The rooftop in the photograph was unfamiliar, yet something visceral cracked inside Mira the moment she saw it—like déjà vu with teeth. Her own smile felt alien, those arms wrapped around the stranger too casual, too intimate to be a mere trick of editing.
She paced her small apartment, holding the data slip up to the light. There had been no contact, no chip signature attached. Whoever he was, he'd masked himself expertly. Ghosts with clean footprints. Whoever he was… he remembered a version of her life she didn't.
Sleep was out of the question.
By midmorning, Mira was threading her way through the illegal layers of the city—down into Spiral 14, where corporate firewalls flickered in and out like ghosts and illegal memory syncing was just another market item in neon-lit stalls. She sought one man: Dray, a rogue neural broker known for syncing people with suppressed or stolen memories... for a price.
"Echo fragments?" Dray said, running a scanner over the memory coin, brow furrowing. "These haven't surfaced since the Cog Erasure Acts. Where'd you get it?"
"It found me."
Dray frowned but reluctantly agreed to extract a memory sample and examine its waveform signature. The setup was crude—neural wet threads linked to an analog processor, her hand trembling as she slid the coin into the reader.
The moment it connected, her vision dimmed.
Heat. Screaming metal. Airtime.
And her—crying. Standing on a rooftop. Wind lashing through her short-cropped hair—not her current cut, but a different one. Her voice demanding, "We weren't supposed to forget. We chose to remember."
Then—fire. Red light swallowing the sky. A figure lunging toward her. The unknown man from the café, gripping her shoulders. "Don't trust the Archivists," he said, echo breaking around him. "If they find you—"
Mira gasped, ripping the neural leads off as power surged and shorted the console. Sparks spat across Dray's equipment. "There's more in that coin than you're ready for," he growled. "Someone sliced your neural timeline. You're split across branches. That's why this isn't just a glitch."
Dizzy, Mira staggered to the exit, the burnt scent of plastic nerves in the air. But just before she left, Dray grabbed her shoulder.
"One last thing," he said quietly, nodding at the photo on his console. "You didn't ask me about her, but… this woman?"
Mira froze. Onscreen, enhanced from a blurred frame in the echo—
Ava Leone.
Eliah. Facial match: 92.7%.
The woman she loved may not be who she claims to be.
To be continue...