If the wife you forgot holds a knife to your throat... would you use your last second of life to ask her why she sold your son?

PRAXIS-CHAPTER 4: The Meat Shield

The tactical elevator slammed into The Basin’s level with a metallic crash.

The grated doors slid open, spitting out a dozen Praxis Hounds.

These weren’t standard security; they wore matte-black polymer armor and visorless helmets that operated on echolocation, their stun-pulse rifles tuned to maximum neurological frequency.

Elias was thirty meters away, exposed on the catwalk.

He didn’t know how to fight.

His body was trained to endure fifteen-hour shifts in an ergonomic chair injecting lines of code, not to evade tactical fire.

The Hounds raised their weapons in unison.

Below, the thousands of Blank Slates remained paralyzed, staring at Elias with adoration, tears cutting through their dirty faces.

Elias looked at the crowd, then at the soldiers, and his Extractor mind calculated the only asymmetry left on the board.

He had no weapons, but he held the root of the programming.

He recalled the metadata of the ghost file he had unleashed.

The emotional core of that memory wasn’t romance; it was survival.

It was the primal, animal terror of losing the child.

Elias gripped the catwalk railing, forced all the air from his lungs, and screamed into the abyss of the factory:

"They’re coming for Leo! They want to take the boy!"

---

The effect was instant and devastating.

There was no war cry.

There was a howl of pure maternal and paternal terror, amplified by three thousand throats.

The Blank Slates, who seconds ago were docile drones, mutated.

Their only connection to humanity was that fabricated memory, and the Praxis Hounds had just become the threat coming to rip it away.

The gray mass moved like a thick, violent fluid.

Hundreds of bodies swarmed the elevator platform.

The Hounds opened fire.

Blue pulses slammed into the chests and foreheads of the workers, frying their nerve endings.

Dozens dropped dead on the spot.

But the Blank Slates didn’t care.

Stripped of all self-preservation instinct, only the memory remained.

They trampled over their own dead, crushing them, and buried the guards under an avalanche of flesh, bare hands, and assembly tools.

A deep nausea washed over Elias, a corrosive chill in his gut.

He had just used the fabricated love of thousands of human shells as a meat shield.

---

Using the chaos and the muffled screams of the soldiers beneath the horde, Elias sprinted down the catwalk, disappearing into the network of maintenance tunnels that connected to the Scrap Sector.

The noise of the slaughter faded, replaced by the steady drip of condensation and the hiss of steam pipes.

He ran until his lungs threatened to burst.

He stopped in a dark alcove, pressing his back against a dead turbine.

He was safe for the moment.

It would take Silas time to reorganize his strike teams.

Elias closed his eyes, trying to sort his thoughts.

He needed an isolated terminal.

He needed...

---

A steel wire snapped around his neck with brutal violence.

Elias let out a choked gurgle.

Expert hands yanked the wire backward, breaking his balance, and a sharp knee drove into the base of his spine, slamming him to the damp, grated floor.

Elias clawed at the wire, but his attacker had absolute control of the leverage.

He was dragged into the pitch-black shadows of an industrial niche.

Suddenly, the pressure on his throat eased just enough to let him draw a breath—only to be replaced by the edge of a ceramic blade pressed directly against his carotid artery.

"Give me one single reason not to slit your throat and sell your suit, corporate," a woman’s voice hissed in his ear.

Elias coughed, raising his hands in surrender.

The amber light of an emergency beacon flickered over them.

Slowly, he shifted his eyes to look at his captor.

Elias’s cold, calculating heart skipped a beat, defying all his biology.

Her hair was filthy, plastered to her forehead with sweat. She wore a heavy leather harness weighed down with scrap-extraction tools.

But what stopped Elias’s breath were her eyes, slightly asymmetrical, and the pale scar cutting across the right side of her chin.

It was her.

The woman from the memory.

The woman half the orbital station was mourning at this exact moment.

---

But there was no devotion in her eyes.

No tears.

There was only a frigid, calculating hatred, aimed directly at the white Extractor uniform Elias wore.

Elias looked just behind the woman’s ear.

Her cortical port—the gateway to her memory—was sealed with a thick scab of lead and epoxy resin.

A homemade jammer.

She was entirely offline.

She hadn’t received the memory virus.

The irony of the situation dropped on Elias like a lead slab.

The entire Praxis Station loved him for a memory he had lost.

And the only woman who had actually lived that memory was looking at him like he was the monster sent to kill her.

---

"Are you deaf, Extractor?" she spat, pressing the blade until a bead of blood welled up on Elias’s neck. "I said, give me a reason."

Elias looked into her eyes.

He felt no love.

He didn't feel the warmth of home the ghost file had described.

His mind had been successfully purged by the corporation; to him, she was just statistical data, a coincidence in the system.

"Because I was your husband," Elias replied, his voice devoid of all emotion, cold as the statistic itself.

"And I need you to tell me why you sold our son."

The woman’s blade trembled, and for the first time, absolute terror crossed her face.