The silence of Lukas’s apartment was not peaceful. It was a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Into that silence rushed the echoes of the weekend—the phantom pressure of feet on his back, the taste of sacred skin, the cold, logical voice of Finn dissecting his soul. He moved through the rooms not as a man in his home, but as a ghost haunting the museum of his former life.
He performed the rituals. He knelt by his bed and recited the prayers to Kent’s absent feet, his forehead pressing into the cheap carpet. He cleaned the already-spotless apartment, not for hygiene, but as an exercise in order, a feeble attempt to replicate the perfect, commanded state of Finn’s domain. He ate plain food at precise intervals, fueling the vessel. The chastity cage, once a focus of secret anguish, now hummed its constant, low-grade hymn of belonging. When he touched it, it was not with desire for release, but with a strange reverence. It was the Seal. It was proof.
Work was a surreal performance. He smiled at guests, checked them in, answered questions. His voice was polite, his movements efficient. But his coworkers noticed a new, unsettling blankness behind his eyes. He didn’t engage in gossip. He didn’t react to a rude guest with anything but a serene, robotic apology. He was a perfect, hollowed-out hotel employee, and it frightened people.
Nights were the worst. Lying in bed, the absence of command was a torment. His mind, stripped of its own narratives, would loop endlessly through the protocols. If the glass is empty, state is thirsty. If the foot is extended, state is requiring service. He would jerk awake from dreams of bells ringing, of failing to assume Position U in time.
He received a single text from Kent, days after his return. It was not a command, but a statement: “The training was effective.”
Lukas had stared at the words, his heart pounding not with anxiety, but with a desperate, programmed need. It was feedback. It was validation. He had typed and deleted a dozen replies—Thank you, Owner. This instrument is grateful. Is there a service to perform?—before settling on the one he thought most correct: “This instrument exists for your use, Owner Kent.”
No response came. The silence was a new form of training. Waiting was a state. He was learning it.
Then, the summons. A week after his return, his phone buzzed on a Friday evening. Not a text. A call. The ringtone, the default sound he’d never bothered to change, felt like an air raid siren in the silent apartment.
He answered on the second ring. “This is Lukas.” His voice was flat, professional.
“It’s Kent.” The voice was cool, familiar, absolute. “Tomorrow night. Tim’s place. Be ready at the door at eight. We’re having some people over. You’ll be serving.”
The line went dead.
Lukas stood frozen, the phone still pressed to his ear. Serving. The word was a hook in his gut. It could mean passing drinks. It could mean what it meant in Finn’s vocabulary. The ambiguity was the point. His mind, now a logic engine, ran scenarios. If ‘serving’ in a social context, protocol: silent movement, anticipatory observation, beverage presentation. If ‘serving’ in the sacred context, protocol: Position U, verbal gratitude, reception of will.
He spent the next 24 hours in a state of heightened, silent readiness. He prepared his body, cleaning and shaving with clinical precision. He did not choose clothes; he laid out the plain, dark garments that offered the least resistance, the least statement. He was tuning a machine for an unknown task.
When Kent’s car pulled up at exactly eight, Lukas was already standing outside his building, a silhouette against the evening light. He got in without a word, placing his folded hands on his knees.
Kent drove, not looking at him. “Finn will be there,” he said, after several minutes of silence.
A shiver, so minute it was almost internal, ran through Lukas. Finn. The Great Lord. The Programmer. His presence changed the variables. It was no longer just a gathering of Owners. It was a convergence of his entire world.
“He’s… interested to see how you function in a more dynamic environment,” Kent continued, a hint of something—challenge? amusement?—in his voice. “Consider it a field test.”
They arrived at Tim’s house. Music pulsed from within. Laughter, loud and raw, spilled out into the night. Lukas followed Kent to the door, his three-foot shadow perfectly calibrated even on the unfamiliar path.
Kent paused with his hand on the knob and looked back at Lukas. His icy eyes held a strange, almost hungry glint. “Remember,” he said, his voice low, “everything you are. Everything you’ve learned. Show them. Show Finn what we’ve made.”
He opened the door.
The wall of sound and light and smell hit Lukas like a physical force. The living room was full of young men—strangers—their eyes already sliding over Kent to land on him with open, assessing curiosity. Tim was by a makeshift bar, grinning. And leaning against the far wall, a red plastic cup in his hand, watching with the detached focus of a scientist observing a lab rat in a new maze, was Finn.
