Vault 3, North America - 2029

Once, his work had made headlines. He had rebuilt the motor functions of stroke victims, given movement to children who had never walked. Awards followed. Grants. Reverence.

It should’ve ended there — in clinics, in recovery wards, in the hands of those who needed a second chance. But somewhere along the line, the patient became the asset. The limb became the load out. And everything he once stood for was repurposed into something colder.

It had never been installed. Just a prototype — the last one Nakamura completed before the Preservation Initiative began demanding field deployment. Repurposed from civilian mobility aid to something stronger, more durable, and no longer voluntary. He had adjusted its load tolerance right here in this room — not the surgery, but his workspace — where innovation once lived and now guilt lingered.

He’d done this before. Too many times. But this one stayed with him, because it was the first time the Global Preservation Initiative had told him why.

It wasn’t for recovery, nor was it for healing. But for the preservation of something bigger. Something global.

They didn’t pressure him. Not exactly. But the weight of it — the rhetoric, the urgency, the unspoken threat of failure — made refusal feel like negligence. Like walking away would be letting the world die without lifting a hand.

The kind of protection they spoke of didn’t serve the host — it used them. This patient wouldn’t be walking out with a better life. He’d be deployed. Sent to a Node. The limb not to restore, but to help defend if the need arose.

Not for his sake. Not even for his survival. Just another cog in the Initiative’s calculus.

The host had looked at him once — just once — with eyes that didn’t ask for strength, power or survival. Just to be left whole.

As he turned, the light caught the edge of the Doctor’s coat — just enough to catch the stitched name tag. 'Dr. K. Nakamura,' nearly worn away.

The host was young, barely out of adolescence. Silent. Too young for this. Too quiet for what came next. The silence always said more than screams ever could.

The tools hovered, uncertain — bone, wire, neural binders — each step more delicate than the last. This wasn’t a routine procedure. Every action had to be recalibrated on the fly. Neural mapping surged and stuttered. One wrong signal, and the host’s nervous system could misfire permanently. The calibration sequence whispered through the clinic like a breath Nakamura hadn’t yet taken, tension curling behind every blink — measured in microvolts and risk.

It took over four hours. When it was done, the Initiative deemed the integration flawless. But Nakamura knew better. Sweat clung to his collar. His hands ached. And the boy — still staring at nothing — hadn't blinked once. Still, guilt crept in.

He had rewritten something more than a limb. He had altered a life that didn’t want it. The strength he’d added wasn’t requested — it was enforced. It wasn’t human any more — triple the torsion threshold, reactive torque speeds well beyond combat norms. Not strength to lift, or protect, but to break. To overwhelm. A test subject wrapped in protocol and silence.

He had paused once. Not to rest or to think. Just to look at it.

He could have left. Many had. But Nakamura had seen what happened when ethics walked out first. The Initiative didn’t need him to keep going — it needed him to keep it human. Or at least, that’s what he told himself. He stayed not to accelerate the work, but to restrain it. To keep them from turning his breakthroughs into a blueprint for soldiers. So he throttled progress. Redirected experiments. Buried designs under bureaucratic knots and clinical jargon. It worked — for a while.

But, it wasn’t a lab any more. Not really. Once, it had been an office — or close enough. The walls still bore outlines where shelves used to hang, and the faintest glow of old lighting strips still clung to the ceiling, flickering with forgotten purpose. Dust lay thick across the floor, disturbed only where the debris had been dragged or kicked aside. The air was stale — dry and weighty, like it hadn’t moved in years.

Shelves lined the far wall, their contents long scattered or buried in dust. Among them, a cracked spine still bore his name — an early textbook on neuro-interface surgery, once praised for restoring mobility to the disabled. A wall-mounted display was fallen and fractured, but beneath the glass, faded news clippings clung to life: headlines about breakthroughs in neural rehabilitation and awards once spoken of with esteem.

In the center of the room stood what remained of the prototype display. The reinforced case that once protected it — sleek, custom-built, sealed against tampering — now listed to one side, its glass shattered and the base crooked. But the limb inside remained untouched. Steel alloy and fibered muscle-weave, still gleaming beneath the dust, its fingers curled slightly as if caught mid-motion.

Even unfinished, it had been beautiful.

The silence around it felt charged — It had become a monument — to precision, to ambition, to something now long gone. And yet, it felt like the room itself hadn’t let go. Like it remembered the purpose carved into every inch of metal, glass, and code.

"I never wanted to make weapons. I wanted to give people their lives back. Somewhere along the line, we stopped asking who paid for that." — Dr. Kenji Nakamura, unarchived annotation, Vault-3