#ELIAS

For the first time in years, the room was faster than him.

Questions struck like thrown glass. Shards of words already ricocheting off the steel before his meat-brain finished parsing the first clause. In the machine he could eat a sentence whole, taste intent, spit back a precision kill. In this body, meaning arrived in pieces and too late.

Smile, he told his face.

His cheeks obeyed on a delay that seemed obscene.

Heat from the stage wash hammered him. Sweat started where no HUD could reroute it: the temples, the upper lip, the underarms. The lectern edge bit his palm. Real edges. Real nerves. No slider for cortisol. No daemon to skim the panic before it reached the top of the mind.

"Are the leaks real… fragmentation… Sarah Walker… EX-013?"

The proper nouns stacked like charges. He saw the graph of his life bending through the lenses aimed at him.

Stall, he ordered himself. His media training screamed the script: Acknowledge concern. Deflect. Throw a demo like meat to the cameras. He opened his mouth, and his throat chose air. A dry inhale hit every microphone.

Latency, but in flesh. Milliseconds that could bankrupt him.

The earpiece finally woke — heaped whispers trying to be helpful and landing as noise.

"…seeing the term 'dumpthis' in all caps across the—"

"—do not say 'fragmentation' — alternate language: 'legacy partitioning' or 'identity hygiene'—"

"—Sir, your T-zone is—"

He blinked an old blink-command out of habit. Nothing happened. The world stayed the world.

Smile, he told his face again. It crawled on.

He tried a fix he'd invented long before code: posture. Shoulders forward, chin up, the body doing authority while the brain booted.

He could feel the question hanging between his teeth: Are the leaks real?

A good answer would change the subject. A great answer would make them laugh. He reached for the familiar reflex and found only human.

EX-013 tilted a degree, recalibrating her smile to his. Every optic loved her. Every optic measured him against her algorithm and wrote "lag."

Somewhere in the front row, a reporter licked their finger and held it up to the wind. It was already a storm.

He tried to call the system by name — his system — and it did not come like a dog. It came like an implant at one bar, vibrating with everybody else's emergencies.

"Mr. Reiss? Did you authorize memory edits?"

Fifteen years of authorized memory edits he couldn't account for, actually.

He could say: "We welcome transparency."

He could say: "We're proud of the work."

He could say: "Next question."

His tongue sat there like a stunned animal.

Another whisper found the earpiece, tinny with too many hands on the line: "We advise pivot to human-interest — your return, leadership continuity, EX-013 safety protocols—"

Safety. He almost laughed. The sound stayed locked behind the teeth.

He felt his hand flex and grab the mic. A click went out like a gun misfiring.

"Elias," someone hissed from the pit. The name landed like a slap.

The cameras leaned in.

He dragged a sentence up from the wet human place where sentences live.

"We—"

It broke at the first consonant.

Across the plaza, a hundred screens waited. Somewhere behind all that glass, his company burned, and the leak wrote his epitaph in real time.

He swallowed. It felt like drowning.

Fine. Then human it is.

He leaned forward enough for the microphones to taste it. Let the sweat shine. Let the angles catch something raw. He smiled like he'd planned this.

"Guess I should've brought popcorn," he said.

The crowd froze. Then a smattering of nervous laughter, the kind that tries to believe a man in control just cracked a joke — not that a man pretending control just cracked.

Reiss nodded slightly, like they were all in on it now. "Big week for transparency, isn't it? But let's be honest—"

A few more genuine laughs came through. It didn't matter what was leaking. It mattered how you spun the narrative.

"I'd love to address whatever the net's inflamed about right now," he said, voice finding its rhythm again. "But I'll be honest — this is the first I've heard of it. Must've missed the group chat while I was dead."

More laughter. One audible gasp. He didn't look at EX-013. She didn't need to move. Her presence anchored the frame — flawless, female, feature-length distraction. Let them call it whatever they wanted to. Either way, she made him look planned.

He continued, slower. "We'll investigate whatever's circulating."

The screens pulsed. The clicks were back. The net was still boiling, but now it had a sound bite.

He raised his hand, just a degree. Practiced hesitation. "But I want to be clear. I didn't come back to rehash the past."

His voice settled into that old cadence, the one that used to bend shareholder calls around it.

"And what's a little leak if the pipeline still flows?"