BOUND

Prisoner A135X wakes in a cell in an unknown place, his augments severed, his senses raw. An interrogating AI opens the first session and lays out the charges: terrorism, murder, treason. There will be no trial. Only erasure of the prisoner's memory.

Erasure begins as the AI probes the prisoner's memories of a crew, a ship, a face. The prisoner resists, but certainty is already slipping.

The prisoner’s resistance cracks as the AI reveals the procedure’s full scope: erase all memories while writing new ones. Four minds, one body, zero certainty of which one is real.

The erasure accelerates. Memories surface and dissipate before the prisoner can hold them: a revolving restaurant, the riots on Neuropa, a face he can't place. As he nears breaking, one surfaces that isn't like the others. Something buried inside it, left for the prisoner alone to understand.

Language frays. Memory empties. The prisoner can barely hold thoughts together anymore, and still he refuses. But in the dark of his ruined sleep, something surfaces that even his interrogator can't explain: dream memories of another time and place.

Something is coming. The prisoner's environment grows increasingly unstable, the cell losing its solidity only to snap back wrong. The AI interrogator calls it nothing. But the prisoner knows it's something else: a reason to hold on.

A new directive: complete the erasure in forty-eight hours. What was a guided process turns brutal. But as the machine races to unmake him, the prisoner makes a stand. And for the first time, the AI interrogator falters, its certainty giving way to something it can't account for.

The dream returns. Something is coming. Outside the cell, the final barrier is failing. Footsteps. Weapons fire. For the first time, a chance of rescue. But full erasure is closing in fast.

Out. Awake in a real body, on a real ship, for the first time in weeks. But the prisoner feels an overpowering silence where a voice used to be, and a grief no one else understands. And behind him, the two who saved him begin to wonder what they really rescued.

Prisoner no more. He's free now and trying to heal, working with a new AI assistant to piece himself back together, one session at a time. But the recovery isn't clean. Disturbing compulsions are surfacing, impulses that don't feel like his own, and the certainty of who he is won't hold. Is he the man they rescued, or something else?