Eira Lovell stood at the edge of the steel balcony, staring down at the city of New Avalon as it pulsed with life below her. The sprawling metropolis stretched to the horizon, a maze of neon lights, steel towers, and flickering holograms. The hum of the city was constant, the soft buzz of machines mingling with the rhythm of human existence. But for Eira, it was always too quiet. The world felt too still, as if something was missing.
The air was thick with the scent of synthetic flowers that bloomed in holographic gardens scattered across the city. A stark contrast to the cold, sterile atmosphere of her lab. There, in the heart of the Memoria Systems facility, she spent her days buried in data streams, analyzing artificial intelligence, and attempting to crack the mysteries of the human mind through algorithms. But no matter how much progress she made, no matter how many neural networks she connected, something in her felt disconnected from it all.
Her fingers twitched nervously as she tapped on her tablet, bringing up a new set of data: Rowan Hale. The name appeared in glowing letters on the screen, but it wasn't just a name. It was a person, a memory, a ghost from the past. Someone who shouldn't have existed.
Rowan Hale had been a figure in history long erased, a revolutionary whose life and love had been wiped away by the government's careful manipulation of memory. She was part of the Mnemosyne Project, an experiment to retrieve and preserve lost memories, and yet… Eira had found something more. A memory—no, a connection—that shouldn't have been there. A memory that seemed to call to her across time.
Eira leaned closer to the screen, her breath shallow. This was it. The glitch she had been chasing for months, the anomaly that no one else seemed to notice. She had discovered a connection—a thread that tied her to Rowan Hale. A thread that shouldn't exist in any logical framework.
The room was dark, illuminated only by the soft glow of the screen in front of her. The silence felt heavy, pressing in on her as the system began to process the data. A soft whirring sound filled the air as the memory core began its initialization. The holographic interface shifted, revealing a faint outline of Rowan's face. It was blurry at first, the image flickering, but then it became clearer.
Rowan's eyes, dark and intense, seemed to look directly at Eira. The longer Eira stared at the image, the more the sense of familiarity grew. It was like looking into a mirror of someone she had never met. The connection was too strong, too real.
"Who are you?" Eira whispered, her voice trembling slightly.
The image on the screen blinked, as if acknowledging her question. Eira could have sworn that she saw a faint smile on Rowan's lips, one that was both knowing and sad, as if she had been waiting for Eira to find her.
And then the words appeared, typed out slowly on the screen: "I remember you."
Eira's heart skipped a beat. She stood frozen, unable to move as the words lingered in the air. The machine was malfunctioning, that much was clear. But the sensation, the feeling of something beyond the data, beyond the algorithms, was undeniable. Rowan Hale wasn't just a forgotten piece of history. She was alive. Somewhere. Somehow.
Eira backed away from the screen, her mind racing. This couldn't be possible. It was a glitch. A malfunction. Nothing more. But in her heart, she knew it wasn't just a machine error. There was something more to this. Something bigger.
As the screen flickered one last time, Eira whispered, her voice barely audible, "I remember you too."