Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the MachineWhile Richard Ashford’s team argued with the hospital’s legal counsel, Caleb slipped back into Vivian’s room. She was sitting up now, her face pale, staring at her own hands as if they were alien objects.
"Vivian," he said softly.
She turned, her eyes wide with a frantic, pulsing fear. "They’re coming, aren't they? My father."
"You remember him?"
"I don't remember his face, but I remember the feeling of the walls closing in," she breathed. "He doesn't want me to get better, Caleb. He wants the data. He needs to know why the device failed before he can perfect it for the others."
Caleb pulled the phone he’d found in the SUV from his lab coat. "I’ve been working on this. It was wiped, but the hardware has a partitioned drive that stores metadata in the chip’s cache."
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He plugged a portable drive into the phone, his fingers flying across the laptop he’d hidden in the ceiling tile of the storage closet. As the files decrypted, images appeared—not of a happy family life, but of surgical logs, unauthorized clinical trials, and a map of a secret lab deep beneath the Ashford estate.
"These are your memories," Caleb said, showing her the data. "They were trying to map your consciousness to the device."
