THE INVITATION
CHARPER 1:
Lena Voss hadn't touched her quantum rig in three years.
Not since the day she divorced Marcus Hale and watched half her memories flicker out like dying stars.
The rig sat in the corner of her loft like a relic: matte-black headset, neural lace coils, the faint smell of ozone still clinging to the ports. She'd meant to sell it. She'd meant to do a lot of things.
Instead, she poured herself another glass of red and stared out the rain-slick window at the city below. Seattle, December 24, 2025. Christmas Eve, though the holidays had felt hollow since the split. The Space Needle glowed in the distance, strung with lights that looked too cheerful for her mood.
Her wrist implant chimed. Not a call—an echo request.
Incoming quantum packet. Source: unknown. Timestamp: impossible.
Lena frowned. Echo requests were supposed to be routed through licensed therapists only. Hers had been revoked the day she quit the Institute.
She almost dismissed it. Curiosity won.
"Accept," she said aloud.
The room dimmed as the packet unpacked itself into the air above her coffee table. A hologram blossomed: a woman who looked exactly like Lena, but harder around the eyes. Same dark hair pulled into a severe knot, same faint scar on the left eyebrow from a childhood fall. But this version wore the white coat of an active quantum therapist, and her expression was urgent.
"Lena," the echo said. Her voice carried the slight distortion of cross-timeline compression. "If you're seeing this, the merge window is still open. Do not go to the ceremony tomorrow. Do not sign the reunion protocol. He's lying about the stabilization patch. It's not a fix—it's a harvest."
The echo leaned closer, pixels glitching at the edges.
"I know you think you closed the door. You didn't. You only locked it from your side. He still has the key."
The hologram froze, then shattered into blue static that dissolved into nothing.
Lena stood motionless, wineglass halfway to her lips. Her pulse thudded in her ears.
A harvest.
That word had been whispered in the Institute's darker corridors. A myth, most said. The idea that someone—some corporation, some rogue coder—had found a way to siphon emotional residue from merged timelines. Raw human data: love, rage, grief, desire. The most valuable currency in the age of predictive AI.
She hadn't believed it. Not until now.
Her implant chimed again. This time, a simple text invitation on elegant black card stock, projected in augmented reality.
Mr. Marcus Hale
requests the honor of your presence
at the renewal of vows
December 25, 2025
The Observatory at Dawn
Private ceremony. Quantum merge optional.
Below the formal text, in Marcus's unmistakable handwriting—digitized but still his looping scrawl—was a single line:
I fixed it, Lena. Come home.
She laughed once, sharp and bitter. Home. As if their marriage had ever been a place instead of a war zone.
They had pioneered quantum divorce together. Back when the tech was new, when the Institute still pretended it was therapy instead of erasure.
Traditional divorce left scars: shared friends divided, finances gutted, memories that hurt to touch. Quantum divorce offered a cleaner cut. You sat in adjacent pods, neural laces connected, and the algorithm mapped every moment you'd spent together. Then it branched.
One timeline kept the marriage intact. The other stripped it away, grafting over the gaps with plausible fictions. You woke up believing you'd never met. Or that it had ended amicably years earlier. Or—if you paid for the premium package—that you'd simply grown apart without bitterness.
Lena and Marcus had been the golden couple demonstrating the process. Live-streamed keynote at the 2022 Quantum Wellness Summit. "Healing Through Separation," they'd called it.
Behind the scenes, it tore them apart in ways the algorithm couldn't predict. Marcus wanted children in the kept timeline. Lena didn't. The algorithm couldn't reconcile that, so it split them anyway—one reality where they had two daughters, another where they never tried.
Lena got the empty one.
She'd quit the field six months later. Marcus stayed, climbing the ranks until he founded his own startup: Echo Stabilization Solutions. A company that promised to "smooth the edges" of fractured timelines.
And now he wanted her back.
Lena drained the wine and set the glass down hard enough to crack the stem.
She should delete the invitation. Block his signature. Move cities again.
Instead, she walked to the rig in the corner and brushed dust from the headset.
The neural lace still fit perfectly, cool filaments settling against her scalp like old friends. She hesitated only a moment before powering it on.
