Cole awoke with a start. The taste of blood filled his mouth. He blinked against the clinical overhead lights, the dim hum of the penthouse's auto-sanitization systems vibrating through the floor beneath him. For a moment, he didn't know where he was.
Then the memories came surging back—blinding, fragmented, violent.
He sat up on the neural cradle's reclined surface, hands trembling. The reset session had gone wrong. He remembered flashes—faces he'd never seen, screams in a language he didn't know, hands reaching through fire, drowning.
"Lucid," he croaked. "Status."
The AI's voice came calmly. "You were disconnected from the cradle system due to neural interference. Memory integrity: compromised. Recommend full diagnostic."
"No. Not yet."
He stumbled toward the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Staring into the mirror, he no longer saw a polished face for the campaign. His eyes were bloodshot, sunken. Pale skin pulled tight over cheekbones he hadn't noticed growing sharper.
Something was changing inside him.
Later that morning, he sat in the private transport en route to the Continuum Tower. His assistant, Maren, briefed him on the day's events, but her voice faded in and out like a distant radio.
Cole's mind spiraled.
They used me as the gate.
He didn't remember where he had heard the phrase. It had come to him like a whisper during the session—maybe a leak from a previous consciousness, or maybe his own mind finally rebelling against the seamless lies it had helped build.
The Continuum Project. A name he'd helped greenlight years ago. Marketed as the next evolution in NeuroLease, it had promised optimized identity streaming—merging skillsets and personalities across leased minds to create superhuman efficacy.
But now it felt like his thoughts weren't entirely his own.
The tower loomed like a blade splitting the sky. At the top floor, board members gathered for a briefing. Cole entered to polite nods and veiled curiosity. They noticed something off. He could see it in the flickers of their expressions.
"Mr. Harker," said Yvan Wu, COO of NeuroLease. "The Tokyo data from the Collective Merge test—impressive results. 16% increase in neural sync. We're ready to roll global deployment in Q3."
Cole nodded mechanically. "Let's hold. I want another security pass."
The room froze.
"Sir? We've already—"
"Do it again," Cole snapped. "Every cradle. Every host. I want risk assessments on bleed, drift, cognitive erosion."
Yvan's brow furrowed. "That's... unexpected. We've built the platform on full confidence. We're weeks from presenting Continuum to the Global Forum."
Cole's hands tightened around the edge of the table.
"Just do it."
No one argued further.
Hours later, Cole stood alone in his private lab, secured behind biometric locks only three in the company had clearance to access. The memory vault shimmered before him—rows of glass-encased neural shards, each glowing with archived lives, experiences, identities.
He approached one labeled Project: Elian Varas.
He hesitated.
Elian had been one of their brightest minds before going rogue. He had flagged early concerns about the merging process, and then disappeared. Officially declared dead. Unofficially, they had erased him.
Cole inserted the shard into the cradle reader.
A flood of data surged forward. Elian's voice crackled into life.
"You think you're you, Cole. But how many minds have you inherited since the first merge? Continuum wasn't supposed to be a stacking operation—it was meant to integrate knowledge, not identity. But you—"
The voice distorted.
"—they used you as the template. The clean slate. The compliant gate. But every slate accumulates scratches. You've got hundreds of fingerprints in your head now. Some of them are breaking through."
Cole stumbled back. Static buzzed in his skull. Words flared up on the screen:
COALESCENCE BREACH DETECTED. PERSONALITY INTEGRITY: 82%
He clutched his head, gasping.
Later that night, Cole stood on his balcony, staring out at New Lyra. Lights glittered across the skyline like stars falling in reverse.
He didn't know how long he stood there before the shard in his hand started to pulse.
Not possible, he thought.
It pulsed again.
And then a voice emerged—quiet, childlike.
"They're coming, Cole. Not the board. Not the media. The real ones. The ones you leased and forgot."
He dropped the shard. It hit the tile with a crystalline clink and went still.
His hand shook. Not from fear. From something deeper.
Guilt.
In the mirror, he didn't see his own eyes anymore.
He saw a dozen eyes. Different colors. Different pain.
He saw Nico. He saw Elian. He saw a woman who drowned in her own memory stream trying to help her brother walk again. He saw a child forced into leasing by his parents to escape debt. He saw—
He saw himself. Alone. Silent. Watching the cracks widen.
Lucid chimed. "Sir, a private message has arrived. Source unverified."
Cole opened it.
A single line.
We have Elian's shard. And we know the truth.
Cole stared at it.
His heart didn't race. It slowed.
He was no longer in control of the narrative.
He was part of the evidence.
And someone was preparing to show the world.
He leaned forward over the balcony rail.
Below, the city buzzed with unknowing life. But change was coming. The kind that couldn't be polished or spun or leased away.
For the first time, Cole didn't know who he was.
But maybe that meant he could finally become someone else.
Someone real.
He turned back to the lab. To the vault. To the truths locked in data.
It was time to open the floodgates.