True Belief

Part One: The Promise

The ad played on every screen in the city, a soft-voiced narrator over images of smiling families: "True love never wavers. True faith never doubts. With MindLock™, you can finally live what you believe."

Sarah Lawrence remembered the day her mother first used it. They'd gathered in the living room—Sarah, her father, her younger brother Marcus—while Mom sat in the neural interface chair, the sleek band around her temples glowing soft blue.

"I'm cementing my love for this family," Mom had said, tears in her eyes. "I want you all to know that nothing will ever change how I feel about you. Not time, not arguments, not anything."

Dad had done the same the next day. Then Marcus, eager to prove his devotion to the Church of Ascendant Truth, cemented his entire catechism at seventeen. Pastor Williams had praised him from the pulpit, held him up as an example of true faith.

Sarah had been twenty-three then, just finishing her neuroscience PhD. She'd hesitated.

Something about MindLock's architecture troubled her—the way it used recursive neural loops to make certain synaptic patterns self-reinforcing, immune to contrary evidence or emotional shift. The brain essentially attacking any attempt to modify the cemented belief as a threat, the way an immune system attacks a virus.

"Why would you want to change your love for your family?" her mother had asked, confused by Sarah's reluctance.

"I don't want to change it," Sarah had tried to explain. "But wanting something to be true and making it impossible to question are different things."

Her father's face had hardened. "When you truly love something, you don't need to question it."

But Sarah had seen the data. In the first year after MindLock's release, divorce rates dropped 60%. Church attendance spiked. Political polarization intensified—people cementing their affiliations, their policy positions, their tribal loyalties. Arguments became pointless. How do you debate someone whose mind literally cannot process counterarguments?

Then the test cases started appearing in the medical literature. A woman who'd cemented her love for her husband before discovering his abuse—her brain unable to process fear or self-preservation when it came to him, even as he put her in the hospital. A man who'd cemented his belief in a political leader who was later exposed as a fraud—his mind simply rejecting all evidence, creating elaborate conspiracy theories to protect the locked belief.

Still, Sarah had eventually given in. Not because she believed, but because refusing had become a mark of shame. Her bishop had pulled her aside after services: "How can we trust someone who won't lock their testimony? It suggests weakness. Doubt. Are you not certain the church is true?"

At her brother's wedding, the vows included cementation. Both bride and groom, fresh-faced and twenty, locking their devotion before God and witnesses. Everyone applauded.

Sarah had cemented her testimony on a Tuesday. The church's core doctrines. The divine authority of its leaders. The absolute truth of its scriptures. She'd felt the mental click, like a door closing. And then... peace. No more questions. No more midnight anxieties. The ambiguities that had plagued her simply vanished, her brain now treating them as resolved.

For twelve years, she lived in that peace.

Part Two: The Fracture

The accident was absurdly mundane. A patch of ice. A fall. Her head striking the corner of a concrete planter.

Sarah woke in the hospital with her husband David hovering over her, their two children—Miriam, ten, and Joel, eight—pressed against his sides. The neurologist, Dr. Okonkwo, stood at the foot of her bed with an expression Sarah would later recognize as carefully controlled alarm.

"You've suffered a traumatic injury to your left prefrontal cortex," he said. "Specifically, to the regions modified by MindLock technology."

David's face went pale. "Can you fix it?"

Dr. Okonkwo hesitated. "Fix it how?"

"Re-cement what was damaged. Restore her beliefs."

"Mr. Lawrence, I'm not sure you understand. The injury has disrupted the neural loops that maintained the cemented patterns. Her brain is... healing in a way that's reversing the cementation. I've never seen anything like it. The recursive structures are being pruned by her brain's normal repair mechanisms."

Sarah felt it happening even as they spoke—a strange fluidity returning to her thoughts. Questions she hadn't been able to ask for over a decade suddenly bubbling up. She thought about the church's teaching on women's roles, a doctrine she'd cemented—and for the first time in twelve years, she thought: But what if that's wrong?

The thought didn't hurt. It didn't vanish. It simply... was.

"Oh," she whispered.

David gripped her hand. "It's okay. We'll get you re-cemented as soon as you're healed. Dr. Okonkwo, how soon can we schedule that?"

"I..." The doctor looked at Sarah, then at David. "I'm required by law to inform you that re-cementation requires the patient's consent."

"Of course she'll consent," David said. "Sarah, you'll consent, right? To restore your testimony?"

Sarah opened her mouth. A week ago, the answer would have been automatic. Now, she found herself saying: "I need time to think."

David's expression cycled through confusion, fear, and something harder. "Think about what? Whether you believe in God? Whether you love your family?"

"My family wasn't cemented," Sarah said softly. That had been one boundary she'd maintained—she'd locked her religious and political beliefs, but never her love for David and the children. Some instinct had held her back from that final step, even as her mother and father had judged her for it.

"But your faith was," David said. "And without that, who even are you?"

Part Three: The Unlocked World

Sarah didn't re-cement.

The decision cost her everything she'd built in her cemented life. David filed for divorce within three months—the church's attorneys represented him, arguing that Sarah's de-cementation constituted abandonment of the marriage covenant. She'd changed too fundamentally, become someone he hadn't married.

"I'm still me," Sarah had protested during mediation.

"No," David said quietly, and his cemented love for her—locked when they'd married—warred visibly with his cemented belief that apostates were spiritually dangerous. The beliefs won. They always did. "You're not the woman I chose. That woman wouldn't question. She wouldn't doubt."

