Kaelen laughed. “Sounds like a gift.”

For the first time in three weeks, he imagined the rain. Not the data of it—the pH balance, the trajectory, the atmospheric pressure. Just the feeling. Cold on his cheeks. The smell of wet asphalt. The memory of being seven years old, splashing in a puddle, his mother laughing.

Kaelen stood at the door to Shunta’s lab. The injector in his hand was heavy. Jun’s words circled his skull like vultures.

Version 3 was the new batch. Shunta’s masterwork. The needle was a phantom—no puncture, no blood. Just a warm, amber light flooding his optic nerve, rewriting his cortical columns one by one. Suddenly, the grime on the transit platform looked like Van Gogh’s brushstrokes. The distant wail of a child became a Bach cello suite. He could see the magnetic fields pulsing from the rail lines, taste the pheromones of the woman two rows over—fear mixed with jasmine.

Outside, the recycled rain began to fall. And for the first time in a long time, Kaelen let himself not know what it meant.

Stay on V3. Drift into Jun’s state. Become an observer of life’s source code, forever hungry for one more layer, forever losing the plot.

The injector beeped. Low battery.