Yet she felt hollow. Her friends called her a robot. Her mentor, now ill and confined to a care pod, asked: “Are you living, or are you optimizing?”

Linna unstrapped her neural puck and dropped it onto the asphalt. Then she drove away, the boy quietly eating a protein bar she’d found in the glovebox.

But as she braked near a crumbling warehouse, a child—no more than eight, hollow-eyed—darted in front of her headlights. Linna swerved, heart slamming. The child froze, then ran into the shadows.