His Betrayal

The cold silver wires felt like ice against my skin, a stark contrast to the familiar warmth of my lab.

Three years of my life, three years of marriage, were supposed to lead to our shared triumph, not this.

Not me strapped to a chair in our penthouse, the neural interface humming ominously as it pressed against my temple.

This was Mark' s project, but it was my creation.

The MindSync algorithm was my soul, coded into existence.

I, Ava Green, a software engineer who believed in technology that could connect people, had designed it to personalize user experience on a level never seen before.

I gave it to my husband, Mark, the brilliant tech CEO I loved, the man I thought loved me.

He re-engineered MindSync to extract a user\'s deepest desires, their most private emotional data, turning human feeling into a commodity he could monetize for unparalleled market control.

And I never knew.

"Ava, Sophia\'s condition is agonizing," he said, his voice flat. "Only your personalized MindSync can truly help her. Your emotional core is the key."

He didn\'t look at my tears.

He watched the monitor, tracking the progress of the extraction.

The machine whirred to life, and a piercing pain shot through my skull.

It felt like my thoughts were being ripped out one by one, my memories shredded, my feelings siphoned away into the humming device.

Tears streamed down my face.

"Mark, why?" I begged, my voice cracking.

He looked at me like I was a piece of hardware.