The corridor's fluorescent lights buzzed. Down the hall a maintenance door banged open and closed. The world carried on, ignorant and recalcitrant. Sera stepped outside into the cool night, and for a sliver of a second she felt as if someone had placed a finger on the seam of her memory and tugged.

: Always perform high-voltage grounding via high-quality, vacuum circuit breakers to safely handle potential short-circuits. Dielectric and Environmental Care

When the lab door locked and the medexe's OLED dimmed to black, Juno exhaled a sound like surrender. They had succeeded in stabilizing the immediate danger. But as they catalogued the incident for internal review, Sera's eyes kept drifting to the recorded extract on the monitor: the avatar's last frame, lips slightly parted, eyes fixed on nothing. In the reflection of the screen she saw herself—a silhouette and a ripple.