All Chapters of My Wife Betrayed Me. The System Chose Me : Chapter 81
- Chapter 90
102 chapters
CHAPTER 81
The file resisted opening.Not with an error. With delay.Caelan noticed it because the system had been fast everywhere else. Too fast. Queries returned before he finished reading them. Records unfolded cleanly, obediently. This one hesitated, the cursor blinking as if waiting for permission that never came.He leaned closer to the screen.“Show full lineage,” he said.The terminal acknowledged the request. A loading wheel spun once. Then again. When the page finally rendered, it did so incompletely, the way a document looks when someone has torn out a section and forgotten to smooth the edges.Name. Date of birth. Location.Mother.The field was there, filled, verified. The name was familiar. Too familiar. The one he had known his entire life. The one etched into hospital bracelets, school forms, death certificates.He scrolled.Beneath it, faint and compressed, sat a secondary entry. Not a footnote. Not an annotation. A full line, overwritten but not deleted.Different surname.Cael
CHAPTER 82
The archive did not open the way others had.There was no delay this time. No hesitation. The system recognized the request immediately, as if it had been waiting for it. The folder surfaced without resistance, already unsealed, already exposed.That unsettled Caelan more than obstruction ever had.The header was unremarkable.GENETIC LINEAGE CLASSIFICATIONBeneath it, a status marker blinked once, then stabilized.INHERITABLE RISK — SUPPRESSION RECOMMENDEDNot prohibited. Not illegal. Just… recommended.Caelan scrolled.The language was careful, polished to the point of neutrality. No mention of danger. No allegation of malice. Just probabilities and projections. Risk curves. Long-term deviation models. Words that sounded mathematical until you noticed what they were measuring.Autonomy variance. Resistance density. Compliance decay over generations.The bloodline was not violent.It was inconvenient.A diagram appeared, branching forward instead of backward. Most lines tapered. Som
CHAPTER 83
The choice did not look like murder when it was made.It arrived dressed as concern, wrapped in timing and signatures. A decision taken between meetings, approved with a pen that never paused long enough to feel the weight of what it was authorizing.Caelan found it buried in a procedural archive, filed under medical contingencies. Not a report. A request. One that had been approved faster than most emergency interventions.CARE REDIRECTION — JUSTIFICATION: RISK MITIGATIONHe read it once. Then again.The language was deliberate. No mention of termination. No explicit harm. Just a change in priority. A reassignment of resources away from aggressive treatment toward “stabilization and observation.”Toward waiting.His mother had been sick, but not dying. Not yet. Her condition required vigilance, not withdrawal. The records before the request showed steady response. Improvement, even. Nothing dramatic. Nothing terminal.Then came the signature.His stepmother’s name sat at the bottom o
CHAPTER 84
Caelan left the archive behind, but it did not leave him.The city greeted him the way it always had—noise without recognition, motion without memory. People moved past him carrying lives that had never intersected with his own, unaware that the ground beneath them was layered with decisions like the one he had just uncovered. Quiet choices. Clean signatures. Outcomes absorbed and forgotten.Inheritance worked the same way.It did not announce itself. It did not wait for readiness. It moved through blood and time, settling where it would, regardless of comfort or consent.The system registered his exit without comment. No directive followed. No objective appeared. That silence was intentional. Caelan understood it now. The system did not replace judgment when truth surfaced. It stepped back and allowed the subject to stand inside what had been revealed.Across town, in a district that still carried his family name on its older buildings, his stepmother continued her day. Meetings. Cal
CHAPTER 85
The gate still closed with the same hesitant creak. The light sensor still blinked once before deciding whether to turn on. Even the air inside carried a faint trace of detergent and old cooking oil, layered the way familiarity always was. Nothing screamed departure. Everything whispered delay.Caelan stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The sound settled too quickly, like it had been waiting.The furniture remained. The couch still bore the shallow indentation where someone once sat too long, scrolling, avoiding conversation. The dining table still had one chair slightly misaligned, pushed back an inch farther than the rest. A habit. Not his.He moved slowly, not because he was afraid, but because speed would imply expectation. He had none.The walls were bare.Not stripped. Not vandalized. Simply emptied with intention. No frames. No nails. Even the discoloration where pictures once hung had been cleaned over. Whoever did this had not wanted outlines.In the kitchen, the c
