Vyomika chaudhary signed the contract with a hand she would not possess for much longer.
A high-pitched tone confirmed the signature, and the digital agreement was etched into Nexatech's central ledger—immutable, irreversible. Her organic rights nullified. Ownership of her body, and by extension, her human continuity, was now the property of a corporation.
She had studied physics once. She understood entropy, understood how systems decay. What she hadn't anticipated was that the decay of a soul could be orchestrated in a sterile white room under fluorescent lights.
Her decision had been rational. The debts her father left behind had destabilized her family's credit score, locking her mother and younger brother out of basic social services. In an engineered society where every breath was quantified, compassion was a computational inefficiency.
"This is a standard neural extraction," said the technician, a middle-aged man whose presence registered no more than the chair he gestured toward. "Retention percentage estimated at 98.3."
Vyomika sat. The chair adjusted its form to cradle her body with mathematical precision.
From the ceiling descended the interface—a crown of wire-thin sensors guided by gyroscopic stabilizers. They settled on her skull, drilling molecular contact points into her cortex. There was no blood, only data.
Synaptic pulses flickered across the screen: her memories, dreams, fears—all translated into energy patterns. Soon they would become nothing more than packets in Nexatech's secure servers.
"Begin transfer," the system declared.
What followed was not pain. Pain implies feeling. What Vyomika experienced was subtraction—an unspooling of herself, memory by memory, synapse by synapse, until she no longer recognized the image that flickered across her visual cortex.
Childhood evaporated. Emotions collapsed into null sets.
Somewhere in the blur of fading synapses, she remembered a monsoon—the sound of raindrops against rusted iron, the laughter of someone whose name was already gone.
"Neural integrity stabilized. Organic memory erasure complete. Initiate Phase II."
Nanobots entered her bloodstream, replacing biology with engineered functions. The heart became a regulated pump. The lungs were optimized for variable-atmosphere efficiency. Her skin, once prone to blemish and scarring, now functioned as adaptive armor.
By the time the chair released her, she was a being optimized for compliance. Consciousness without history. Identity without individuality.
"You are now Reversal Asset 001," said a disembodied voice. "No further interactions with civilian memory zones are authorized."
Vyomika stood. Her movements were efficient—calculated for minimal energy waste. She felt no fatigue. No hunger. No anchor.
"Where do I go now?" she asked.
"Destination: Sector 8K-Delta. Await further protocol."
She paused at the threshold.
There was no pain. No sorrow. And yet, a paradox stirred in the depths of her quantum-augmented consciousness—a flicker of dissonance, like a ghost in the algorithm.
A name, perhaps. Vyomika.
Was it hers?
No matter. The system had already forgotten her.
She walked forward, her new body humming in synchrony with the drones above, becoming another vector in the expanding latticework of post-human civilization.
Behind her, the door sealed shut with a final click.