You'd think being able to rewrite people's memories would make me popular. Instead, it got me arrested, almost killed my dad's career, and taught me that real friends don't ask you to edit their test scores.

I'm Benjamin Thorne IV – yeah, those Thornes. Silicon Valley royalty, tech empire, enough money to buy a small country. Not that any of that mattered at Portsmouth Prep, where I was just the weird kid who spent lunch breaks coding instead of playing lacrosse. At least until the Event gave me the ability to reach into people's minds and adjust their memories like lines of code.

The medical community calls it "mnemonic manipulation." The government calls it a Class One security risk. Tate Wheeler, who sat next to me in AP Physics, called it my ticket to the cool kids' table.

"Think about it, Benji," he said, sliding into my usual corner of the library. First time he'd talked to me since third grade. "You could make Ms. Henderson forget to give the calc test. Make Coach Phillips remember giving us all A's in PE. You could be a hero."

I should have said no. But do you know what it's like to spend sixteen years being invisible? To have your only friend be an AI chatbot you coded yourself? When the popular kids suddenly start inviting you to parties, it's hard not to get caught up in it.

It started small. Making teachers forget homework assignments. Editing awkward moments out of people's memories at parties. Helping someone remember where they left their keys. Harmless stuff, really.

Then came the college applications.

"Just a few tweaks," Tate insisted. We were at his house, the cool crowd gathered around his pool. "Make the admissions officer remember being really impressed with our interviews. It's not like we're hurting anyone."

I did it. Not just for Tate – for all of them. Seven early admissions to Ivy League schools. The perfect crime. No one would ever know.

Except someone did.

The Bureau of Anomalous Containment and Research showed up at school three weeks later. They had questions about statistical anomalies in the admissions patterns. About reports of memory inconsistencies among school staff. About a certain group of students whose test scores and teacher recommendations didn't match their historical performance.

My "friends" threw me under the bus so fast I got tire marks on my soul. Turned out Tate had been documenting everything, building a nice little blackmail file. Insurance, he called it.

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The BACR agents weren't gentle. They had a Parallaxer with them who could detect memory alterations. Every edit I'd made lit up like a Christmas tree in their scans. They took me in for "questioning."

That's when my father showed up with six lawyers and enough political leverage to sink half the government's black projects.

"Do you have any idea," he said later, in his private jet flying us home from the facility, "how many strings I had to pull? How many favors I had to call in? The contracts I had to promise?"

I stared out the window, watching the clouds. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry doesn't begin to cover it. Do you know what they do to memory manipulators in those facilities? What they make them do?"

I did. I'd seen enough in the few hours I was there. The endless interrogations. The memory extractions. The "loyalty reinforcement" sessions.

"You're lucky," he continued. "They're classifying you as a restricted asset instead of a security threat. Weekly monitoring, no unauthorized use of your ability, supervised 'contributions' to certain government projects."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then all my strings and favors disappear, and you disappear with them."

He set me up with a legitimate job at one of his companies – "voluntary consultation" for the intelligence agencies. Better than a cell in a BACR facility. The monitoring bracelet on my ankle is nearly invisible under my designer jeans.

Tate and the others got their acceptance letters rescinded. Small comfort. They're still at Portsmouth, still popular, still living their lives. Sometimes I think about editing their memories, making them remember what really happened. But that's what got me into this mess in the first place.

My father hired a private tutor to help me finish high school. The official story is that I'm doing an intensive college prep program. The truth is, I'm not allowed within a hundred yards of a school anymore.

The only person who still talks to me from before is Carla Jones, the quiet girl from Computer Club. She didn't want her memories edited, didn't ask me for favors. Just shared her lunch when I was coding through meals.

"You know what's funny?" she said yesterday, while we were working on a new AI project. "You spent all that time editing memories, trying to make people like you. But I liked the real you better."

I'm not allowed to edit memories anymore, except under strict government supervision. But I'm learning that maybe that's okay. Real connections don't need editing. Real friends don't ask you to rewrite reality for them.

My father's reputation survived, though his political capital took a hit. The monitoring bracelet comes off in three years, assuming good behavior. The government gets to use my abilities for "special projects" twice a month. Could be worse. At least I'm not in a BACR cell having my own memories rewritten.

Yesterday, I found Tate's blackmail file in my email. Amy helped me track it down, wrote a program to scrub it from every server and backup. Not because I asked her to, but because that's what real friends do.

I didn't edit any memories this time. Some things should be remembered exactly as they are.

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