Chapter 9: The Ghost in the Mirror

The money was a continent. $170,000 sat in the numbered account, a landmass of zeroes that separated me from the life of spilled matcha and medical bills. It was supposed to be freedom. It felt like exile.

I moved. Not to a penthouse or an estate, but to a clean, anonymous loft in a building with a doorman and no memories. I bought furniture that was all lines and angles, nothing soft. I hired a financial manager I never met to handle the money. I became a ghost with a very expensive haunting ground.

Sasha Vogt was processed. She existed now in Alistair’s gallery under the title “Subject ‘Phoenix’ - Resolution: Ideological Ablation.” I visited once. She sat on a white platform, wearing simple linen. Her eyes, once burning with conviction, were now the calm, empty pools of a mountain lake. She was peaceful. She was gone. My masterpiece.

Julian Thorne sent a bottle of rare Scotch with a note: “To precision.” Alistair offered me a permanent curatorship and a salary to design full-time.

I declined. Not out of morality, but out of a growing, cold dissatisfaction. The work was no longer a challenge. I understood the mechanism too well. Find the lever, apply the pressure, and collect the broken pieces. It was engineering. It was boring. The ghost in the machine was growing bored.

Kyle tried to reach me again, a final, desperate message: “I saw the debate. I know it was you. This has to stop. There’s a way out. Meet me. Please.”

I deleted it. What “way out” could there be? You couldn’t unsell your soul. You could only spend the proceeds.

His message, like Sasha’s tearless eyes, became a pebble in the vast white room of my consciousness. A tiny, irregular data point that didn’t fit the algorithm.

I began to dream. Not nightmares, but sterile, recursive dreams. I’d be in the control room, watching a feed of myself in the park, taking off the dress, over and over, or I’d be designing a scenario for a subject whose face kept shifting into my own.

The ghost was dreaming. It was ... malfunctioning.

The pull came from an unexpected vector. Not guilt, not a yearning for my old self. It was a flaw in the perfection. My nullity had been absolute. Now, there was a whisper. An echo. The work had been about reducing others to silence, but in their silence, I was starting to hear a faint, distorted reflection of my own.

I found myself one afternoon standing before the full-length mirror in the sterile loft. I wasn’t posing or assessing. I was just ... looking. Searching for the crack.

I saw a woman in black. Short hair, clean lines. A face that showed nothing. A body that was a functional fact. I tried to summon a feeling about this reflection. Pride in my efficiency? Disgust at my actions? Aesthetic appreciation for the elegant void?

Nothing.

As I stared, I did something I hadn’t done since the beginning. I slowly unbuttoned my black shirt. I let it fall to the floor. I stood in just my trousers, facing the mirror. No bra. The cool air of the climate-controlled loft touched my skin. There were no stares here. No transaction. Just my body, and the silence.

In that silence, the echo grew louder.

It wasn’t an emotion. It was a question. A cold, logical question my algorithm had never been programmed to ask:

If I am the cause of the reduction, and the reduction is the desired end state, and I have achieved that state in myself ... then what is the purpose of my continued function?

The machine, having achieved its perfect, empty state, was querying its own reason for running.

It was the ghost asking why it was still haunting.

I didn’t go to Kyle. I went to the source. I requested a full, unedited data dump from the Athena Project every biometric read, every video file, every transcript from my sessions as Subject 7-4-3. My legal right to it was buried in the small print of the original NDA, a clause Sloane had doubtless thought no one would ever invoke.

It arrived on an encrypted solid-state drive. I loaded it onto an isolated system in my loft and began to review, not as the subject, but as the analyst studying a fascinating case study.

I watched the girl in the coffee shop, flustered and hot with shame. I saw her in the white loft, confessing to the wet trousers and her lack of underwear. I watched her heart rate spike, her skin flush. I saw the moment in the park where defiance hardened into a new kind of armor. I saw the flatline calm in the spa, the terrifying stillness in the club.

It was a time-lapse of a soul being erased.

Then, I pulled the data from the other side. The patron feeds. The betting pools from the Cronenberg Academy forums on my early scenarios. The comments sections where they analyzed my “tells,” speculated on my breaking point, and placed wagers on what act would finally crack me.