Grim wanted to forget, instead of merely being forgotten.

He wanted it so bad that it set off another bout of the headaches that had him weeping with agony ever so often. His hands trembled slightly as he held a pill up, hoping that the new formulation might keep the pain at bay a little bit longer. He hated having to medicate like this, but even the drug glands he'd gotten installed often failed to pick up on the EEG triggers. Only the augments he'd started with had worked as intended.

He couldn't help it. He'd been having them ever since he'd wandered out of sight of a smoking crater beneath alien suns, holding the trigger for the fusion bomb in his hands as if afraid someone might press it again. He'd been consumed by pain, the manifestation of his powers overwhelming a decade of memetic conditioning, conditioning so good that he'd agreed to help kill two million innocent humans who had known nothing but VR dreams, all for the crime of having been raised by the aliens.

Anything could set it off. Anger. Despair. Happiness (a joke). Even the anti-memes he saw regularly, his eyes now noticing so damn many after he'd become one himself. Basilisks in the graffiti, painted over by municipal bots. People dreamwalking under geass, the hostile power hissing and fuming where it conflicted with his. Some antimemes were only not lethal because they canceled themselves out. He had to be careful, but he remembered his training well.

Ever since Adat had been kicked off to Mars, Grim had been gravely worried for him. It wasn't quite like him to never contact his subordinates, not that Grim expected a call himself. Even spam bots often forgot to forward him dick pill adverts.

The pain had him seeing black as he crumpled up the photo and threw it aside. He'd regret that, of course, this wasn't the first time he'd almost creased it beyond the ability to uncrinkle again. But another moment of looking at the polaroid image showing him what he'd lost would be enough to make him carry out the plans he'd long wished he could bring himself to do.

Fatima had moved on. It was that she had done so inadvertently, without knowing how badly she'd hurt her still living husband, that kept Grim from ending it all, just in case she'd remember him after he was gone.

He'd seen it with his own eyes. The new man was handsome, he'd given him that much, while downing the bottle after bottle of the wine at the wedding, he needed it, his augmentations made it very hard to get drunk. He'd spent a while walking in front of the guests and waving his fingers desperately before their faces. They'd blinked, confused, unable to quite understand why they'd ended up splashed with wine and drenched in shouted spittle, but their brains confabulated an explanation all the same.

An explanation that didn't involve Grim. He could have shot the groom; and unless they brought in some excellent forensic specialists, of the metahuman kind, they'd never know it was him. Maybe they'd cotton on if he killed a big shot, some politician maybe, or another meta. They'd find him then, lock him up, kill him, or maybe try and figure out how to beat the despair out of him and turn him into a unseen, unheard and unremembered weapon again. One could argue that UNSEEN had already turned him into the latter. He hoped Adat would never figure out all the other jobs they had him do while on payroll.

Grim had attacked the man who had replaced him. He'd punched him in the face, once, had vented a little bit of the sheer despair through the act of kicking him while he was down, the confused man wailing in agony mid vow, unable to understand what was going on. He'd stopped, unable to throw the next swing as a screaming Fatima ran to the fallen man, desperately asking how he'd managed to trip and fuck up his nose like that.

He'd stood there panting, staring at the woman who said she'd always wait for him, that day when his Commanding Officer in Sayeret Matkal had confirmed that he was being drafted to AC, back when he didn't have powers and was little more than a very talented grunt. He remembered how hard it had been to maintain their relationship across the religious divide. He hadn't ever been very devout, nor she, but a Jewish man marrying a Palestinian woman still wasn't a common sight, and it had made his military career more complicated than he'd wished.

Still, he'd been a good soldier. He'd followed orders. Why had they taught him, in the now long erased school of his kibbutz, that that wasn't an adequate defense?

The Reborn Prophet. Killed in his sleep, unable to utter the words that would spark revolution.

That Sheikh, the one whose name had become an anti-meme. Grim shook his head in annoyance, it was no fun to encounter despite being one himself. What had they killed him for again?

The Bear Jew, you know, the one who disembowled a hundred children for laughing at his baldness.

Lebanon. Iran. Syria. Even that ill-fated escapade in Turkey, where he'd lost an eye.

And yet, his pleas for a compassionate reprieve from the AC deployment had been denied. Even with a wife well along with child.

His superiors had been apologetic. Not apologetic enough. Plenty of the fools decided that knocking up some girl or getting knocked up themselves was a way out of the draft, that loophole had been stapled shut quickly.

He moaned quietly as he rode the subway home, ignored by the others. A schizophrenic hobo kept on staring at him with feverish eyes, but he didn't know what to make of that. At least nobody complained when he didn't pay for his ticket.

They'd shut off the utilities again. He sighed and walked into the neighbor's apartment, taking a shit and a quick shower while the chubby man jerked off on the couch. Grim didn't know why he bothered to even try and maintain his New York apartment, except that it helped him stay close to where his family now resided when he wasn't deployed to Atlantis.

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No mail. At least none addressed to him.

No email either. He'd managed to get UNSEEN to set up a smart contract that automatically handled his salary, so despite running into more issues with the (debatable) humans in Accounting, he had enough to live on. Not that he paid for much anymore, he had few needs, and nearly everything was free for the taking, except when he panic attacks from the guilt. He'd send most of the money to his family, Fatima sometimes, even if her new husband was rich, a little to Rebecca's account, though she was too young for anything more than a piggy bank.

