POV: Cole Harker
The world rebuilds around him in silence.
Not the kind of silence he's used to—no faint hum of tower infrastructure, no Lucid whispering updates in his ear, no sound of his own curated breathing in the perfectly balanced penthouse air.
This silence is raw. Organic. Imperfect.
Then sound rushes in like a flood: the rush of wind, the rasp of cheap fabric, the jolt of boots scraping gravel. He's lying on a rooftop. Not his rooftop. He blinks hard, the neural delay fading.
A single notification hovers in the corner of his visual field: Lease ID Confirmed. Welcome, Subject 2425-L. Estimated Duration: 72 hours.
Cole sits up, body aching in unfamiliar ways. This host is younger—maybe early twenties—taller, thinner, with wiry strength. There's a scrape along one arm and a chemical burn near the wrist. His fingertips are blackened, stained by some industrial substance.
This is definitely not one of his luxury profiles.
He runs a systems check. Cognitive pathways stable. Emotional inhibitors—disabled. Huh. That's not standard.
"Lucid," he says instinctively.
No response.
Right. This host doesn't have a corporate-grade implant. He's off-grid.
Or worse—he's somewhere he shouldn't be.
Dislocation
Cole stumbles to his feet. His balance is off—this body favors the left leg, and there's damage in the right ankle joint. He limps toward the edge of the rooftop and peers over.
The skyline here is fractured. He's in the outer ring of New Lyra, near the industrial quarter. Even from this height, he sees the slums—makeshift shantytowns crushed beneath the city's shimmering towers like insects beneath glass.
His eyes catch on something: graffiti across the wall of a power relay station.
"WE ARE NOT OUR BODIES."
The letters are scrawled in jagged strokes, almost frantic.
He shivers.
"You chose this," he reminds himself. "You wanted a full reset. Total disconnection."
So why is he still thinking like Cole Harker?
The point of these leases was to escape—to cut out the static of power, money, performance. To taste something real. But this time, something's wrong. There's no comfort in the dissonance. No thrill.
Only noise.
Intrusion
As he climbs down a rusted ladder into the alley below, pain shoots up his side. He grits his teeth. There's blood beneath his shirt—dried, not fresh. A wound healing poorly.
Who was this person before Cole took their place?
"Does it matter?" he thinks, then catches himself.
That thought doesn't feel like his. It feels inserted. Like a line read from a script someone else wrote. Cold. Efficient.
There's static again—low and electric at the base of his skull. He pauses, steadying himself against a wall.
Then the voice comes.
"Nico. Run."
Cole flinches, heart slamming. The voice isn't his. It's distorted, familiar.
"Nico?"
He doesn't know anyone by that name.
Or… does he?
He closes his eyes, trying to steady his breathing. A name drifts up. Not from his memories—from the host's.
Nico Varn.
There's a face. Fractured. Fuzzy. He sees a fight. Hands slamming into a wall. A rooftop. A fall. Screaming. Something about a data key. About Echo Root.
He gasps and drops to his knees.
"These aren't my thoughts," he whispers. "I'm just borrowing them."
But they don't feel borrowed. They feel trapped—like pieces of the host are still active, still screaming in the back of his mind.
Something's wrong with the lease.
Echoes
Cole stumbles into a dimly lit corridor beneath an abandoned mag-rail station. Old neon signage buzzes overhead, casting harsh purple light on the cracked walls. His head throbs with phantom memories—some his, some not.
A voice behind him makes him freeze.
"Did you remember this time?"
He turns slowly.
A girl stands near the entrance, arms crossed, face half-hidden beneath a dark hood. Her eyes glint with suspicion.
"I don't know you," he says.
She laughs without humor. "You always say that."
"Who are you?"
"Lira. You used to call me Red." She steps forward. "Last time you remembered me. Briefly. Before they pulled you out."
"I—" Cole falters. His brain stutters like a skipping track.
"You said if you ever came back wrong, I should tell you three things," she says carefully, watching his face. "First: You were never born into your name. Second: The board lied about the bleed. Third—"
She hesitates. "Third, you were part of the initial trials. You were Subject Zero."
Cole's breath catches.
"That's not true. I'm Cole Harker. I'm—"
"You're a leased identity. You're the product of synthetic convergence. A curated psyche built to sell empathy as a product." Her voice is gentle now. "You're not the real Cole. He died during the Alpha bleed tests."
"No," he growls, backing away. "That's a lie. I'm real. I remember everything. My life. My campaign. My penthouse—"
"They're all fragments stitched into a marketable vessel."
"Stop!"
But even as he shouts, the images twist—his penthouse flickers, replaced by a concrete dorm. Vex Talin's interview glitches, looping endlessly. "Isn't it just commodifying their soul?" "Their soul?" "Their soul?"
His hands shake.
Unraveling
Lira steps forward. "They made you into the perfect spokesman for leasing. But you weren't born—you were assembled. Memory threads, emotional pathways, facial algorithms. All compiled into the Cole Harker people wanted to believe in."
He's trembling now. "I remember my mother."
"No. You remember a simulation of a mother. We traced the same template across seven other personas."
He sinks to the ground.
The static grows louder, screaming through his mind like a crashing wave.
He's remembering now—but not the way he wants to.
He remembers a cold lab. A name scrawled on a neural cradle. His own voice, asking: "Will I know if it's me?"
He remembers the board watching, silent. The first time he "woke up" in Cole's body.
"Just let him believe," someone had said.
Awakening
Lira kneels beside him, voice soft. "You were part of the first convergence experiment. The Cole Harker you think you are—he was version 4.3. You're 7.2. They rotate you every two years. You lease yourself into fragments of other lives to keep you from going unstable."
"So this—this isn't just a vacation lease."
"No," she says. "This was your final test. They needed to know if you could still differentiate self from borrowed identity."
Cole lets the silence sit for a moment. Then he asks the only question left.
"Did I pass?"
Lira doesn't answer.