Was it the act itself, or my… caresses? My pre-load sequence? Or… was I too new? A virgin, perhaps, fresh off the factory floor?” Kaelen bit back a groan. He wouldn’t let it go. Her mind scrambled, desperate for one last, definitive lie to seal the deal, to shut down the inquiry permanently. She had to make him absolutely, unequivocally *not* want to revisit this topic. “I… I think,” she mumbled, pulling the words from the deepest, darkest corners of her cynical mind, “you didn’t… enjoy it much either. And you finished… very, very quickly. Like a bad data burst.” He fell silent. A long, drawn-out sigh followed. Kaelen heard his breathing eventually even out, a slow, steady rhythm that indicated true sleep. She gingerly tried to pry her hand from his, but his grip remained firm even in unconsciousness. The day’s events, the constant tension, the relentless lying, had drained her. Her own eyelids grew heavy. She intended to stay awake, to ensure he was truly out, to plan her next move. But exhaustion claimed her, pulling her down into the shallow depths of sleep, her hand still tangled in his. --- A blaring synth-horn from the street woke Kaelen with a jolt. Her eyes snapped open, a scream catching in her throat as she found herself staring directly into Ryu’s pale eyes, which were already open and fixed on her. He had propped his head up with one hand, a small, innocent smile playing on his lips. “Good morning, Kae.” *What the…!* The doc swore his recovery would be slow, that the neuro-trauma would induce deep, prolonged sleep cycles. He was supposed to be out cold for days, maybe even weeks. Instead, he was awake, looking refreshed, and greeting her like they’d just shared a perfectly normal night’s sleep. His pale irises seemed almost reddish in the harsh morning light filtering through the grimy window. Her carefully constructed timeline had just glitched hard.

Chapter 3: Bio-Feedback Loop