“I remember,” he said. The words cost him. Neural pathways that had been chemically cauterized screamed back to life for one agonizing second. “I remember your name. Abigail.”
He turned. Walked to the capsule. Did not look back.
The first phase was bearable. Hyper-dense muscles, lungs that processed perfluorocarbon emulsion. Rick could hold his breath for twenty-three minutes. He and Abi still made love, though he had to be careful—his grip could snap her wrist.
Instead, he walked to the fence. The guards raised rifles. Rick raised one palm—the webbing glowed soft amber.
Above Titan’s orange haze, years later, a figure in no suit walks across a methane dune. It has no name. It has no wife. But sometimes, when the cryo-volcanoes sing, it hears an echo—a laugh, a child’s cry—and it stops. Just for a moment.
Rick closed his new eyes. Inside, the math and the mission and the hundred silent voices of his augmented genome chanted Titan, Titan, Titan . But somewhere deeper—in a fold of his brain the scalpel had missed—a man named Rick Janssen held his son’s hand and watched a rocket rise without him.
“Dad?” Lucas said.
That was a lie wrapped in a hope.
Phase three was the memory cull. The military scientists called it “synaptic decluttering.” Emotions, they explained, were inefficient. Fear caused cortisol spikes. Grief wasted neural real estate. Rick signed the waiver— to preserve mission integrity —and woke up unable to remember Lucas’s first word. It had been “moon.” Now it was nothing.
Rick felt… a flicker. A warm phantom limb of love. Then his new brain categorized it as distraction: irrelevant and deleted it.
“I’m saving us,” he replied. It was the last honest thing he’d say for months.
Rick was the perfect candidate. Ex-military pilot. High pain tolerance. No living family except Abi, his wife, and their young son, Lucas. General Frey had assured them: You’ll still be you. Enhanced. Evolved.
Rick tilted his head. His voice came out a subsonic rumble. “That designation has no current operational referent.”