The interface bloomed in her vision: soft blues and silvers, the Institute's old color scheme. Her credentials were long revoked, but Marcus had always been sloppy with backdoors. She slipped through one he'd left years ago—his birthday as the passkey, unchanged.
She pulled public records first. Marcus Hale, 37, CEO of Echo Stabilization Solutions. Net worth north of two hundred million. Recent patent filings: "Emotional Residue Mitigation in Multi-Timeline Reintegration."
Then private channels. Restricted forums for high-tier therapists. Whispers about unauthorized merges. Clients waking up with memories that didn't belong to them. One post, anonymous, dated three weeks ago:
He's marrying her again. The original subject. If the harvest works, they'll roll it out to premium clients by Q2. We're talking petabytes of raw affect data. Enough to train the next generation of companion AIs. Real feeling, not simulation.
Lena logged out. Her hands were shaking.
She told herself she was going for answers. To warn him, maybe. Or to confront him.
But deep down, in the part of her that still woke up reaching for a body that wasn't there, she knew the truth.
She was going because she wanted to see if anything was left.
Christmas morning dawned cold and clear. Lena wore black—simple wool coat, boots, no jewelry. The Observatory at Dawn was a private venue atop a hill in Bellevue, all glass and steel with a 360-degree view of the Cascades. Marcus had rented the entire place.
A lone attendant scanned her invitation at the entrance, expression neutral. Inside, the space was empty except for a single arch of white roses and a quantum officiant pod humming softly in the center.
Marcus stood beneath the arch in a charcoal suit, hands clasped behind his back. He looked exactly the same: tall, dark hair starting to silver at the temples, the faint scar on his jaw from a sailing accident they'd shared in another life.
His eyes lit when he saw her.
"You came," he said softly.
"Don't look so surprised." Lena stopped a few feet away. "I'm here to tell you no."
He smiled—the same crooked smile that used to undo her. "You haven't heard the offer yet."
"I've heard enough." She glanced at the pod. State-of-the-art, far beyond Institute specs. "Stabilization patch, right? Fix the emotional leakage between timelines?"
"Exactly." He stepped closer. "You feel it too, don't you? The echoes. Dreams that aren't yours. Moments you swear happened differently."
She couldn't deny it. Last month she'd found herself crying over the death of a daughter she'd never had. The grief had been visceral, physical.
"It's getting worse," Marcus continued. "For both of us. The divergence stress. But I found a way to braid the timelines back together without losing the good parts."
"At what cost?" she asked.
He paused. "Some data sharing. Anonymous. The system learns from our emotional patterns, refines itself. In return, we get wholeness."
"Harvest," she said flatly.
Marcus's expression flickered. "That's an ugly word."
"It's the accurate one."
He sighed. "Lena, we were the best thing either of us ever had. You know it. I know it. The algorithm knows it—that's why it's fighting to keep us connected across branches. This isn't about data. It's about us."
She studied his face, searching for the lie. He'd always been good at telling her what she needed to hear.
"And if I walk away?"
The hum of the pod deepened, as if listening.
"Then the echoes keep coming," he said quietly. "Until one day you won't know which memories are real. You'll lose yourself piece by piece. I've seen it happen to others."
He held out his hand.
"One ceremony. One merge. If it doesn't feel right, we can divorce again—clean this time. No leakage. I'll sign whatever you want."
Lena stared at his outstretched hand. The same hand that had once traced constellations on her skin in the dark. The hand that had signed the dissolution papers without a fight.
She thought of the echo's warning.
Do not sign the reunion protocol.
But she also thought of the emptiness that had lived in her chest for three years. The way her apartment felt too quiet. The way she still set two wineglasses on the counter out of habit.
She took his hand.
The pod opened like a flower, revealing two contoured seats facing each other, neural laces dangling like silver vines.
Marcus squeezed her fingers. "Together?"
Lena nodded once.
They stepped inside.
As the pod sealed around them and the laces connected, Lena felt the first tug—not painful, but deep. Like something buried inside her was being pulled toward the surface.
Marcus's voice came through the shared neural link, warm and intimate.
Welcome home, love.
For one brief moment, she believed him.
Then the merge began, and the screaming started—not hers, not his, but a thousand versions of them both, echoing across timelines that were never meant to touch.
And somewhere in the dark between worlds, something vast and hungry opened its eyes.