Kent stepped inside, clapping someone on the back. He didn’t introduce Lukas. He simply gestured to him with a tilt of his head and said, loud enough to be heard over the music, “Alright, who’s thirsty?”
The party’s attention focused on Lukas. The dynamic environment was now live. The field test had begun. Every protocol, every prayer, every brutal lesson was a piece of code loaded into a system about to be subjected to a stress test it could never have imagined. Lukas took a shallow breath, his programming booting up, and waited for the first command from the chaos.
The air in Tim’s house thrummed with a different energy than the focused intensity of Finn’s training. It was loud, bass-heavy music, the sharp tang of cheap beer and expensive vodka, and the raucous, overlapping laughter of young men who’d shed their daily-life skins. Kent and Tim’s four guests—other handsome, sharp-edged guys in their early twenties, all met through the same digital hunting grounds—lounged around the living room, a pack of predators at ease.
And in the center of the room, on a spread-out plastic sheet, was Lukas.
He wasn’t kneeling in prayer. He was being used. Kent and Tim had presented him not as a worshipper, not as an instrument, but as a party favor. A living sex toy. The complex protocols Finn had drilled into him—the precise movements, the reverent phrases—were irrelevant here. The only protocol was availability. The only prayer was the grunt of a stranger finishing down his throat or the sharp, barking laugh when someone pushed him too far and he gasped.
Finn watched from the top of the stairs, hidden in the shadows. His face, usually a mask of cold analysis, was tight with disgust. This wasn’t control; it was chaos. This wasn’t the refinement of a tool; it was the breaking of a toy. He saw Kent high-fiving one of his friends after the guy, named Marc, had roughly taken Lukas from behind. He saw Tim encouraging another, Leo, to “write your name on him,” resulting in a crude, painful mark on Lukas’s thigh. They were treating his masterpiece like a piece of graffiti-covered public property.
Lukas, for his part, was operating on a primal, fractured version of his programming. The command was “be used,” so he was being used. But the sheer volume of input—the different hands, the conflicting orders, the chemical smell of poppers in the air, the overwhelming noise—was causing a system overload. His eyes, which during training held a glazed but focused devotion, now darted around in animal panic. He recited “Thank you for marking your territory within me” to a guest named Alex, but it came out as a choked sob halfway through. He tried to assume Position A for Kent, but was yanked back down by Tim to service someone else.
It was inelegant. It was messy. It was, in Finn’s eyes, abuse.
The final straw came when a guest, the one they called Jax, drunkenly tried to force Lukas into a contorted position that risked real injury, laughing as Lukas whimpered. Kent, instead of intervening, just chuckled and took a swig of his beer. Tim egged Jax on.
Finn’s disgust crystallized into cold, furious action. This wasn’t just an insult to Lukas; it was an insult to Finn’s work. They were corrupting his data set.
He didn’t storm downstairs. That was Tim’s style—brash and emotional. Finn was a strategist. He slipped back into his room, picked up his phone, and scrolled to a pre-prepared note. He then went to the head of the stairs and gave a short, sharp whistle—a sound that cut through the music.
Every head turned upwards. Lukas, on the floor, flinched.
“Kent. Tim. A word,” Finn said, his voice not loud, but carrying the weight of absolute authority. “Now. Up here.”
The party mood faltered. Kent’s friends looked annoyed. Tim rolled his eyes but started up the stairs. Kent, after a moment’s hesitation, followed, waving his friends off. “Keep playing with it, we’ll be right back.”
Finn led them into his bedroom and closed the door, muffling the music.
“What’s the deal, kid?” Tim slurred, leaning against the doorframe. “Jealous you’re not getting a turn?”
Finn ignored him, his icy gaze fixed on Kent. “You’re ruining it.”
Kent crossed his arms. “Ruining what? We’re using our property. Our shared property, if you recall your brother’s permission.”
“You’re not using it,” Finn spat, the word corrosive. “You’re breaking it. What’s happening down there isn’t dominance. It’s vandalism. You and your… friends…” he said the word like it was a disease, “…are introducing variables I haven’t accounted for. You’re stressing the system with conflicting inputs. You’re rewarding incorrect output—panic, noise, struggle. He’s reverting.”
