Yuma picked up the shard beled 01. It felt warm against his palm, almost alive.

  Probability of trap: 47%. Probability of genuine memory: 38%. Probability of maniputed data: 15%.

  He gnced at the others. Ruri was already holding hers, tears welling again. Tsukasa eyed his with distrust. Komachi stared at hers as if it were a poisonous insect. Sakuya simply observed, recording reactions.

  Observation: Subject?02 (Ruri) dispys heightened emotional vulnerability. Subject?03 (Tsukasa) shows aggression?as?defense. Subject?05 (Komachi) exhibits freeze?response. Subject?06 (Sakuya) remains in observer?mode. My own response: analytical detachment. All within predicted psychological parameters.

  Yuma activated the shard.

  Memory pyback: Yuma’s perspective.

  He’s standing outside a reinforced steel door, the kind used in high?security boratories. The pcard reads: Project Ark – Control Center. Authorized Personnel Only.

  His father, Dr. Sakakibara, is arguing with someone just inside the doorway. Yuma can’t see the other person’s face, only a gloved hand gripping the doorframe.

  “You can’t do this, Alex,” his father says, voice strained. “The ethics committee will never approve. This goes beyond screening—it’s outright manipution of human consciousness.”

  “Ethics are a luxury we can’t afford,” the other man—Alex—replies. His tone is cold, clinical. “Prometheus needs results. The Ark Protocol is the only way to accelerate evolution.”

  Prometheus. The name sends a jolt through present?day Yuma.

  “I won’t be part of it,” Dr. Sakakibara insists. “I’m pulling out. And I’m taking the encryption keys with me.”

  Alex’s hand tightens on the doorframe. “You know too much, Kenji. They won’t let you walk away.”

  “They?”

  “The ones funding this. The ones who believe humanity needs to be… upgraded.”

  A beat of silence. Then Dr. Sakakibara turns, meets Yuma’s eyes through the door’s small window. His expression is a mix of fear, regret, and… apology.

  “Run, Yuma. Don’t look back. Don’t—”

  The memory cuts to static.

  For a moment, Yuma couldn’t breathe. The air in the common room felt thin, artificial. The holographic dispy’s glow seemed too bright, the hum of the Ark’s life?support system too loud. He’d seen his father—alive, terrified, warning him—and then nothing. Static. A manufactured bckout.

  Why cut the memory there? What don’t they want me to see?

  His analytical mind raced through possibilities. 1) The memory is genuine, and the cutoff hides critical information about Prometheus’s pns. 2) The memory is fabricated, and the cutoff prevents me from spotting inconsistencies. 3) Both—a blend of truth and lies, designed to provoke a specific reaction.

  But the emotion in his father’s eyes… that couldn’t be faked. Could it?

  Yuma blinked, back in the common room. His heart hammered against his ribs.

  Father was trying to protect me. He knew about Prometheus. He knew Ark was more than a simple survival test.

  The shard had shown him truth—but only a sliver. Who was Alex? What was the “upgrade”? And why had his father’s warning been cut off?

  Across the table, Ruri was sobbing quietly.

  Memory pyback: Ruri’s perspective.

  She’s on a track field, stretching before a regional competition. Her opponent, a girl named Aya, smiles at her—a genuine, friendly smile.

  “Good luck out there, Ruri. May the best runner win.”

  Ruri smiles back. “You too, Aya.”

  The starting pistol fires.

  They’re neck?and?neck around the final curve. Then Aya’s foot catches on something—a loose piece of turf?—and she tumbles, rolling violently. The crack of bone is audible even over the crowd’s roar.

  Ruri skids to a halt, rushing to her side. Aya’s leg is bent at a grotesque angle. Her face is white with pain.

  “Help! Somebody help!” Ruri screams.

  Paramedics rush onto the field. As they lift Aya onto a stretcher, Ruri catches a glimpse of the girl’s ankle—and freezes.

  There, just above the sock line, is a tiny, intricate tattoo. A stylized helix intertwined with a fme.

  The Prometheus symbol.

  The memory flickers, shifts. Now Ruri is in a hospital room, visiting Aya. The girl is asleep, leg encased in pster. On the bedside table, a tablet screen is open to a document header: Project Ark – Subject Candidate Profile: Aya Tanaka. Status: Rejected – Physical Resilience Insufficient.

  Rejected… but why was her profile in Ark’s database at all?

  The memory ends.

