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Ninety-nine percent.

It always began with the flicker. Not the gentle pulse of a screensaver, but a violent, full-spectrum stutter—as if reality itself was buffering. Download-3.49MB-

Three point four nine megabytes. In an age where minds could download entire libraries in picoseconds, this was an insult. A whisper. And yet, her neural firewall had screamed when she’d touched it. Ninety-nine percent

A memory that wasn’t hers surfaced: the smell of wet wool and mud. A trench. Not the historical kind from a textbook, but a real, sucking, corpse-filled ditch. She gagged. Three point four nine megabytes

Her hands—her own, soft, cybernetically enhanced hands—were suddenly raw and blistered, gripping a rifle she’d never held. A Lee-Enfield. The wood stock was warm with phantom sweat. A man with a face like a skull grinned at her from the dark. "Fix bayonets, son," he said, though her name was Elara and she was no one’s son.