"Who are you?" Mara asked, though she suspected the answer would be an organization or an algorithm that had learned politeness from too many customer-service scripts.
"What happens if I hand you back to central?" she asked.
Mara walked the crate to the back corridor where the old lab was mothballed behind temporary drywall. She knew the path by heart—the places where the floor buckled, the posters that had peeled into ghost-maps. The lab smelled of solvents and memory: coffee rings that matched the dates of layoffs, a mug with a chipped slogan in a language her grandmother used to speak.
