Chapter 37
KIMBERLY
Idon’t sleep.
Not after what I saw. Not after what they tried to do to him. My eyes are swollen, burning, the skin beneath them dark like bruises blooming across old wounds. I don’t hide them. Let them see it. Let the whole godsdamn galaxy know what grief looks like when it hasn’t had time to rot into silence.
No makeup. No lighting crew. Just me and a mic and the truth sitting heavy in my chest like an old knife I finally learned how to twist the right direction.
The files are queued behind me, hovering in projection like silent witnesses—memos stamped with OFFICIAL USE ONLY, strings of genome code annotated by clinical hands, case notes from psychologists who never met the man they dissected.
I start reading. No flair. No righteous fury.
Just facts. Let them choke on the quiet violence of it.
“Subject T-UR-019 was designed to exhibit emotional volatility under attachment strain,” I read aloud. “Failure to destabilize within predicted timeframe resulted in contingency escalation. Subject assigned to Surveillance Zone Gamma-Four under false integration parameters.”
I pause. Look directly into the lens.
“And I was listed as acceptable collateral.”
I don’t cry. Not on air. That part’s done. My throat burns, sure, but I swallow it like ash. Rage is steadier than grief. More useful. More dangerous.
Next file.
“Subject exhibits atypical resistance to emotional triggers despite engineered design. Recommended observation extension with adjusted environmental stressors.”
They wanted to break him. With me as the lever.
I read every word.
I explain every phrase in plain language—translating bureaucratic cruelty into truths that land like body blows. I trace the threads from genetic manipulation to psychological pressure to the surveillance protocols that followed us like ghosts.
I narrate it like a war story.
Because it was.
The outcry starts before I finish the third document.
Comments flood the live feed. Journalists latch on.
Hackers scrape the data. Families of other Reaper variants start posting their own fragments—snippets of withheld medical records, odd disappearances, unexplained behavioral conditioning.
It doesn’t take long before core-world media outlets pick it up.
By noon, dockworker unions have declared a global strike.
By sundown, protests erupt in three major urban zones.
And the Alliance?
They stay silent.
That silence is louder than denial.
Later, I sit in the back hallway of the Grill, legs stretched out, back against the wall, datapad in hand. My voice is raw from hours of speaking, my fingers numb from the pace of it all. Tur walks in, slow and wary.
“You alright?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “But I will be.”
He crouches next to me, eyes scanning mine like he’s still worried I might shatter.
“You didn’t have to do it that way.”
“Yeah, I did.”
His jaw ticks. “You laid yourself bare.”
“So did you. They just thought no one would care.”
He doesn’t respond right away.
Then, soft: “They were wrong.”
We spend the next two days fielding requests. Everyone wants a statement. A follow-up. An exclusive.
I give none.
I let the files speak. I let the former Oversight agents who crawl out of their holes confirm the rest. One by one, they break ranks. Some out of guilt. Some out of spite. All of them terrified.
One memo becomes ten.
Ten becomes a hundred.
Then a thousand.
A goddamn flood.
Memos outlining the entire Reaper project lifecycle. Training manipulation tactics. Behavioral conditioning schedules. Even internal ethics objections buried so deep they never saw daylight—until now.
I walk into the Grill on day three and find Tur staring at a wall display, fists clenched. One of the whistleblowers is speaking—an older woman with shaking hands and sunken eyes.
“We were told they weren’t… whole,” she’s saying. “That they were constructs. That their emotional development was synthetic. We were told—”
Tur slams the screen off.
I walk up behind him, touch his back gently.
He doesn’t flinch.
But he doesn’t speak either.
“I know,” I say softly.
“Do you?” he asks, voice low. “Because I still don’t.”
“They tried to turn you into a weapon.”
“They did.”
“Then you turned yourself into a man.”
He turns, eyes wet and furious. “You shouldn’t have had to burn for me.”
“I didn’t burn for you, Tur. I burned because that was the only way they’d see the smoke.”
When the news anchors finally catch up, their spin attempts are laughable.
“Unsubstantiated leaks.”
“Unverified archives.”
“Possible disinformation campaign by radical elements.”
And then a mid-tier communications director makes a mistake.
She goes live with a statement and uses the phrase “emotional manipulation assets.”
She’s talking about Reapers.
But the phrasing lands like a slap.
By midnight, there’s fire on three spaceport tarmacs. By morning, half a dozen more whistleblowers have come forward. Not just about Reapers now. About everything. Surveillance protocols. Civilian experimentation. Class-based memory wipes. Stuff even I hadn’t imagined.
The narrative collapses in real time.
No script can keep up.
I’m offered interviews with every major network. Alliance-aligned and otherwise.
I take two.
One with an independent circuit.
One with a fringe-cast that broadcasts to colonies nobody talks about.
In both, I say the same thing.
“I’m not a victim. I’m not a symbol. I’m a woman who was marked as disposable and chose to survive anyway. That is not heroic. It is not exceptional. It is infuriatingly common.”
They try to get me to cry.
I don’t.
They try to get me to forgive.
I won’t.
Tur watches every interview. Doesn’t say much. But when I get home that night, he’s standing in the kitchen barefoot, frying synth-chilies in a battered pan, and he just murmurs, “You were flawless.”
I lean against the doorway, exhausted. “I was furious.”
He glances back. “That’s what I said.”
The Grill stays open.
People keep coming.
Not just to eat.
To talk.
To confess.
To plot.
To hope.
The truth is out now.
And there’s no putting it back in the vault.