Scene: Tunnel Confrontation
Dr. Alistair Krane stepped closer, his tailored suit reflecting the emergency light, his smile too generous for the dark. The two De-Coherence agents—gray suits, cold eyes—moved silently to flank Elara.
"I expected more resistance, Miss Vance," Krane said, his voice a smooth, low register that usually calmed millions during his quarterly Reveri press conferences. "But the Ghost Flare is a potent cocktail, isn't it? That flash you felt—it was the original trauma fighting your mind's defense mechanism. You're lucky. Some minds simply shatter."
Elara's head throbbed. The residual terror from the stolen memory—the scream, the flash of red light—still clawed at the edges of her consciousness. But the pain brought a grim clarity. Krane wants this device back, and he wants me quiet.
"My mind's fine," Elara spat, her voice tight. "But I think yours is the one that's shattering, Doctor. You're rewriting history."
Krane chuckled, a warm, genuine sound that made him seem impossibly normal. "History is merely a narrative, Elara. We're just providing a better editor. Now, hand over the Recorder and we can discuss a comfortable, memory-forged retirement for you. Maybe a villa in Tuscany?"
As he spoke, Elara's fingers were already moving, discreetly pulling the Memory Recorder from her backpack. It was a prototype; she didn't know its limits. But she knew the tech was raw, violent.
"I prefer the truth," she whispered.
Before Krane could react, Elara slapped the Recorder onto the wet concrete floor, stomped on it with the heel of her boot, and simultaneously hammered the Transmit function she'd rigged into the casing.
The device didn't shatter; it overloaded.
It emitted an instantaneous, high-frequency EMP burst, not powerful enough to fry the entire grid, but localized enough to scramble the specialized electronics on Krane's team. The De-Coherence agents froze, their earpieces spitting static, the tiny surveillance optics in their gray suits dying.
But the EMP was secondary. The primary effect was the weaponization of the Ghost Flare itself.
The Recorder, overloaded, disgorged the raw, unedited, terrifying memory it had just cloned, broadcasting the trauma in an immediate, invasive psychic shockwave.
Krane and his agents collapsed, clutching their heads in silent, agonizing shock. They weren't experiencing the subtle memory flare Elara had felt—they were hit with the full, raw deletion file of a memory so traumatic it had required a specialized forge.
Elara didn't wait. She scooped up the still-humming Recorder, bolted out the dock door, and into the damp night air.
"ZERO! I'm out! Krane is here, he's got goons, and I just memory-fried his entourage! Where's my extraction?"
The synthesized voice in her earpiece was momentarily silent, replaced by a sound like rushing wind. "That was… aggressive, Vance. Your vitals are a mess. Krane's system has already issued a Level-3 Asset Recovery Alert. That means no police, no news, just his black-ops team."
"Tell me something I don't know."
"You're on the waterfront. Turn right, run for the ferry docks. A container is waiting, tag OMEGA-33. If you're not there in ninety seconds, assume I'm gone."
Elara ran. She sprinted down the rain-slicked concrete, dodging rusted shipping containers and weaving between idle forklifts. The Level-3 Alert was instant: within seconds, two sleek black drones detached from the Reveri building, their searchlights slicing through the mist, their optical sensors already mapping the terrain.
One beam found her.
She ducked behind a stack of blue containers as the drone hovered, its metallic shriek filling the air. She could hear the heavy thud of Krane's De-Coherence team recovering and beginning their pursuit.
She glanced at the Memory Recorder in her hand. The blue light was blinking red, a warning. The EMP had damaged it, making it dangerously unstable.
Ninety seconds. She had to get to the container. The chase was on.