You and Martha worked at a funeral home. You were attracted to each other. You went on one coffee date.

Then a computer flagged you both for "necrophilic paraphilia" because workplace BCI monitoring detected arousal near dead bodies. It wasn't the bodies that excited you, it was each other. The bodies were just there because you work at a funeral home.

Now you're both involuntarily committed to St. Raphael's Psychiatric Treatment Facility. Day 14. Gender-segregated wings mean you only see each other once a week in group therapy. Every time you see each other, you're attracted to each other. The system reads this as confirmation of . You're trapped in a Kafkaesque loop with no exit.

The staff are kind, professional, and completely wrong. Nobody realizes the system made a mistake. You're both dissolving into medications you don't need for a condition you don't have.

Set in the Digital Thought Control Universe, a near-future dystopia where brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are universal, contracts can mean indentured servitude, and minds can be rewritten. The metal device on her temple is a BCI port. Everyone has one.