Silence. Then his voice, shaky but present : “Maya? I just had the worst dream. I was in a classroom. There was a girl with no face. She said to tell you… something about a download.”
“Press it,” the ghost-Maya whispered. “You have ten seconds before the installation finalizes. After that, your mind is rewritten. Leo won’t remember you. Your mom will raise a stranger. And I’ll still be here, watching another soul take my place.”
She deleted it. Then she backed up her entire hard drive, ran three antivirus scans, and called Leo back to ask if he wanted to grab coffee — real coffee, in the real world, where endings were messy and memories were yours alone to keep.
Maya slammed her palm down.
Her fingers — Riko’s fingers — trembled over the button.