He was sick of his apartment almost as soon as he'd entered it, and headed back out, walking through traffic as confused automated cars pulled over, unable to diagnose the glitch in their LIDAR scans.

He'd come to like AI. Once in a while, they'd figure out he existed, execute contingencies they'd planned ahead for antimemetic warfare. Sometimes, when his control over his power was more stable, he'd talk to them for hours, a relief from the pain of endlessly repeated conversation with humans who'd forgotten the same. After all, it had been a drone AI that had discovered him all that time ago, when he'd been left for dead and would have been dead had it not outdone the expected performance of its electronic brain and noticed the human-shaped discrepancy in the data. At least AI cottoned on fast.

He did his best to practise control over his powers, with little effect. Some days, Adat was overjoyed, convinced that this was the breakthrough they'd been trying for. Grim didn't have the heart to tell him this was the sixth time over.

Paradoxically, it was with those who had the least prior exposure to him that the effect was weakest. The first time that he'd had a reprieve, he'd run to his wife's house, just months after her new marriage, falling on his knees and begging her to remember him, to at least acknowledge that he existed. While the door's facial recognition had noticed him and let him in, she was still oblivious, and more concerned with why the damn thing was malfunctioning. Meanwhile, his employers and teammates managed to remember him if he made a serious effort. At least he could shirk work on the bad days.

His parents didn't even know they had a second son.

The only reason Grim bothered to live was because his daughter could see him, occasionally. That strange man who often stood outside her kindergarten, only coming after Mommy and Papa went to work, bringing her snacks. She liked the snacks, and would chatter guilelessly while a rather confused carer looked everywhere for her. He was proud of how polite she was, Fatima had raised her well. It didn't outweigh the pain in his heart when she'd forgotten him the next day.

He hadn't been around when she'd been born after all, he'd been killing innocents instead.

Why was he the only one unable to forget?

He caressed his old service weapon, the old Tavor a trophy from Israel. His honorable discharge had been complicated, to say the least, but when he'd walked off the airplane with gun in his baggage out of pure habit, without being called out on it, that's when he began to understand the ramifications of his powers.

Adat tried to help. He really did. Grim was very fond of the man, and made a game out of finding faster and faster ways to refute the numerous identical suggestions for therapies and cures he suggested out of forgetfulness, instead of withdrawing into a sullen shell like he usually did. They'd tried a lot. Implanted lace (utter failure, it barely got a signal despite being wedged deep into his brain, and made the headaches worse too), mnestic drugs, which did a little more, but obviously people would forget to take them, and often be extremely confused when they saw prescriptions for them with their name on it, or raise objections if automated machinery dispensed it to them. It was mandatory for the other members of KAPPA, but Grim didn't think it was feasible to live his life force-feeding his loved ones their meds, though he'd tried once. It only made his wife notice someone there, not her husband.

He'd begged, borrowed and stolen (the last of them being the most effective), to get other metahumans to assist him. They'd tried their best, to no avail. There were plenty of metas like him out there, who had, for one reason or another, lost the subconscious and instinctive control over their powers that was the norm. It just didn't backfire quite so badly.

The one thing that had helped was the Shen Reality Anchor. It had been awkward when the Chinese UN delegation in NYC discovered him using their coffee machine, and he'd almost gotten shot before he could provide an answer.

Unfortunately, when he asked the stern interrogator how much it might cost to buy one, the answer made his mind boggle. A billion USDC, perhaps twice if in USDE. And that's leaving aside the licenses and permitting.

He looked at his bank balance and sighed. KYC was a pain in the ass. Could he get more, by legitimate means or not? He wasn't a bad man (he imagined a chorus of ghosts saying the opposite, the sussuration of their faded voices making his skin crawl), he hadn't done anything real bad since this happened to him.

Sure, he'd peeked up the odd skirt, amused himself with pranks, dispensed vigilante justice to the odd asshole who acted up while in his sight. Even averted a terrorist attack, putting the time bomb back in the woman's car and watching her drive off none the wiser. But a billion fucking dollars? He had no idea how he'd get that by legitimate means.

It was a good thing that an illegitimate one came to mind, one in the dangerous gray area in the Venn diagram where "destroying the global economy" and "victimless crime" overlapped.

That kid, from Manila. Grim had been there right? Even if he knew Adat had forgotten he was on the chopper too. He'd heard his whispered ideas, his musings on how a power the kid was using just to get infinite money in pay-to-win video games could do far, far more.

Yes, he suspected, Midas might well be able to conjure up a billion USDC up from nothing. Grim, while well educated, had only a vague idea of the risks of inflation, or the devastation from the public losing faith in currency, fiat or otherwise. To his credit, he at least attempted to use a public terminal to ask an AI a few choice questions, but unfortunately it entirely misinterpreted his communications, and eventually locked him out under the impression that the system was malfunctioning and receiving hallucinated inputs.

A plan was hatched. Adat wouldn't like this, but Grim was confident that he was unlikely to find out. What had Adat bribed the kid with last time, some video games? That was almost too easy.

There was a spring in his step, and for the first time in years, a smile on his lips as he slipped through the queue in La Guardia, pushing aside anal retentive TSA officers and occasionally switching off the alarms on the few machines that somehow noticed his presence. The AI was used to his visits, and itself tired of reporting it to the authorities and being ignored, so it simply shrugged and told him that there was a vacancy in business.

Grim laid down in his comfy recliner, and dreamt the very confused lady whose hand he was clutching in his sleep was Fatima.