Kai stared at his reflection in the broken mirror hanging on the wall of his small apartment. Three days had passed since the raid on the underground memory market, and sleep had become a stranger to him. The fragments of stolen memories still swirled in his mind like pieces of a shattered puzzle.
The door chimed softly as Maya entered. She carried two cups of synthetic coffee, steam rising from the cheap plastic containers.
"You look terrible," she said, setting one cup on his cluttered desk.
Kai turned away from the mirror. "I feel worse than I look."
"The memories from the market?" Maya asked, settling into the worn chair across from him.
He nodded. "They're not fading like they should. Usually, when I extract memories, they dissolve after a few hours unless I store them properly. But these... they're getting stronger."
Maya leaned forward. "What kind of memories are they?"
"That's the problem. They don't feel like normal memories. They're too vivid, too real." Kai picked up the coffee cup, his hands trembling slightly. "They feel like they're mine, but I know they're not."
One memory in particular haunted him. It was of a woman with silver hair standing in a laboratory filled with strange devices. She was speaking to someone Kai couldn't see, warning them about "the fractures spreading between dimensions."
"There's something else," Kai continued. "The woman in the memories... she knew about memory merchants. She called us 'dimensional anchors.'"
Maya's expression grew serious. "That's impossible. Memory merchants have only existed for twenty years, since the neural interface technology was developed."
"I know what's impossible," Kai said. "But I also know what I saw. She mentioned someone called the Architect, and she was terrified of him."
The broken mirror caught Kai's attention again. In the fractured reflection, he could swear he saw not just his own face, but others superimposed over it. Faces he didn't recognize but somehow knew.
"Maya," he said quietly, "what if the memories we extract don't just disappear? What if they go somewhere else?"
"What do you mean?"
"What if every memory we've ever handled has been stored somewhere, building up like layers of paint on a wall? And what if someone has been collecting them all this time?"
Maya stood up abruptly. "Kai, you're scaring me. These thoughts... they don't sound like you."
But as she spoke, another wave of foreign memories crashed over him. This time, he saw himself—but older, standing in a vast chamber filled with floating memory crystals. The older version of himself was speaking to a figure shrouded in darkness.
"The anchors are weakening," the older Kai was saying. "The barriers between dimensions won't hold much longer."
The shadowy figure replied in a voice that chilled Kai to his core: "Then it's time to begin the final harvest."
Kai gasped and stumbled backward, knocking over his coffee cup. The brown liquid spread across his desk, soaking into papers and notebooks.
"Kai!" Maya rushed to his side.
"I think I'm losing my mind," he whispered. "Or maybe I'm finding it. I don't know which is worse."
He looked at the broken mirror one more time, and for just a moment, all the fractured pieces seemed to align, showing him a complete image. But it wasn't his reflection he saw—it was the silver-haired woman from the memories, and she was looking directly at him.
Her lips moved, and though he couldn't hear the words, he somehow understood her message: "Find the Source. Before he finds you."
Then the mirror shattered completely, sending glittering fragments across the floor.
Maya grabbed his arm. "We need to leave. Now."
"Why?"
"Because someone's been watching your apartment for the past hour, and they just started moving toward the building."
As if on cue, the lights in the apartment flickered and went out. In the darkness, Kai could hear footsteps in the hallway outside, slow and deliberate.
The memories weren't just haunting him—they were a warning. And now, whatever force had been hunting through dimensions had found him.