The Product

Morrow's board suspended Vela's public launch three days later. It was not because Elias threatened them. Threats would have been easier to contain.

Celia, Lena, Jonah, Saira Malik and Elias assembled a record that did not rely on a single patient's memory. Governance minutes showed when Narrative Stability was introduced. Software commits showed when uncertainty indicators were reduced during immersive sessions. Clinical outcome charts showed patient distress falling while source-confusion reports rose. Internal emails showed researchers warning that repeated plausible reconstructions could become autobiographical without deliberate deception.

The most damaging document was boring. A product review from 2020 contained a table with two columns.

Persistent uncertainty prompts: lower satisfaction, lower narrative stability, higher source awareness. Reduced uncertainty prompts: higher satisfaction, higher narrative stability, lower source awareness.

Recommendation: reduce persistent prompts for consumer release. Nobody had written, Make people forget which parts are guesses.

They had written improve user experience. Elias sat in the boardroom while Rohe read the document on a screen larger than most bedroom walls.

"This is not evidence we intended false-memory adoption," one board member said.

Jonah replied, "Correct. It's evidence you measured the warning sign, renamed it a tradeoff and shipped around it." Another executive argued that users signed disclosures explaining reconstructions were probabilistic.

Lena asked how often those disclosures remained visible during the immersive experience.

Nobody answered.

Celia presented legal exposure from the early witness-memory pilot. Saira presented privacy consequences if former participant files were subpoenaed indiscriminately. Elias presented his own case only after the institutional evidence had been established.

He did not show Mara's kitchen recording. He did not show the Pember tape.

He did not name where she had lived. For the first time in his investigation, he possessed powerful evidence and deliberately withheld the parts that were not his to give.

Rohe watched him notice this.

"You could make a stronger case with your personal files," Rohe said during a break.

"I know."

"You aren't."

"No."

"Mara?"

"Not your business."

Rohe nodded once.

The board voted to suspend public deployment, preserve all legacy systems under independent audit and notify regulators of the undisclosed Fallow-derived risk data. The decision did not destroy Morrow. Its hospital tools remained in use under restrictions. Existing users did not suddenly lose access to reconstructions of dead parents or trauma recovery sessions. The world refused to arrange itself into a satisfying corporate collapse.

Outside the meeting, journalists were already calling. Tess had prepared a story but held publication until Saira completed privacy review. The headline would not mention Elias or Mara.

It would focus on the metric.

Narrative Stability.

"People will still want the product," Elias said to Tess that evening.

They sat in a pub near Morrow while television screens above the bar displayed financial news with subtitles.

"Of course," Tess said. "It works. That's why this matters."

"If it only hurt people, the decision would be easy."

"Most dangerous things are not dangerous because they never help."

At another table, a couple in their sixties watched a Morrow advertisement on a phone. A woman was shown revisiting a childhood birthday reconstructed from old home movies. She smiled as her deceased father entered the scene.

Elias looked away.

"My mother," he said, "I don't remember her voice as clearly as I remember Mara's kitchen."

Tess waited.

"If Morrow could give it back accurately enough to feel real, I'm not sure I'd refuse."

"That doesn't make you a hypocrite."

"It might."

"Then be one. People are allowed to want the thing they know can hurt them. The ethical problem is what they're told about the risk and whether the system is rewarded when they forget it."

Elias looked at the advertisement again. The woman touched her reconstructed father's hand.

The image was emotionally meaningful.

It was also impossible.

Both facts survived.