Rain slashed through Neo-Tokyo's Mid-Tier like silver needles, ricocheting off the floating billboards that advertised the latest in cognitive euphoria:
"Tired of your past? MemoCorp's 'Clean Slate' procedure – 60% off this week!"
Kai Nakamura adjusted the neural dive mask over his face, feeling the cold pricks of its interface needles locking into his temples. The device hummed to life, casting a pale blue glow across his sharp features.
Target: Ryuji Sato, Senior VP of MemoCorp East Branch.
Memory: Project Pandora's neural schematics.
Payment: 50,000 CE.
He exhaled, watching his breath fog the visor.
"Beginning extraction in 3… 2…"
A voice crackled in his earpiece— YukiSato, his handler for tonight. Her tone was all business, but he could hear the faint tapping of her fingers against a keyboard, the way she always did when nervous.
"Kai, you've got a twelve-minute window before their security sweep. Don't get cute."
A smirk tugged at his lips. "When am I ever cute?"
"...1."
---
Kai's consciousness lurched forward, his vision dissolving into a tunnel of streaking light. When it cleared, he stood in RyujiSato's mindscape — a sterile, high-rise office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a digital Neo-Tokyo skyline.
Standard corporate psyche. No surprises yet.
Floating around him were fragments of Sato's memories—holograms of board meetings, family vacations, the occasional flicker of something darker, hastily tucked away. Kai reached for the neural thread pulsing in Sato's temporal lobe—the memory he'd been paid to steal.
But as his fingers brushed it, the thread twisted, revealing jagged fractures.
What the hell?
A voice echoed behind him, smooth and cold. "You shouldn't be here."
Kai spun.
A shadowy figure stood in the mindscape, its face a shifting mosaic of forgotten features. It wasn't a Memory Guard—those were programmed defenses, predictable. This was something else.
"Who—?"
The figure lunged.
Kai barely dodged, rolling as the office shattered around him. The windows cracked into screaming faces, the desk melted into a pool of liquid data.
Yuki's voice, urgent: "Kai, your vitals are spiking! Abort!"
"Not yet!" He gritted his teeth and grabbed the fractured memory thread—
---
The world blurred.
Suddenly, Kai wasn't in Sato's mind anymore.
He stood in a white room.
No doors. No windows. Just endless, sterile white.
And then — a child's whisper, so close it could have been his own breath.
"Don't trust the white room."
PAIN.
Searing, white-hot, like a neural drill boring into his skull.
Kai gasped as he jolted back to his body, his mask sparking violently. The rooftop. The rain. His hands shaking.
Yuki: "Kai?! Talk to me!"
He ripped off the mask, sucking in air like he'd been drowning. "The memory was tampered with. There was—"
A gunshot cracked the air. The rooftop ledge beside him exploded in concrete dust.
Corporate hunters. Three of them, clad in SynapTech armor, their visors scanning him with cold, mechanical precision.
"Shit." Kai was already moving, sprinting across the rain-slicked rooftops as bullets chewed the air behind him.
---
The Mid-Tier's neon arteriespulsed around him as Kai leapt between buildings, his enhanced reflexes the only thing keeping him ahead. The hunters were gaining.
"Yuki, I need an exit!"
"There's a neural café on Level 7—lose them in the crowd!"
Kai ducked into a vertical market street, where augmented vendors hawked bootleg memories and cognitive stimulants. A synth-pop ballad about lost love blared from a speaker, its melody syncing with the flickering ads overhead:
"Tired? Buy a Dream™—MemoCorp's patented happiness injections!"
He slid into the café just as the hunters rounded the corner. The interior was a haze of neural jacks and glowing brain scans—patrons lying in pods, their eyelids fluttering as they consumed stolen vacations.
Kai slapped a forged ID chip onto the counter. The clerk, a cyborg with one organic eye, squinted at it.
"Booth 12. Don't puke this time."
---
Inside the booth, Kai plugged into a securenode, his hands still unsteady. The white room lingered in his vision like a ghost.
"Yuki, pull the last five seconds of the memory I grabbed."
A hologram flickered to life. The corrupted memory played—Sato's face, sweating, as he whispered to someone off-screen:
"If the Board finds out we're testing on Lower Tier citizens, the whole—"
Then, the whiteroom again. The child's voice.
Kai's stomach twisted. That wasn't Sato's memory. That was… mine.
Yuki's breath hitched. "Kai, that glitch—it's a memory lock. Someone sealed part of your past. And whoever tampered with Sato's file knew you'd take this job."
A new alert flashed on Kai's display.
Unknown sender.
The message read:
"They're erasing us. Find me before you forget."
---
Yuki Sato's fingers danced across her holo-keyboard, the glow of six floating screens painting her apartment in eerie blue. Rewinding Kai's neural feed, she froze on the white room glitch.
"That's not just a memory lock," she muttered. "That's a firewall built into his mind."
Her cat, Circuit, bumped her elbow, demanding attention. She ignored him, zooming in on the child's whisper.
Voiceprint analysis: 89.7% match – KAI NAKAMURA (age 6-8).
Yuki's coffee went cold. He's hearing his own suppressed memories in someone else's head. That's… impossible.
A new alert flashed— MemoCorp Security Breach Detected. She'd tripped a trace by accessing Kai's files.
"Shit. Shit!" She slammed a fist on the desk, then typed furiously:
>> To Kai:They're tracking me. Ditching my node. Meet at Blackout Alley in 30.
She yanked the neural drive from her temple, blood trickling down her cheek. The screens died as she grabbed her coat and a stun-pistol from the drawer.
Circuit hissed at the door.
Yuki froze.
Three rhythmic knocks.
MemoCorp doesn't knock.
She peered through the thermalpeephole. A figure in a tattered hoodie stood there, their heat signature flickering like a dying bulb.
The knock came again. Then a voice, raspy but familiar:
"Yuki. It's Marcus. Kai sent me."
---
Kai stood at the edge of the Lower Tier, staring into the abyss of crumbling infrastructure and memory addicts huddled around trash fires. Somewhere down there was the sender.
Somewhere down there was a piece of himself.
He touched the neural jack at his temple, still warm from the extraction.
"Yuki. Cancel my next three jobs."
"You're going down there? Kai, if MemoCorp is really—"
"I know." His voice was quiet. "That's why I can't stop."
The rain swallowed him as he descended into the dark.
---