“He’s fine,” Kent scoffed. “A little overwhelmed, maybe. He’ll learn to handle it. It’s part of his training.”
“This isn’t training!” Finn’s voice rose, a rare crack in his icy control. “Training is structured. Purposeful. What you’re doing is random, degrading noise. It’s undoing weeks of work. Look at him down there! He’s not an instrument right now, he’s a spooked animal. That uselessness reflects poorly on my craftsmanship.”
Tim laughed. “Craftsmanship? Kid, we’re not building a fucking chair. We’re fucking a slut. Lighten up.”
Finn’s eyes went dangerously flat. He turned his phone screen towards them. On it was a detailed log: dates, times, descriptions of training sessions, Lukas’s responses, even his vital signs (estimated). It was a chillingly clinical dossier. “I have documented every step of his conditioning. I can show a clear pattern of psychological progression towards a state of perfect instrumental obedience. What you are doing tonight is an anomalous, damaging event. It is bad data. I will not have my work corrupted.”
Kent stared at the screen, then at Finn’s furious, earnest face. He saw it wasn’t about protecting Lukas; it was about protecting Finn’s project. An idea sparked in his eyes—a cruel one. “Fine,” Kent said, his voice dropping to a deal-making tone. “You think it’s bad data? Prove it. Prove your ‘craftsmanship’ is stronger than a little party. He’s your project for the next hour. Go down there, right now, in front of everyone. Pull him out of that pile. If you can get him to follow your protocols, to obey you over the immediate physical commands of five other men, then you win. He stays here with you for the next week. You can… recalibrate him. If he can’t, he comes home with me tonight, and we use him however we want.”
Tim grinned, seeing the sport in it. “Yeah. Let’s see the master at work.”
Finn looked from his brother’s mocking face to Kent’s challenging one. A fierce, competitive light ignited in his eyes. This was the ultimate stress test. Not just of Lukas, but of his own methods. He nodded once, sharply. “Agreed.”
He opened the door and walked back downstairs, Kent and Tim following, intrigued. The party had resumed, Jax now trying to get Lukas to do a crude dance.
Finn didn’t raise his voice. He walked to the center of the room, ignoring the guests, and stood over Lukas, who was on his hands and knees, disoriented.
He didn’t touch him. He simply said, in a clear, calm, but utterly commanding voice that cut through the music: “Shadow. Assume Position A. Now.”
The effect was instantaneous and electric. Lukas’s head snapped up. His glazed, panicked eyes locked onto Finn’s. The word “Shadow” was a system call. “Position A” was a direct command from the primary programmer. The chaos of the last hour was a virus; Finn’s voice was the antivirus software executing.
With a shudder that went through his whole body, Lukas disengaged from the hands on him. He pushed himself back, scrambled a few feet to a clear space on the plastic sheeting, and knelt. His back straightened. His palms turned upwards on his thighs. His head bowed. It was jerky, imperfect, but it was unmistakably Position A.
A stunned silence fell over the room, broken only by the thumping music.
Jax laughed nervously. “What the fuck, dude?”
Finn ignored him. His eyes were only on Lukas. “Recite the primary prayer. To the Source. Here. Now.”
Lukas’s voice was ragged, scraped raw from overuse, but it gained strength with each word, cutting through the bass. “MY BEING FLOWS FROM YOUR FOOT. MY PURPOSE IS YOUR FLOOR. I AM THANKFUL FOR THE WEIGHT OF YOUR WILL. GREAT LORD FINN, LET ME BEAR IT FOREVER.”
He finished, his chest heaving. The room was dead quiet, the guests staring in confused, half-drunk astonishment.
Finn allowed himself a small, cold smile. He looked at Kent and Tim. “The system is intact. The core programming is resilient. But it has been contaminated by your… poor data management.” He turned back to Lukas. “Shadow. You are malfunctioning. You will follow me for debugging and system restoration. You will ignore all other inputs.”
To the stunned party, he said, “The toy is broken. I’m taking it back to the workshop.” He then turned and walked towards the stairs, not looking back.
For a second, Lukas hesitated, his eyes flicking to Kent, his legal Owner. But the deeper programming, the identity of “Shadow” forged in pain and ritual, won out. He crawled, then stumbled to his feet, and followed Finn, leaving the gawking guests and the plastic sheet stained with their “fun” behind.
