Unlike my siblings, I grew up in the regular world and not enclosed in the concrete walls of the Butler Institute. I had a nice life with Mom in suburbia until she got killed when I was seventeen. After that, I met my Father: Tom Butler, the famous tech industrialist hero who once literally saved the world from being destroyed. Except instead of being the standard kind of hero, he was more the kind that experimented remorselessly on his children, murdered people who got in his way, and paid thousands of women for sex. That last one was nominally for the childbearing so he’d have an army of kids to brainwash and experiment on as part of his crusade to remake the world, but who was he kidding? He was above the law in every way, and if he hadn’t given me and my siblings the same kind of power his implant and nanobots gave him, he would have continued that way for a long time.

So we killed him.

That was over a year ago now. It was me and three of my siblings: Evan, Louise, and Andrea. Jeff should get credit too, but he was our sacrificial lamb. I drove him to a psychotic break, then used that as the cover we needed to get the jump on Father. Even with that cheap shot, it wasn’t easy, and the power to do it didn’t come without a price.

My brain remodeled itself pretty extensively to allow me to interface with the implant better as I pushed myself to master it. The human brain is remarkably adaptable, but it has its limits. Every brain cell that takes on a new job is a brain cell not doing its old job. Most of the cost for my deep connection to the implant and the nanobots that it controls was paid in the way my brain handles memory. I can’t remember things for much more than a dozen hours at a time under the best of conditions. On the upside, I seem to be able to get some memories back when I’m prompted. The memories are still there, I think. At least mostly. It’s just the connections and the ability to recall at will that standard humans have that are broken for me. Louise is working on figuring it out, but so far she hasn’t made much progress.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Having a computer in my head is the only thing that helps me cope. With notes like this, a database that indexes all of the important things that I should know, and a tasking system, I’m able to almost fake being a real person most of the time.

The real trouble now is living with myself. I’m a real bastard in every sense of the word. The truth is, I spent a year plotting to kill my Father because he murdered my mother. Except it turned out that he didn’t. Her death was an accident. Maybe he deserved to die for his other crimes like Evan says, but I can’t make myself believe it. Even worse, I destroyed my brother Jeff in the process and pinned all the blame for the whole thing on him. I can’t handle the weight of this guilt. Every day of running the Institute, trying to fill Father’s shoes, it gets heavier and heavier.

I don’t know how much longer I can take this.