Foudre

Open mouths, empty heads, big bytes. Darby Skelm wakes up in a bed that isn't his, next to a woman who's been cataloging his consciousness like inventory. Sixteen extraction chips. Seven months of harvested memories. And a split-consciousness alert that won't stop screaming. Émilie runs Neural Acquisitions at Moshimoto. She smells like vetiver and microdosed Prozac. Her fingers are synthetic. Her interest in Darby is not. The overlays say UN-AUGMENTED. The closet says otherwise. And the gap between what Darby remembers and what was taken is getting wider every time she touches him. Some people fall in love. Some people get disassembled by it. The extraction logs don't lie. But they don't tell you everything, either.