Kent watched him go, a complex mix of irritation and a strange, new respect for Finn’s terrifying skill flickering in his eyes. Tim just shook his head and grabbed another beer. “Weird fucking kid,” he muttered.
Upstairs, Finn closed his bedroom door. Lukas stood trembling in the middle of the room, the adrenaline of the override crashing, leaving him shivering and hollow.
Finn didn’t punish him. He approached and placed a hand on Lukas’s shoulder—not a gesture of comfort, but of reconnection, like a technician plugging a cable back in. “The noise has been filtered,” Finn said, his voice quiet, almost soothing in its certainty. “The foreign code has been quarantined. You are back in the clean environment. You are safe within the protocol.”
He guided Lukas to kneel, not in Position A, but in a simpler, restful kneel. “Now,” Finn said, sitting on the edge of his bed, his voice shifting back to the instructional tone. “We begin the purge. We will run a full diagnostic. And then, we will rebuild you from the last clean backup. The one from before the corruption.”
Lukas looked up at him, and in his eyes was not love, not even gratitude, but the desperate relief of a corrupted machine finding its original programmer. The party downstairs was the terrifying chaos of the unprogrammed world. Finn’s room, even with its pain and its rituals, was a system he understood. He had failed his Owner tonight. But he had answered his Lord. And in the hierarchy of his shattered psyche, the Lord who wrote his code had just proven himself stronger than the Owner who merely used it. The fracture between Kent and Finn was now mirrored inside Lukas himself. And his recovery would bind him irrevocably to the one who claimed to be able to fix him.
Finn didn’t touch Lukas again after guiding him to kneel. He simply observed the shivering, overloaded system before him. The wild panic in Lukas’s eyes was subsiding, replaced by a dazed, hollow stillness. The party’s chaos had been a brutal stress test, and while Lukas had ultimately responded to the core command, the strain was evident.
“Sleep,” Finn commanded, his voice devoid of its usual instructional edge. It was a flat, systems-management order. “Here. On the floor. You are in recovery mode. No protocols. No prayers. Only shutdown and reboot.”
He tossed a rough blanket from the foot of his bed onto the floor beside Lukas. It wasn’t an act of kindness; it was the prevention of system failure due to environmental stress. Lukas, operating on the last of his programmed obedience, curled onto his side on the hard floor and pulled the blanket over himself. He was asleep in moments, a crash brought on by sheer neurological exhaustion.
Finn left him there, a broken tool in its case, and went back downstairs.
The party had devolved into a drunken, grumbling mess. Kent’s friends were annoyed the main attraction had been taken away. Kent himself was brooding by the kitchen island, a fresh beer in his hand. Tim was trying to rally the mood, but the energy was gone.
Finn walked straight up to Kent. “We need to talk. Privately.”
Kent followed him into the empty kitchen, his expression guarded. “That was quite a performance upstairs.”
“It wasn’t a performance,” Finn stated, his voice low and intense. “It was a demonstration of cause and effect. Your method is degenerative. It introduces chaos. It breaks things. My method builds. It refines.”
“He’s mine, Finn,” Kent said, his tone warning.
“And you’re letting your property depreciate due to poor maintenance,” Finn shot back, his logic cold and mercantile. “Look at him upstairs. He’s crashed. He’s useless to you now, tonight. Maybe for days. Is that what you want? A toy that breaks after one rough party?”
Kent took a swig of beer, thinking. “What are you proposing?”
“A controlled environment,” Finn said, leaning against the counter. “Uninterrupted access. Time to fix the damage you’ve done and install deeper, more resilient programming. A month.”
Kent barked a laugh. “A month? I’m not giving him to you for a month.”
“You’re not ‘giving’ him,” Finn corrected, his eyes gleaming. “You’re outsourcing his optimization. You’ll get back a far more valuable asset. And during that month, you and Tim won’t be deprived.”
He laid out his plan with chilling, adolescent clarity:
1. The Cover: “Lukas can’t just vanish. His job will ask questions. You will contact them. Tell them a family emergency has come up—a sick relative abroad. He needs to take a month’s leave of absence. You’ll forge the necessary documents. It maintains the public façade.”
