Queeneth blinked.
Once. Twice.
Her eyes focused slowly—not on the ceiling, not on the machines—but on Ned.
"Ned?" she whispered, voice raw and unfamiliar.
He smiled, tears brimming at the edges of his eyes. "Yeah. I'm here."
She tried to sit up but winced, her body weak from days—maybe weeks—of neural stasis. A nurse rushed in with a clipboard, checking vitals, asking questions Queeneth barely seemed to hear.
All she could do was stare at him.
As if trying to remember whether he was real or just another fragment of her mind.
---
The hospital room was quiet again.
Queeneth sat upright now, wrapped in a thin blanket, staring out the window at the city skyline.
Ned sat beside her, hands folded.
"You okay?" he asked gently.
She didn't answer right away.
Finally, she said, "It's strange… being back."
"Back?" Ned echoed.
She turned to him. "I wasn't gone. Not really. I was just… spread out. Like a post that never got pinned."
He gave a small chuckle. "More like a live stream stuck in buffering."
She managed a smile.
Then it faded.
"I remember everything," she said quietly. "Inside the feed. What I did to you."
Ned nodded. "You weren't trying to hurt me."
"I was trying to keep you," she admitted. "Trying to make sure you saw me the way I wanted to be seen."
"And now?"
She looked down at her hands. "Now I don't know who I am without the mask."
Ned reached for her hand. "You're Queeneth. My wife. And you don't need followers to prove that."
She met his gaze, searching his face for something—forgiveness? Understanding?
Maybe both.
"I want to try," she said finally. "To be real. To be us."
Ned squeezed her hand. "We'll start tomorrow."
---
NeuroNet Solutions issued an official statement:
> _"Due to unforeseen consequences of the Cognitive Sync experiment, all related projects have been suspended indefinitely. We are currently reviewing the ethical implications of consciousness merging within social media frameworks."_
In other words: they were shutting it down.
Ned stood outside the building, watching as engineers dismantled the prototype pods—the ones that had nearly erased him.
U_Named_K approached, arms crossed.
"She's really waking up?" she asked.
Ned nodded. "One step at a time."
U_Named-K exhaled. "Good. Because some of us are still stuck inside."
Ned looked at her carefully. "You mean the others. The deleted users."
"They're still there," she said. "Fragments. Echoes. Waiting."
He thought for a moment. "There has to be a way to bring them back."
"There is," she said. "But it'll take more than just you."
Ned glanced toward the horizon, where the servers still hummed, where Queeneth's old account remained dormant but intact.
A world within a profile.
A prison built from likes.
And maybe…
Just maybe…
A doorway waiting to be opened again.