POV: Nico Varn
The rain stings like judgment.
Nico Varn presses his back to the alley wall, gasping. His pulse thunders in his ears, but the beat is off—unfamiliar. His breath fogs in front of him, but even that feels alien, like watching someone else breathe. His fingers twitch against the cold synthcrete. Calloused, rough. Not soft like they were hours ago—if that was even real.
No. Focus.
This is real. The alley. The rain. The nausea curling in his gut. Real.
He glances down again at the flyer in his hand, already half-soaked. The words blur, but the symbol—a fractured neural circuit wrapped around a clenched fist—burns into his brain like a brand.
Echo Root Collective.
He remembers them. Or... Nico remembers them. Protests. Pirate broadcasts. Seditious graffiti scrawled across NeuroLease towers. But Cole Harker, corporate messiah, had always dismissed Echo Root as fringe conspiracy nuts. Dangerous radicals. Anti-tech lunatics clinging to obsolete notions of selfhood.
Yet now, standing in the body of someone the system deemed expendable, it doesn't feel like conspiracy. It feels like truth.
His hands tremble. He stumbles forward, dragging one foot after the other until he reaches the edge of the alley and peeks out.
The lower districts of New Lyra look nothing like the pristine spires above. Down here, the city bleeds. Flickering signs advertise black-market body leasing, memory wipes, even identity overhauls. There are children sleeping in gutters, their eyes already clouded with synthetic addictions. Drones buzz overhead, scanning faces, matching heat signatures to social debt indexes.
Nico's debt is massive. He knows that instinctively. The number pounds at the base of his skull like a migraine: 12,904 credits. Enough to trap him here forever.
And yet—something's wrong.
He doesn't remember earning that debt.
He barely remembers anything.
Fragmentation
Back in the shelter of the alley, Nico leans against a rusted barrel and tries to breathe through the static crawling at the edge of his thoughts. There's a voice in his head, coiled and waiting.
It doesn't belong to him.
"This is a glitch," it whispers. "This isn't your life. You're Cole Harker. You're not supposed to be here."
He grits his teeth. "Shut up."
But the voice is relentless. A memory, or a shadow of one, bubbles up: smiling into cameras, charming Vex Talin, promising that leasing is liberation. Selling lies.
He clutches his head. It feels like his skull is splitting in two—like someone took two jigsaw puzzles and forced them into the same frame.
His reflection in a puddle shows Nico's face: gaunt, with a crooked scar beneath one eye and grime caking his skin. But behind the eyes, there's something wrong.
A second presence. Watching.
"What if you never left the cradle?" the voice hisses.
The First Contact
He doesn't have time to unravel it. Footsteps echo down the alley. Nico ducks behind the barrel, heart hammering.
Two figures appear—tall, masked, wearing patchwork coats with haptic threadwork and Echo Root symbols etched into the sleeves.
One of them—a woman—speaks. "You're late."
"I didn't know I was coming," Nico says before he can stop himself.
The woman tilts her head. "You glitching again?"
Nico hesitates. "Maybe. Hard."
The other figure—a thick-necked man with a distorted voice modulator—grunts. "You forget how to knock twice and hum?"
"Yeah," Nico lies.
The woman steps closer, pulling down her mask. Her face is pale, with eyes that shine like broken glass. "Name?"
He opens his mouth—and almost says Cole.
He stops himself. "Nico."
She studies him for a moment, then nods. "You're one of the bleed cases. Thought you'd been black-bagged."
"What happened?" he asks, voice shaking. "Why can't I remember anything?"
The woman sighs. "NeuroLease. You went under too deep. Whatever you leased into… left a crack open. Happens sometimes. Usually the board wipes 'em clean and sends the husk back."
"But I'm still here."
"For now," the man growls.
Echo Root Refuge
They take him to a safehouse: an old train terminal converted into a subterranean commune. Power lines dangle from the ceilings. Murals of screaming faces and broken neural diagrams line the walls. Everyone here wears recycled coats and coded patches that glow faintly under ultraviolet bulbs.
Inside, Nico is met with suspicion. Some recognize him, but not all trust him. There are whispers:
"He blanked last time."
"He's got fragments in him."
"They say he was in Harker's proximity."
Nico is led to a makeshift terminal where an old neural technician scans his cortex with a salvaged cradle interface. The machine groans as it boots up.
"Well, shit," the tech mutters, eyes widening. "You've got a ghost in your skull."
"A what?"
"Shadow memory. Looks like Cole Harker's signature. Someone tried to overwrite you with him. Or maybe the other way around. Can't tell."
"Why would he be in me?"
The tech shrugs. "Maybe he leased into your body. Maybe he fell too deep and now neither of you knows who's real."
"Which one of us is the original?"
The tech chuckles darkly. "Does it matter?"
Nico wants to scream, but all that escapes is a whisper: "I don't want to be him."
"Then don't be," the tech says. "Be whoever remembers first."
The Video
That night, someone slips a data shard into Nico's hand. It contains a single file: grainy security footage.
It shows Cole Harker—in Nico's body—standing on a rooftop weeks ago. He's speaking to someone in an Echo Root jacket, animated, passionate. Then the clip cuts, rewinds, and plays again—this time zoomed in on Cole's face.
It's terrified.
He says something—barely audible through the wind: "I'm not him. I'm not me."
Then he turns—and jumps off the roof.
Nico stares at the paused frame. The body doesn't hit the ground. The footage glitches before impact.
He rewinds again, searching for any clarity—but only finds that same haunting expression, mirrored now in his own face.