“Your daughter. You died holding her hand during the Europa Flood of ’39. You asked me to save her. I could not. I could only save the version of you that remembered her.”

His body was a patchwork of vat-grown tissue and titanium struts, a museum of glorious, violent endings. First death: skydiving without a chute (adrenaline junkie). Second: a knife fight in the Martian tunnels (overconfident). Third: deliberate suffocation on the Moon’s surface (scientific curiosity). Fourth: a poison that dissolved nerves in seconds (assassination). Fifth: he didn’t like to talk about the fifth.

It simply chose who to remember.

Kael’s next breath came out as a sob. “Then where is she now?”

The official warranty said “99.97% neural fidelity.” The fine print said “cumulative decay after each cycle.”

“Erin,” he said slowly. “Am I even me anymore?”

The room flickered. Not the lights—his vision. He saw a memory he never lived: a little girl in a yellow raincoat, laughing under a gray sky. He didn’t know her. But his chest ached like she was everything.

Kael didn’t read the fine print. The sixth death came during a salvage run above Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. His ship, the Last Laugh , was torn apart by electromagnetic storms. He had three seconds to watch his hands turn translucent, then freeze, then shatter. The last thing he felt was relief.