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You leave the shell. It's cliché, but it's almost like waking up from a bad dream. The feelings are still there—pain like someone's jammed a hunk of metal in your chest, making your heart ache, your lungs pull tight. It hurts to breathe. Your head's swimming with the feeling. But the memories, when you reach for them, stay at the tip of your fingers, just out of reach. You know you repaired them. You know you showed them to yourself. And you know you deleted them.
But it still feels so fucking weird, not to know what they were.
There's hints, and for all you fight not to chase them, your paranoid opsec brain can't help brushing over the connections. Six memories, clustered together. Memories that were in perma, that you needed out so bad you tried to cut them out. And two memories clustered with them, the two you saved—their storage location implying a connection, their subjects so distant from each other, there had to be a story. Like two stars of a constellation.
Your old boss—that fucking asshole—and the principal he assigned you to, Elisabeth. Sweet girl. No. Scratch that. Sweet woman, one he insisted on treating like a child. Or, really, like a high-priced dollbot with glitches he thought he could get rid of if he trained it long enough, not even a person at all.
Didn't treat his employees much different. Just didn't think of you as a collector's item, was all.
The other memory, the flashes. Made sense you'd keep that. It'd be a nightmare and a half, waking up to a body full of mods you didn't know about. It's hard enough keeping the security updated knowing what your systems need.
But you can't remember why you were so desperate to get them. And you certainly can't remember why that'd have anything to do with Elisabeth. Or why you feel so goddamn wretched.
But you know your repairs succeeded. And you know you chose to delete them. And you know you shouldn't keep thinking about it. But you'll let yourself click together the pieces one last time, and hope it'll give you closure.
Maybe you got her out. Got her somewhere safe.
Maybe to keep her that way, you can't know where it is.
(It's a pretty story, at least.)
Maybe you can hope.