The tenement's old ventilation shaft howled above Eira, a mechanical shriek from the age before soundproofing, carrying with it dust and grime from a forgotten system. He sat cross-legged in the narrow crawlspace beneath the floor, where the air was still and heavy, the warmth of his body barely enough to keep the cold off the metal panels pressing into his back.
The data drive lay in front of him, its indicator pulsing a steady red. It hadn't done that before.
Eira stared at it for a long minute, then exhaled slowly. "Alright, let's see what you're hiding."
He plugged it into the portable terminal—a hacked-together relic of processor boards, thermal fuses, and jury-rigged voltage bypasses. A machine that looked like it had been born in pain, which wasn't far from the truth. He'd built it years ago, after his first skirmish with the Bureau.
The terminal beeped, and a prompt blinked onto the screen.
TIB ARCHIVE // ENCRYPTION DETECTED
REQUIRES BIOMETRIC CONFIRMATION TO ACCESS FULL CONTENTS
Biometric? That was new. The list from earlier hadn't required anything but decryption. He frowned.
His fingers flew across the interface, launching a bypass protocol he hadn't used in months.
Override initiated...
The drive began to resist. Not just deny access—it actively fought him. Power spikes surged through the port. His terminal flickered, its cooling fan spun into a low whine.
Trace initiated.
Eira froze.
That wasn't just a defense. That was a signal. The drive wasn't just blocking his access. It was trying to go home.
He yanked the cable, but it was too late. A pulse of light flashed across his HUD, and his internal timer blinked.
LIFE REMAINING: 9 Days, 17 Hours, 12 Minutes
He stared at it.
LIFE REMAINING: 9 Days, 17 Hours, 2 Minutes
His blood turned to ice.
He hadn't spent any time.
He hadn't authorized a trade.
He hadn't even moved.
"No..."
Another 10 minutes. Gone. Vanished.
His hands shook. He tapped the implant node near his collarbone. It chirped in response.
No recent transactions. No donations. No losses.
Bullshit.
He launched the diagnostics tool. The logs had gaps. Empty fields. Corrupted metadata. His implant wasn't lying; it had been made to forget.
Someone had tunneled into his life counter and drained him directly.
"Is that what you do now?" he hissed at the chip. "You punish anyone who opens you?"
He stood up, hitting his head on the beam above him. He didn't care. Sweat broke out along his back, his breath sharp in his throat. Someone had watched him. Not just monitored. Reached into him.
Every implant had protections—even low-grade models like his had ledger logs, sub-second audits. But this bypassed all of that.
Not a hack.
A recall.
The drive wasn't just a record. It was a trap. If it had leaked or been stolen, it made sense someone would embed a kill-switch.
But why not drain him completely? Why just 10 minutes?
A warning.
He scrambled to the tin-lined storage and tossed the chip back in, slamming the lid shut. He wrapped it in fiberweave and stuffed it in a degaussed field case. Not perfect protection, but enough to slow another pulse.
His timer remained steady.
9 Days, 17 Hours, 2 Minutes
But he couldn't stop watching it.
He stumbled out into the hallway, the stink of recycled coolant and heat-exhaust hitting him like a punch. His neighbor across the hall was coughing again, the wet, gravelled sound of someone too poor to buy more time for their lungs.
Eira didn't even glance over.
The elevator was out—again—so he took the stairs three flights down to the underground tram that still ran on magnetic residuals. No ticket needed. No questions asked.
He needed to find Tarin.
The ex-government hacker knew these systems, and if anyone could tell him how his implant had been hacked without tripping a Bureau flag, it was Tarin.
And he'd better have answers.
The tram squealed into motion, sparks illuminating Eira's haunted reflection in the dirty glass. His face looked older, somehow. Less time on his clock, or just the terror of knowing how fragile the illusion of safety was?
Across from him, a woman in a silver-lined jacket with a commercial sync band smiled at a blinking console.
LIFE REMAINING: 88 Years, 3 Months
She didn't even look at it. Just kept scrolling through messages.
Eira looked down at his own HUD.
9 Days, 17 Hours, 2 Minutes
Then he looked at her again. Envy twisted inside him, but it wasn't simple jealousy.
It was rage.
She would never have to claw for minutes. Never have to dodge death by delay. Her life was a fortress. His was a leaky faucet, one stolen drop at a time.
And now someone had decided he'd seen too much. Or lived too long.
He touched the spot on his neck where the implant ticked. Not just a machine. Not anymore.
A target.
Someone was watching.
And there would be no reset.
To be continued…