---

I don’t remember my own eyes.

That’s the first thing they took—not physically, not in some surgical horror you could point to and say there. No blood. No scar. Just… absence. A quiet erasure. Like someone dimmed the world until it forgot how to reach me.

They told me the implants would fix it.

“Restore perception,” they said. Not vision. Not sight. Perception. That should’ve been the warning.

Now I see everything.

Not the way you do. Not color and shadow and distance. I see corridors where there shouldn’t be corridors. Layers behind walls. Heat signatures of people who haven’t entered the room yet. The visor hums low, like it’s thinking, like it’s deciding what I deserve to know.

And sometimes… it shows me things that don’t belong to now.

There’s a hallway in the red. Endless. Clean. Clinical. It stretches farther than geometry should allow. I don’t walk it—no, that’s the worst part. I am already inside it when it appears. No transition. No warning. Just—

There.

Every time.

The air smells sterile, metallic. Like rain on iron. Like memory stripped of warmth.

They said the cost would be minimal.

Minimal is a lie engineers tell when they don’t have the language for loss.

I used to dream. I know that much. I can feel the shape of it, like a phantom limb of the mind. Faces I loved, maybe. A voice that softened the edges of the day. But now when I try to recall it, the visor flickers—red floods in—and the hallway replaces whatever was trying to surface.

It edits me.

That’s the truth I wasn’t supposed to reach.

The machines didn’t just help me see. They decide what is worth seeing. What stays. What gets buried.

There are moments—small, dangerous moments—when I lift my hand to the edge of the visor. My fingers hover there. The material is warm. Alive, almost. It pulses faintly, synced to something deeper than my heartbeat.

If I take it off… do I go blind again?

Or do I finally see what they’ve been hiding from me?

Last time I tried, the hallway came faster. Closer. The lights overhead stuttered like a warning. And at the far end—

Something moved.

Not a person.

Not a machine.

Something that recognized me.

I haven’t tried again since.

Because here’s the part they never tell you about restoration:

Sometimes the thing you get back isn’t yours anymore.

And sometimes the thing watching you from the other side of the lens…

is learning how to wear your memory better than you ever did.