CHAPTER 86
No drift. No retcon. No new mythology.No alert.No broadcast.No hostile takeover of the interface. It emerged the way buried things always did not through force, but through exposure. One safeguard removed too many. One legacy index unlocked. One assumption quietly invalidated.Caelan was not present when it happened.That mattered.The system logged the event as an anomaly of persistence, not activation. The distinction was important. Protocols that required activation could be traced to intent. Protocols that resurfaced did not belong to the present. They belonged to unfinished pasts.In a sealed data enclave beneath a private hospital wing, an archive thread reassembled itself. Not fully. Just enough.A sequence identifier long marked nonessential reasserted priority. Its checksum no longer matched contemporary constraints. Its origin signature predated the system’s modern governance layers.It had been written for a world that no longer admitted it had ever existed.The first
CHAPTER 87
Blood carried memory differently than names did.Caelan learned that the night his hands wouldn’t stop shaking, even after the danger had passed. Not fear but recognition. The kind that arrived late, once the body finished doing what it was built to do.He washed his hands in the sink of a public restroom he didn’t remember entering. The water ran clear, but the sensation lingered. As if something older than thought had been stirred and refused to settle.The mirror showed him nothing unusual. Same hollow beneath the eyes. Same stillness he had trained himself into. Yet his pulse betrayed him. It beat unevenly, not fast, not slow—attentive.Blood knew when it was being called.He dried his hands and stepped back into the street. Night had thickened while he’d been inside. The city hummed the way it always did, layered and indifferent. Somewhere nearby, a siren rose and faded without urgency. Life moving around him, not with him.The system remained quiet.That, too, was new.Caelan wa
CHAPTER 88
Lyra woke without opening her eyes.The room told her enough.The air was wrong first. Too measured. Hospitals had a way of pressing order into breath, of making every inhale feel supervised. Machines hummed softly around her, but something in their rhythm had shifted. Not louder. Not faster. Just… cautious.As if they were waiting on her.Her fingers twitched against the sheet. The sensation came back unevenly, like sound through water. She didn’t rush it. Pain followed impatience. She had learned that early, though she could no longer say how.A nurse stood near the foot of the bed. Not moving. Not reading a chart. Just watching the monitors with the stillness of someone afraid to interfere.Lyra opened her eyes.The numbers spiked, then corrected themselves.“Don’t,” the nurse said quietly, instinctive. Then, softer, “Please.”Lyra frowned. It took effort. Expressions felt heavier than they used to. Like they carried weight now.“What’s wrong?” she asked.Her voice sounded normal.
CHAPTER 89
They did not meet in one room.That alone told Caelan everything he needed to know.The Council had abandoned physical convergence years ago, after the first internal purge taught them that proximity created accountability. Now they convened across encrypted partitions, each member sealed inside a private environment calibrated to reinforce their own sense of authority.Ten presences flickered into being.No faces at first. Just silhouettes, voices filtered and flattened, stripped of emotion by design. Power preferred neutrality. It reduced liability.The chair if it could still be called that spoke first.“We are convened under emergency deviation protocol,” it said. “Subject Lyra Ashborne has exceeded recovery parameters.”A pause followed. Not for effect. For synchronization. Every member was reviewing the same data, watching the same curves fail to align with predictive models.One of the silhouettes leaned forward. “This is not unprecedented.”“That’s a lie,” another replied imme
CHAPTER 90
The first thing Caelan noticed was the smell.Old houses always carried ghosts in their walls, but this one had something sharper. Paper left too long in damp air. Iron touched by skin. Ash that never quite washed out. He stood in the narrow hallway and let the door close behind him without turning the lock. The place did not feel like it needed guarding. It felt like it had been waiting.The lights flickered when he took a step forward. Not a failure. A recognition.He did not speak. The system did not prompt him. Silence held, thick and deliberate.The house had been stripped years ago. Furniture removed. Walls repainted. Floors polished until they reflected nothing of what had lived there before. That was the mistake. Whoever emptied it believed absence erased history. They had misunderstood how memory worked.Caelan brushed his fingers along the wall. The paint was smooth. Too smooth. He pressed harder.Something gave.A hairline crack split beneath his touch, running vertically l