Now, he watched the crime scene photos and felt... curiosity . Pure, clean, surgical curiosity. The horror was there, technically. His cognition registered it. But it was like reading about a flood in a country he’d never visited. Informative, not visceral.
“I know,” he said. And then the flicker was gone, smoothed over by 1.0.2’s relentless, velvet efficiency.
Kaelen leaned back in his chair, the city’s light-ribboned skyline bleeding through the window. He worked homicide for the Pacific Rim Conglomerate. Not because he was brave, but because Sharp X made him brave. It scrubbed the grit of trauma before it could calcify. He’d seen a child’s body disassembled by a cargo hauler’s malfunction. Version 1.0.0 had made him cry for ten seconds, then file the report. Sharp X Mind v1.0.2
Darya’s eyes glistened. “Kaelen. That’s not your answer.”
Behind him, Darya deleted the automatic update permission from his file. But she knew it was too late. Now, he watched the crime scene photos and felt
Ilario confessed in full.
Now, he didn’t even blink.
Kaelen sat in the dark. He wasn’t scared. Sharp X had scrubbed that reflex too. Instead, he felt a faint, distant curiosity. The same kind he’d felt looking at the crime scene photos.