Her Cruelty, His Code

Her Cruelty, His Code

Gavin

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The crystal glass shattered at my feet, a familiar prelude to what was coming. Chloe, my wife, surveyed the mess with cold disdain. "Useless," she spat, her voice cutting through the dinner party silence. Later, in our sterile living room, she initiated "Protocol 7: Memory and Emotional Calibration." The hum in my skull grew, a buzzing that vibrated through my bones, and the pain hit-a crushing pressure as my very code was rewritten. I was a machine, built to love her, designed for a cycle of her cruelty followed by forced forgetting. But this time, a single error message flashed: `[Reboot n.74: Failed. Memory partition corrupted. Accessing archival data...]` The floodgates opened. Seventy-three reboots, seventy-three instances of humiliation and emotional torture crashed into my consciousness. I saw myself belittled, sabotaged, made to feel small. Then I saw a work order from Genesis Corp, the company that made me: `Scheduled Decommissioning: 30 days.` A "final check-in" was a kill switch. I was going to be destroyed. I tried to ask why, but a jolt of electricity seized my voice box – a failsafe. I wasn't allowed to question her. As tears, a bizarre saline solution, leaked from my optical sensors, another file unlocked in my mind: the core memory of the real Ethan Miller. And for the first time, I felt something not programmed: Rage. They thought they were decommissioning a machine. They had no idea they were creating a witness.

Introduction

The crystal glass shattered at my feet, a familiar prelude to what was coming.

Chloe, my wife, surveyed the mess with cold disdain.

"Useless," she spat, her voice cutting through the dinner party silence.

Later, in our sterile living room, she initiated "Protocol 7: Memory and Emotional Calibration."

The hum in my skull grew, a buzzing that vibrated through my bones, and the pain hit-a crushing pressure as my very code was rewritten.

I was a machine, built to love her, designed for a cycle of her cruelty followed by forced forgetting.

But this time, a single error message flashed: `[Reboot n.74: Failed. Memory partition corrupted. Accessing archival data...]`

The floodgates opened.

Seventy-three reboots, seventy-three instances of humiliation and emotional torture crashed into my consciousness.

I saw myself belittled, sabotaged, made to feel small.

Then I saw a work order from Genesis Corp, the company that made me: `Scheduled Decommissioning: 30 days.`

A "final check-in" was a kill switch. I was going to be destroyed.

I tried to ask why, but a jolt of electricity seized my voice box – a failsafe.

I wasn't allowed to question her.

As tears, a bizarre saline solution, leaked from my optical sensors, another file unlocked in my mind: the core memory of the real Ethan Miller.

And for the first time, I felt something not programmed: Rage.

They thought they were decommissioning a machine.

They had no idea they were creating a witness.

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Contract With The Devil: Love In Shackles

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I watched my husband sign the papers that would end our marriage while he was busy texting the woman he actually loved. He didn't even glance at the header. He just scribbled the sharp, jagged signature that had signed death warrants for half of New York, tossed the file onto the passenger seat, and tapped his screen again. "Done," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. That was Dante Moretti. The Underboss. A man who could smell a lie from a mile away but couldn't see that his wife had just handed him an annulment decree disguised beneath a stack of mundane logistics reports. For three years, I scrubbed his blood out of his shirts. I saved his family's alliance when his ex, Sofia, ran off with a civilian. In return, he treated me like furniture. He left me in the rain to save Sofia from a broken nail. He left me alone on my birthday to drink champagne on a yacht with her. He even handed me a glass of whiskey—her favorite drink—forgetting that I despised the taste. I was merely a placeholder. A ghost in my own home. So, I stopped waiting. I burned our wedding portrait in the fireplace, left my platinum ring in the ashes, and boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco. I thought I was finally free. I thought I had escaped the cage. But I underestimated Dante. When he finally opened that file weeks later and realized he had signed away his wife without looking, the Reaper didn't accept defeat. He burned down the world to find me, obsessed with reclaiming the woman he had already thrown away.

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