Reclaiming My Life, Redefining Love

. A small, unassuming warehouse in an industrial park that I had bought with my own money yea

ights, and rows of servers hummed to life. Thi

e let herself in. Maria, my former personal assistant

ith tears as she hugged me tightly. "I

nd I saw a faded b

o you?" I asked,

one who was loyal to you. I was a 'redundancy.' They made it clear I wasn't welcome at the compan

ir. They had threatened her. The

ria," I said.

id, her voice regaining its s

ul terminal in the center of the roo

ad erected. They were amateurs. I sliced through their security like it

yped. "Run diagnostic

a sort of digital handshake

ED. USER 'AVA GREEN' HAS LEVEL 3 GUEST ACCESS ONLY. PLE

ommand, a back-door I had built

PROTOCOL ENGAGED. PRIM

mmed its loyalty. She had twisted my creation into a tool that served her, and it now saw me as a stranger, an int

n I rem

into the wrong hands. So, I created a fail-safe. A hidden partition, completely isolated from the main system. It contained Spar

but a sequence of childhood memories only I would know. My fingerprint, then: The smell of summer rain on hot asphalt. The t

s gra

d damaged. It looked like someone had tried to brute-force a deletion protocol and failed. They had t

to erase it,

. She pointed to a log file I hadn't n

past three years had been periodically running maintenance and repair scripts on the partit

e globe, a masterful job of concealment. But the final node, the point

ame was Vanc

e

ew life on top of my old one, Leo had been in the shadows, secretly protecting the last true piece of me. The thought of him, of his si