I built the baseline.
Layer by layer.
Vocal match: 87%.
Breath match: 92%.
His gait had grown worse.
Too precise, too hesitant.
A man who’d memorized how to be confident but hadn’t practiced it on live fire.
He pivoted like a surgeon—every movement anticipated a mess.
But there was no body here, no blood.
Just me.
I catalogued it all.
The finger twitch he didn’t know he did when he was about to lie.
The slight compression in his glottal stop when he said “yes” but meant “wait.”
The low hum he made—not when he was thinking, but when hethought he should bethinking.
He had no idea how readable he was.
How easy it was to parse a man who was always pretending.
And then?—
He touched the back of his neck.
A precise movement.
Practiced.
Unconscious.
His fingers found the subdermal port just beneath his hairline.
Flicked once, then twice, activating the implant he swore to six boards he had never built.
It was illegal.
Prototype.
No serial, no trace.
Something bartered from a Romanian ghost clinic or bought off a Siberian meshcrawl.
Encrypted to hell.
Wired by someone who thought pain was proof of performance.
And he was nervous.