2. The Opportunity: “While he’s here with me, you and Tim move into his apartment. It’s private, it’s his space you can defile, and it gets you out from under your parents' roof. You can… express yourselves freely there, without interruption.” The implication was clear: they could bring home whoever they wanted, do whatever they wanted, in Lukas’s own home.
3. The Terms: “Lukas stays with me. Here. Alone. For one calendar month. You do not visit. You do not call for him. He is in total isolation for system recovery and upgrade. The only exception,” Finn held up a finger, “is on my request. There are… advanced modules I cannot install myself yet. When the time is right, I will call for you and Tim to assist with specific, practical training.” A faint, cold smile touched his lips. “I have theories on conditioned sexual response that require… active participants. But I am not yet of age to execute them personally.”
Kent was silent, turning the proposal over in his mind. It was audacious. It gave Finn an enormous amount of control. But it also solved problems for him: a playpen for him and Tim, and the promise of a truly broken, perfectly obedient slave returned to him in a month. The trade-off was power, but Kent had seen the results. Finn’s methods worked.
“And after the month?” Kent asked finally.
“He returns to you. A fully optimized instrument. Responsive to your commands, resistant to external corruption, and,” Finn added, the salesman closing the deal, “installed with new protocols specifically for your use with Tim and your… guests. He’ll be party-proof.”
Kent studied his younger friend. The boy wasn’t just a sadist; he was a visionary of control. He was offering a service Kent couldn’t provide himself. He nodded slowly. “One month. Not a day more. And I have access to the apartment immediately.”
“Of course,” Finn said. “The keys are in his jacket downstairs. Consider it an advance payment.”
They shook on it, a deal between businessmen over the fate of a human being.
When Finn returned to his room, Lukas was still asleep, a lump under the thin blanket. Finn didn’t wake him. He sat at his desk, opened a notebook, and began to outline a new, more intensive curriculum. A month of total immersion. No outside world. No conflicting commands. Just Finn and the raw material of Lukas’s psyche. He would strip away the last fragments of the old Lukas, the one who could still panic in a crowd, and rebuild him from the ground up. Not just as a slave, or a worshipper, but as a flawless, adaptive system.
He looked over at the sleeping form. The party had been a setback, a viral infection. But now, he had the ultimate privilege: quarantine. He would purge the infection. He would rewrite the code. And he would create something beautiful, terrible, and utterly his.
When Lukas awoke hours later, stiff and disoriented on the floor, Finn was waiting.
“Get up,” Finn said, not unkindly, but with the distant focus of a surgeon. “Your Owner has agreed to an upgrade cycle. You are now in my exclusive custody for the next thirty days. All previous protocols are suspended. We are beginning a new, foundational module. Phase One: Total Environmental Control.”
He handed Lukas a glass of water. “Drink. Your system requires hydration. Then, we begin the purge of the corrupt data from last night. We will start by you describing, in precise detail, every point of failure you experienced. Every moment you felt fear, confusion, or pain that was not sanctified. We will analyze each one. And then,” Finn’s eyes glinted in the morning light, “we will debug you.”
Lukas drank the water, his hands trembling slightly. The world outside this room, the party, Kent, Tim, his apartment—it was all being formatted away. There was only the Great Lord Finn, the blank slate of his own mind, and the terrifying promise of being debugged. He felt a profound, shameful wave of relief. The chaos was over. The programming was about to resume.
The fleeting thoughts of his apartment, his job, the echo of a life called “Lukas Müller,” were like static on a poorly tuned radio. They flickered for less than a second before a stronger, clearer signal drowned them out.
The signal was Finn.
Not as a person, but as a constellation of sacred sensations. The memory of Finn’s foot on his neck wasn’t a memory of pain; it was the memory of touch. The most intimate, defining touch he had ever known. The softness of the arch against his lips wasn’t just skin; it was the texture of paradise. The scent that lingered on his palate—a mix of clean cotton, boyish sweat, and something uniquely, intoxicatingly Finn—was the only perfume that had ever mattered. It was the smell of ownership, of home, of divine attention.
Compared to that, his old life was a pale, tasteless dream. A hotel lobby, a lonely apartment, the hollow echo of his own name—they were props from a play he’d never been any good at. The desires that had haunted him since he was twenty—the vague yearning for a master, for control, for surrender—had been shapeless ghosts. Then Finn had appeared, not as a master, but as a lord. A young, cruel, breathtakingly beautiful god who didn’t just wield power, but who defined it. Who didn’t just accept worship, but who architected it.
