Adam awoke midday in his flat, his head pounding. He staggered from bed toward the shower, desperate to wash away the remnants of last night’s excess. His mind, still fogged by sleep, began receiving fragmented memories—like slow drips of rain.

  It wasn’t until he started making his morning dandelion coffee that the cobwebs began to dissolve. Then the memories surged in like a flood. They knocked the breath from his lungs and bent his knees, until a single horrifying truth slammed into him: he had killed someone.

  Once the initial panic subsided enough for logic to return, Adam plugged in his laptop and accessed his work computer. He dove into the archives, searching the hard drives for the image of the man he had murdered, though “victim” didn’t feel like the right word. The man had been a violent mugger. Sadistic. A killer.

  “Executed” might’ve been more accurate.

  Even so, Adam regretted it. He should never have drunk that strong alcohol.

  He found the photos, captured by the robot’s camera eyes. On-screen, Mikal’s face stared back at him. There was no evil in it. Just an ordinary man. Generic. Unthreatening.

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  With a steady hand, Adam submitted the image to an AI system he’d built. Within seconds, it performed a reverse image lookup, scanning the net for probability matches. It returned dozens of photos—Mikal at school, on social media, in traffic databases—with 99% certainty.

  Then came the dossier.

  His heart slowed as he read the summary. Then it stopped.

  Mikal’s father was the suspected head of one of the most prominent organised crime families in the U.S.—implicated in dozens of murders, though never convicted. Alleged witness intimidation. Missing files. Bought silence.

  Adam’s blood ran cold. A fist of fear tightened around his gut.

  Even on an empty stomach, the terror churned inside him, and he rushed to the bathroom.

  On bended knees, staring into the swirling water at the bottom of the toilet bowl, the image surged—uninvited—into his mind’s eye.

  The robot. Cradling Mikal’s lifeless body beneath the shallow dockside water.

  The same place he’d foolishly dumped everything: the workstations, the machines, the corpse.

  Suddenly, Mikal’s eyes were open. Staring straight at him.

  Adam retched into the toilet bowl again.