  Ruri’s mind reeled. The track, the crack of bone, the tattoo—each detail burned into her with cruel crity. She’d repyed Aya’s accident a thousand times in her nightmares, but never with this context. Never with the chilling realization that it might have been staged.

  Was I part of it? Did they manipute me into being there, into witnessing it? Or… did they make me cause it?

  The guilt she’d carried for a year twisted into something darker: suspicion. Not just of ARK, but of herself. What if her memories weren’t just missing—what if they’d been repced? What if the cheerful, encouraging Ruri she remembered was just another yer of conditioning?

  She looked at her hands—the same hands that had helped Aya off the track. Were they instruments of someone else’s experiment?

  Ruri wiped her eyes, trembling. “Aya’s accident… it wasn’t an accident. She was being evaluated for Ark. And I… I was there. Did I cause it? Did they make me cause it?”

  Tsukasa reached over, pcing a rough hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t do anything, Ruri. This is on them. On ARK. On Prometheus.”

  He activated his own shard.

  Memory pyback: Tsukasa’s perspective.

  He’s in a dimly lit internet cafe, headphones on, fingers flying across a keyboard. Lines of code scroll across multiple monitors. He’s hacking into a government server—a test of skill for his hacker group, “Phantom Zero.”

  The firewall crumbles. He’s in.

  But what he finds isn’t budget reports or cssified memos. It’s a directory beled Prometheus/Ark/Subject?Surveilnce.

  He opens a random file. Video footage appears: a teenage boy sleeping in his bedroom, sensors monitoring his brainwaves. The timestamp is from three months ago.

  The boy is Yuma Sakakibara.

  Tsukasa switches files. Another subject: Ruri Shirahane, running on a track, biometric data overyed. Another: Komachi Chihaya, painting in her studio, her eye?movements tracked.

  They’ve been watching us. For months.

  He digs deeper, finds a document titled Selection Criteria: Genetic Adaptability Index & Psychological Resilience. His own name is on the list—marked as “high aggression, high loyalty, suitable for stress?testing.”

  A notification pops up: INTRUSION DETECTED. TRACE INITIATED.

  Tsukasa yanks the network cable, but it’s too te. The cafe’s door bursts open. Men in bck suits enter, weapons drawn.

  The st thing he sees before the memory cuts out is one of the men’s sleeves riding up, revealing the same helix?and?fme tattoo.

  The shard deactivated. Tsukasa sat rigid, the phantom sensation of a gun barrel pressed to his temple. He’d always prided himself on being in control—the fighter, the protector. But this memory stripped that illusion away. He wasn’t a rebel; he was a specimen. A b rat with high aggression and high loyalty, selected precisely because those traits could be turned against his own kind.

  They watched us sleep. They tracked our dreams. And then they wiped us clean and dropped us into this hell.

  A bitter taste filled his mouth. The anger he’d directed at ARK, at the tests, at his teammates—some of it should have been aimed inward. How much of his “personality” was just programming? How much of his loyalty to Ruri was genuine, and how much was a variable in some psychologist’s spreadsheet?

  He looked at Ruri, at her tear?streaked face, and felt a surge of something raw and protective. Real or not, it was all he had left.

  Tsukasa’s knuckles were white. “They recruited me. Or… captured me. I don’t remember which.”

  Komachi pyed her shard. It showed her in an art gallery, staring at a painting of a byrinth. The artist’s signature: Alex C. The same name from Yuma’s memory. She’d photographed the painting, and ter found the same byrinth pattern in her father’s research notes—notes about “mnemonic conditioning.”

  The memory was brief, but for Komachi, it exploded into a thousand associations. The byrinth wasn’t just a pattern; it was the same geometry she’d seen in her own sketches of the Ark’s corridors. The same fractal recursion that appeared in her nightmares.

  Alex C. Alexander Caine. The director of Project Ark. He wasn’t just a scientist; he was an artist. An artist who turned human minds into his canvas.

  Her hyperthymesia connected the dots: the painting’s date matched the timestamp of their shared memory?loss. Caine had been there, in the background, orchestrating the wipe. And her father’s notes… were they complicity? Or was he trying to warn her?

  She looked at Sakuya, whose shard showed nothing. Was that a blessing or a curse?

  And Sakuya’s shard… was bnk. Just white noise.

  “Interesting,” Sakuya murmured. “Either my memory from that period is completely erased, or ARK is withholding it for strategic reasons.”