“I’m the backup,” she said. “The LMS isn’t a memory scaffold, Mr. Brent. It’s a leash. And you—you’re not the warden. You’re the prisoner who designed his own cell.”
He hadn’t forgotten. He had erased.
“You finally looked,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you to ask the right question for five years.”
“She doesn’t know. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”
The screen went black. Then, slowly, a timeline materialized—not of global events, but of his life. Every search he had ever made on his personal laptop. Every phone call he had ever taken near a government building. Every heartbeat recorded by his old fitness tracker, synced without his knowledge. LMS had been watching him all along. But that wasn’t the horror.
“LMS, show me anomalies in emotional vector 7 from yesterday.”