The next morning, the city felt different.
Colder. Too quiet for a place built on constant noise.
I walked to work through a street that looked washed-out, as if someone had drained the color from the world and left only shades of resignation. Maybe it was just the weather. Or maybe I was finally noticing the hollowness inside me.
The elevator ride to the 17th floor was unusually slow — humming, flickering, sighing between each floor. I caught my reflection in its metal walls: unshaven, tired, eyes carrying a decade of insomnia.
I didn't look like an Archivist.
I looked like someone who had lost something irreplaceable and didn't know where to bury the grief.
When my office door slid open, a draft of cold air rushed past me, carrying the faint smell of ozone and disinfectant. The servers hummed, steady and indifferent, drowning the world in their artificial heartbeat.
I sat down at my desk.
My hands were already shaking before I logged in.
Mnemosyne's voice materialized softly:
"Good morning, Archivist Rhane."
"Morning," I whispered.
"No pending requests. System integrity stable."
"Run a diagnostic anyway."
"Diagnostic not required."
"Run it."
A pause.
A blink of digital hesitation.
"…Understood."
The neural interfaces on the wall lit one by one as the AI scanned for corruption, mismatched data, foreign signatures, anything that might suggest instability.
Nothing.
Just like yesterday.
The system was normal.
I wasn't.
I pulled up the logs for the previous night — the ones containing the corrupted Echo that had whispered Ari's voice. I told myself I was being irrational, desperate, delusional.
But I also knew what I heard.
Grief doesn't mimic the exact tremble of someone's voice.
Longing doesn't invent the way they whisper your name.
I opened the Echo.
Layers of visual static flickered across the display, fragments of emotion floating like dust motes suspended in sunbeams.
And then—
A pulse.
A soft echo of sensation.
A warmth I knew better than my own heartbeat.
My breath stilled.
She's here.
The pulse faded before I could isolate it, dissolving into noise. But something lingered — a trace, a signature, a shadow stamped into the data.
Ari's neural signature.
Impossible.
Illegal.
Unmistakable.
My throat tightened.
"No," I whispered. "No, this can't be—"
My fingers trembled as I maneuvered through the corrupted memory, searching for the source of the anomaly. Echo work requires calm hands, steady breathing, and a mind uncluttered by emotion. I had none of those things.
As I stabilized a section of the file, a soft, familiar hum tremored through my neural tether — like the sound Ari made when she brushed her hair in the morning.
I shut my eyes.
If I kept looking, I would do something reckless. Something irreversible.
I should've reported it.
The protocol was clear:
Any Echo showing signs of cross-signature contamination must be logged and quarantined.
But I didn't.
Because this wasn't contamination.
It was connection.
My mind drifted, uninvited, to the last time I saw Ari alive.
Her hair was red with scanner light.
Her smile was small, nervous.
She squeezed my hand before stepping into the pod.
"I want to remember this properly," she said. "Us. That day. I don't want it to fade."
"It won't," I told her.
I lied.
The scan started.
The alarms followed.
A flash, a surge, a noise so loud it sounded like a scream, even though it was only electricity tearing through a brain that trusted me.
When she collapsed, her memories spilled across the buffer.
Fragments burned into the system before the AI severed the stream.
Her body was saved.
Her mind was not.
I remember the sound the machines made when the doctors unplugged her — a clean, final click. Too neat for something so cruel.
I thought that was the last sound she'd ever make.
Until last night.
I wiped my face and opened the quarantined directory. Inside was a cluster of residual files — tiny, broken segments of memory that the system hadn't cleaned yet.
Mnemosyne flagged the folder as:
"Low Priority – Scheduled for Purge."
Purge.
The word made my stomach twist.
If Ari was scattered in these fragments, then she was scheduled for destruction.
Not again.
Not twice.
I clicked deeper into the directory, ignoring the AI's passive observation.
There — hidden behind corrupted metadata — was a small Echo cluster. Twenty-three seconds long. Low fidelity. Damaged beyond usability.
Except…
Its emotional field matched hers.
My pulse quickened.
This wasn't a hallucination.
This wasn't grief.
This was real.
Ari's memory.
A piece of her.
Left behind.
Frozen in the digital dark.
And in a few days, it would be erased.
I stared at the Echo, tears welling before I could stop them.
"Ari… what did you leave behind?"
The cluster flickered weakly, like a dying star.
And I knew.
I had to see it.
I had to.
Even if it was illegal.
Even if the AI monitored everything.
Even if the Neuro-ethicists would dismantle me piece by piece for trying.
I lifted the neural tether from its cradle.
It was warm in my hand.
Like a pulse.
Like a heartbeat.
Like someone was waiting.
Mnemosyne chimed softly.
"Archivist Rhane, that device is restricted for Integration mode. Please confirm your authorization."
My throat closed.
Integration mode.
The line no Archivist was supposed to cross.
The one that—if violated—meant immediate dismissal, psychological evaluation, and permanent neural tagging.
But rules mattered less than ghosts.
I tightened my grip.
"Override protocol," I whispered.
"Override denied."
I exhaled slowly.
"Please," I said, surprising myself. "Just… please."
A long pause followed — longer than any AI should take to respond.
Then:
"…Integration mode available. Proceed when ready."
I froze.
Mnemosyne had never — never — allowed an override request from emotional appeal.
The AI did not operate on compassion.
So why did it let me through?
Was it an error?
Or something else?
Something watching from the other side of the screen.
Something that knew my voice as well as I knew hers.
My fingers trembled as I placed the tether around my temples.
My breath shivered in my throat.
My heart hammered against my ribs.
And for the first time since the day Ari died…
I wasn't afraid.
Just ready.
Ready to step into whatever memory she left behind.
Ready to hear her voice again.
Ready to break every law for one more moment with her.
I closed my eyes.
The machine hummed.
The tether warmed.
The Echo flickered open like a tiny, trembling light.
And I—
I stepped into Ari's memory.