Scene: A Blight of Data
Elara Vance didn't wear black for stealth; she wore it because the rest of the world looked too bright. Tonight, the black helped her merge with the shadows of the abandoned warehouse district, its corroded steel echoing with the slap of the damp San Francisco bay wind.
Her breath plumed white as she crouched beneath a loading ramp, staring at the rear entrance of a building that looked like a sleek, obsidian tomb: the west coast R&D facility for Reveri.
She ran a thumb over the cold, aluminum shell of the Memory Recorder prototype cradled in her backpack—a palm-sized device that looked deceptively like a high-end external hard drive. It was stolen two days ago from a low-level tech she'd cornered in a parking garage. It was her ticket to exposing Krane, and her death warrant if she got caught.
Her earpiece crackled.
"You're late, Vance. And loud. I can hear your cynicism vibrating the airwaves."
It was ZERO, the hacker. The voice was synthesized, emotionless, and irritatingly superior.
"I'm here," Elara murmured. "The surveillance feed on the dock door is static. Your doing?"
"My art," ZERO corrected. "You have exactly four minutes to insert the Recorder into the data conduit in the maintenance tunnel. It's a clean uplink. It'll clone the last 72 hours of Krane's private R&D logs. After that, the security loop resets, and you'll have a permanent spot on the FBI's Most Wanted list—digitally engraved, of course."
Elara stood, moving with the practiced quiet of someone who'd spent two years running from ghosts. She used a small laser torch to slice through the old dock-door lock—a meaningless gesture, since the door was secondary to Reveri's high-tech security grid.
Inside, the maintenance tunnel was sterile and cold, smelling of ionized air and ozone. She moved fast, her eyes scanning the ceiling for thermal sensors. She found the conduit—a fat bundle of optical cable wrapped in armored conduit—and quickly clipped the Memory Recorder into the junction box.
The device instantly hummed to life, a small blue light pulsing, indicating a rapid data siphon.
"Three minutes, thirty seconds," ZERO advised. "The cloning is successful. Get out."
Elara turned to leave, but something made her hesitate. Not a sound, but a feeling—a sudden, deep-seated terror that wasn't her own. She stopped, pressing her back against the cold concrete.
Then the world fractured.
It was a Ghost Flare. A side-effect of Krane's imperfect forging.
The sterile tunnel warped, replaced by a blinding summer day. She was on a small pier. Her sister, ten years old, was laughing, holding out a handful of colorful seashells. A man's face, smiling and familiar, was bending over them. And then, the memory—the original, traumatic, suppressed memory—cut through the peaceful image like a serrated blade.
The memory wasn't hers. It belonged to the original owner of the Memory Recorder she had stolen.
A flash of red light. A scream. The man's familiar face turning into a mask of sudden, cold panic.
The pain was physical, a migraine exploding behind her eyes. Elara gasped, clutching the wall for support.
"Vance! What is happening? Your vitals just spiked!" ZERO demanded.
"It's... the Recorder," Elara choked out, fighting for control. "I think the prototype stores latent memory trauma. It's flaring."
The image vanished as suddenly as it appeared. Elara was back in the cold tunnel, shivering, her heart hammering against her ribs. The blue light on the Memory Recorder turned solid, indicating the clone was complete.
"Get out," ZERO insisted, the synthesized voice now strained. "You need to wipe that device now."
Elara wrenched the Recorder free, shoved it into her bag, and sprinted back toward the dock door.
Krane's Counter
She was halfway out the door when a deep, resonant voice echoed through the tunnel.
"A shame, Miss Vance. After all your efforts, I'd hoped for a more graceful exit."
Elara froze. Standing at the end of the tunnel, lit dramatically by the overhead emergency lights, was Dr. Alistair Krane. He wasn't flanked by security guards, but by two figures in immaculate gray suits—Reveri's elite De-Coherence team.
Krane smiled—a warm, benevolent smile that never quite reached his eyes.
"You have something of ours," Krane said softly, walking toward her. "And judging by your complexion, you've just sampled the price of truth. Don't worry, Elara. We'll simply replace your painful ghost with a beautiful, custom-forged future."