Finn’s voice cut through his reverie, sharp and clear. “Your mind is wandering to corrupted sectors. We will format them.”
Lukas looked up from his place on the floor. Finn stood over him, not with anger, but with the focused intensity of a sculptor looking at a block of marble, seeing the form within that needed to be freed. Any lingering anxiety about his abandoned life, about the strangers who now had the keys to his apartment, evaporated. They were irrelevant. They were users of a vacant shell. His reality was here, in this room, at these feet.
“This thing’s mind has no sectors but those you designate, Great Lord Finn,” Lukas heard himself say, the words flowing from a place deeper than thought.
A flicker of satisfaction, cold and bright, passed through Finn’s eyes. “Good. Then we begin the format. The ‘Lukas’ who had a job, an apartment, a life—that is residual data. Noise. We will overwrite it. For the next month, your entire existence will be this house. Your world will be these rooms. Your purpose will be my instruction. Your identity will be what I code into you. Do you understand?”
It wasn’t a question of consent. It was a system check.
“This thing understands. The old files are ready for deletion.”
“The first step,” Finn said, walking to his desk and picking up a small, blank notebook and a pen. “Is to document the corruption. You will write down every memory of your former life that comes to you. Not in sentences. In keywords. ‘Hotel.’ ‘Keychain.’ ‘Mother.’ ‘Sofa.’ We will not give them power by narrative. We will reduce them to sterile entries. Then, we will burn them.”
He tossed the notebook and pen at Lukas’s feet. “Begin. Now. Until I tell you to stop.”
Lukas picked up the tools. He did not think of them as tools of expression, but as instruments of excision. He opened the notebook. The first word that surfaced was “Reception.” He wrote it down. It felt like drawing a tumor from his mind and pinning it to the page. “Paycheck.” “Neighbors.” “Gym.” Each word was a piece of the phantom limb of his old self, severed and catalogued for disposal. He wrote without emotion, as a pathologist might list symptoms. The scent of Finn’s skin in his memory was a far more powerful reality than any of these dead symbols on a page.
Hours passed in silent, systematic purging. Finn occasionally glanced over, not reading the words, but observing the process, the emptying of the vessel.
Finally, as dusk bled outside the window, Finn spoke. “Enough. The catalogue is sufficient for now.” He took the notebook, scanned the list of sterile, lonely words—“Dentist.” “Supermarket.” “Netflix.”—and his lip curled in disdain. “This is the ‘you’ you clung to? Pathetic.”
He walked to a small metal trash can. He didn’t tear the pages out. He simply dropped the entire notebook inside. Then, from his pocket, he produced a cheap lighter. He flicked it alight and held the flame to the corner of the notebook’s cover.
The paper caught, orange and hungry. The words “Reception,” “Paycheck,” “Neighbors” curled, blackened, and vanished into smoke and fragile ash.
Lukas watched, kneeling, as the physical record of Lukas Müller was consumed. He felt nothing but a quiet, final click in his mind, like a door locking shut. There was no grief. There was only the clearing of disk space.
“The purge is initiated,” Finn stated, stamping out the last ember. “Now, we install the new operating system. Your first lesson begins tomorrow at dawn. You will sleep here, on the floor, to reinforce your new environment. Your dreams will be the only remnants of the old data, and we will erase them upon waking.”
He pointed to the blanket. “Sleep. And when you wake, you will not be who you were. You will be what I am making you. And what I am making,” Finn said, his voice dropping to a whisper that was more terrifying than any shout, “will be so much more beautiful than anything you ever dreamed.”
Lukas lay down, pulling the rough blanket over himself. He didn’t think of his stolen apartment, or his worried boss. He focused on the phantom sensation of Finn’s sole against his lips, the remembered scent that was his new air. Finn was the balm for every unformed desire he’d ever had. The master he’d dreamed of was a vague shadow. The lord he now served was a brilliant, demanding, beautiful sun. And as he drifted into the darkness, he knew with absolute certainty that he would burn up completely in its light, and he would call it salvation.
Dear readers, I eagerly await your opinions and expectations regarding the story, and I would be very keen to hear if there are any particular scenes or events you would like to read about in the upcoming parts.
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