The church excommunicated her. Her mother stopped speaking to her. Marcus, now a bishop himself, wrote her a letter explaining that association with her would compromise his testimony, his cemented certainty creating actual cognitive distress when he tried to process her apostasy.

She lost her job at the Church-affiliated university. Custody evaluations favored David—how could an unlocked parent provide moral stability?

But Sarah noticed something as her old life crumbled: the world became larger.

She started attending underground gatherings of the Unlocked—the small but growing population who'd never cemented, or who'd been de-cemented by accidents like hers, or who'd undergone the dangerous, expensive, and often incomplete surgical procedures to reverse their cementing.

There she met Raj, who'd been a hardline political operative before a brain tumor required surgery that inadvertently freed his cemented ideology. "I spent fifteen years unable to see the other side as human," he told her over coffee. "My brain literally processed contrary political views as threats. Now I can actually listen. Actually change my mind when presented with evidence. It's terrifying and amazing."

She met Yuki, who'd cemented her love for a woman who'd turned cruel, and had spent years trying to reconcile her locked adoration with her conscious misery, until she'd paid for experimental de-cementation surgery. "I still have scars," Yuki said, touching her temple. "But they're worth it. I can choose how I feel now. Every day, I choose to love my current partner. It means more because it's a choice."

She met Father Thomas, a priest who'd refused cementation for forty years despite enormous pressure. "Faith isn't certainty," he told their small gathering. "Faith is choosing to believe despite doubt. Lock out the doubt, and you don't have faith anymore—you have programming. You have a cage."

These gatherings were the only places Sarah felt whole. The only places where people listened to change their minds, not just to reload their locked positions. Where questions were celebrated, not feared.

But they were so few. Maybe three percent of the population remained unlocked. Everyone else had surrendered their uncertainty, their growth, their ability to be wrong and learn from it.

Part Four: The Children

The real heartbreak came when Miriam turned sixteen—the youngest legal age for cementation.

Sarah had limited custody. Every other weekend, some holidays. She'd tried to give her children what freedom she could in those brief windows, teaching them to question, to examine, to stay open.

But David had majority custody, and Miriam had grown up in his world. A world where everyone who mattered was cemented. Where being unlocked was treated as a character flaw, a weakness, a kind of moral cowardice.

Miriam announced her intention to cement her testimony at her birthday celebration. David hosted it, and Sarah attended with a growing knot in her stomach.

"I want to be certain," Miriam said, radiant in her white dress—cementation ceremonies had taken on the trappings of religious rites. "I want to know that I'll never fall away, like..." She paused, glanced at Sarah. "Like some people do."

Sarah wanted to scream. Wanted to grab her daughter and run. Instead, she asked quietly: "Honey, how can you be certain now if you're not able to become uncertain later?"

"That's the whole point, Mom," Miriam said, with the patient exasperation of a teenager explaining something obvious. "If I can become uncertain, then I'm not really certain now, am I?"

"But certainty isn't the same as truth," Sarah tried. "You can be absolutely certain about something that's wrong."

"Dad says you'd say that. Because you're afraid of commitment."

The ceremony proceeded. Sarah watched her daughter sit in the chair, the neural band glowing, and felt like she was watching an execution. Miriam's face went peaceful, then blank, then settled into serene confidence. When she stood, she hugged her father, her brother Joel, her extended family.

She looked past Sarah like she wasn't there.

Part Five: The Locked World

Two years later, Sarah met David one last time.

He'd asked to meet at a coffee shop near what used to be their home. He looked older, tired. The cemented love for her still existed in his neural architecture—she could see it in the way he flinched when he looked at her, his brain trying to process love for someone his other cemented beliefs told him was spiritually dead.

"Joel wants to cement next month," David said. "I wanted you to know. Before."

Sarah's hands trembled around her cup. "He's only fourteen."

"He'll be fifteen. And he's sure. He's always been sure, Sarah. Not like..." He stopped.

"Not like me," Sarah finished. "Not like someone who questions."

"I'm not here to fight." David looked out the window. "I'm here because... I need to tell you something. While I still can."

Sarah waited.

"Sometimes," David said slowly, each word seeming to cost him, "I wake up and can't remember why I divorced you. My cemented love is still there—I can feel it. But my other cementing tells me you're dangerous, unfaithful to God, a threat to our children's souls. The two things exist together and they hurt." He touched his temple. "Actual pain. Like my brain is tearing itself apart trying to hold both truths."

"David—"

"I've scheduled an additional cementation," he continued. "Next week. To lock the belief that my love for you was an illusion, that it was attached to someone who doesn't exist anymore. The pain will stop then."

Sarah felt tears on her face. "You're going to cement away your love for me?"

"For who you were," he corrected. "I've held onto it this long because... I guess I hoped you'd come back. That the real you was still in there. But Dr. Okonkow was right—the de-cementation wasn't damage. It was healing. This is who you are now. Someone I don't know. Someone I can't love within my other commitments."

"Those commitments are choices you made, David. You can unmake them."

"Why would I?" He looked at her genuinely confused. "I chose them because they're true. If they're true, why would I want to change my mind?"

"Because you're human," Sarah said desperately. "Because we're limited, flawed, finite beings with incomplete information. Because humility means staying teachable."

"I've learned everything I need to learn," David said with perfect peace. "That's what cementation gives you. The ability to stop seeking and start living."

He left before his coffee was cold. Sarah sat alone, watching the other patrons. A young couple in the corner, both with the telltale neural ports for easy re-cementation and updates. An older man reading a tablet, his news feed undoubtedly filtered to align with his locked politics. A teenager with headphones, probably streaming content from their cemented denomination.

All of them certain. All of them locked.

All of them finished growing.