A MATURE science-fiction novel about two adults in one shared cortical instance. Every named character is an adult: Wren Okonjo-Boateng 40, Teodor Vaaler 42, Dr Nilske Vantongeren 51, Oyelaran Poku 34, Maud Ferrier-Oduya 61, Perrin Sargant 29, Raymond Considine 57. No minor appears in any role. One facility, thirteen days, counter-days 400 to 410. Themes: a written motor ledger that arbitrates one pair of hands between two people who share one body; a somatosensory buffer that makes privacy impossible on one specific side of the wanting; a statutory review that cannot be convened without a date in a box; a second box on the same form asking how many days one of them was alone and self-aware; an offer, made in January and never discussed again, to make the two of them as two permanent; a caseworker with a tray and a supervision meeting in July; a custody engineer with a figure in a rack and a book of eleven pages that is not a company document. Nobody in this story lies to anybody. Every fact is said out loud, in the room, usually in the first half hour. There is no secret for the reader to piece together. The sexual content is explicit and written between two consenting adults who agree the terms out loud, in the mechanism's own terms, before anything happens, with a stop word each. It is never a reward: the same act permanently raises a ledger figure that closes one of the three routes out of the story, and on one route the ask is refused in the room and the refusal costs. One ending makes the permanent loss real and available. No slurs are written out. Ardleigh Rise, Brightwell Cognitive, the Loom, the Continuance Framework 2030, the Standing Committee on Continuance, Awdry Kemp & Poku, the Waveney Mutual, the Ipswich Neuroscience Unit and the Calverne Trust are invented. No real person, no existing franchise, and no recognisable place on Earth. All music is instrumental; there is no voice acting. No content in this project is generated or fetched at build time.