The hover-truck sliced through the rain-soaked underbelly of New Lyra, the hum of its propulsion system barely audible over the thrum of Cole's racing thoughts. He sat in silence,
hunched over on the bench seat, soaked to the bone, watching water drip from his fingertips like some quiet unraveling of who he used to be.
Opposite him, Lira studied his face, eyes searching for signs of instability. Nico sat beside her, one hand resting lightly on the pulse-line receiver in case Cole showed signs of mental relapse. None of them spoke, not yet. They were all still calculating.
"You okay?" Nico finally asked.
Cole let out a breath. "Define 'okay.'"
Lira leaned forward. "You remember everything? The overlays, the leases, the resets?"
He nodded. "It's like... layered dreams that never ended. I can feel them still. Their fears, their joys. Even the ones that died. It's not just bleed. It's me. They built me out of them."
Lira looked down. "You were Continuum's prototype. The living archive. They used your neural architecture to test the limits of memory and identity retention. Elian's death was the first crack."
"He didn't die," Cole murmured. "He fractured. I remember being him. Not fully, but enough to feel his terror before the final disconnect."
The hover-truck jolted as it banked down into a subterranean tunnel. Overhead, police sirens echoed like wolves on the hunt.
Cole straightened. "I have to go public."
Lira raised an eyebrow. "Go public? With what, exactly? Your confession that you're a vessel of stolen lives? That you were the poster boy of a tech dystopia you helped build?"
"Yes," Cole said. "Exactly that."
"They'll discredit you."
"Then I'll show them proof. You said the internal shards are still partially active, right? Can we extract them? Project them?"
Nico looked hesitant. "That's unstable territory. Stream-walking a composite consciousness is dangerous. The fragments could lash out or collapse."
"Then we stabilize them. Or we risk it. If people could see what NeuroLease has done—really see it—they wouldn't stand for it."
Lira exchanged a long glance with Nico.
"There's a broadcast node," she said. "An old revolutionary pipeline. Obsolete, but not traceable. If we can get you synced to it, we can project a live memory stream directly to the public cloud. Unfiltered."
"How far does it reach?"
"Everywhere."
The hideout was embedded in the rusted husk of a forgotten server silo, wrapped in a thicket of data conduit and old city scaffolding. A brutalist spire that once powered global commerce, now reduced to an anarchist cathedral of repurposed tech.
Echo Root called it The Scar.
Inside, Lira and Nico guided Cole through layers of neuro-optic equipment. The broadcast node was dormant, a slumbering beast. The old resistance had once used it to leak classified NeuroLease reports, then shut it down after a mass purge.
"Plug in," Nico said, gesturing to the central cradle. "But understand, Cole, if you dive in there, it's not just you anymore. Those fragments in your head—they'll bleed into the stream. All of them. You might not come back the same."
"I haven't been the same in a long time."
Cole lay back. The cold prongs kissed his spine. The neural mesh folded over his scalp.
"Initiating neural sync," Lira announced. Her voice trembled slightly. "Prepare for cascade."
Darkness, then light.
Cole's consciousness exploded into a sea of broken timelines. He was everyone, all at once.
Elian, running through a tunnel with a transmitter clutched in hand. A lease-girl named Caeli, sobbing in a penthouse she didn't own. A miner in Europa's icefields, his lungs collapsing. A pilot, screaming as her borrowed body gave out mid-flight.
Memories were not passive.
They fought back.
Each fragment surged toward him, recognizing their host—the one who survived. They didn't want vengeance. They wanted to be remembered.
"Cascade pulse holding," Lira's voice filtered in, distorted. "Stream at 76%. Stabilizing."
Then Cole saw the truth.
The Continuum project had a secondary goal: weaponization. Not empathy. Not connection. It was training. Conditioning the elite to borrow lives so effectively that moral restraint would dissolve. Political figures. CEOs. War architects. Living inside the minds of others until they could be controlled, replaced, or discarded.
He saw himself giving speeches he didn't remember. Authorizing raids. Approving neural silences. He had been more than a face. He had been their blade.
And now he would be their undoing.
He focused. Anchored himself. Chose one memory. Elian's.
"Let them see," Cole whispered.
The node obeyed.
Across New Lyra, screens flickered.
Phones buzzed. Implants jolted. Streams were hijacked.
A voice—Cole's voice—filled the city.
"You know me as the man who promised a better future. But that future was built on borrowed pain."
Faces turned upward, transfixed by the projected memories. Real lives. Real suffering. Undeniable.
"They turned empathy into a transaction. Turned lives into data. They built a world where your soul could be leased, erased, or rewritten."
Lira watched the metrics spike.
"We just crossed ten million viewers," she whispered. "Fifteen. Twenty..."
"They know," Nico said, stunned. "They finally know."
In the boardroom of NeuroLease, chaos reigned. Executives shouted into dead comms, slamming keyboards, issuing emergency lockdowns.
But the stream wouldn't stop.
Cole had become the signal.
Back in The Scar, Cole convulsed. Blood dripped from his nose. The cascade was burning through his cortex.
"Pull him out!" Nico shouted.
"Not yet!" Lira cried. "He's still broadcasting!"
But the pain was immense.
Cole's last thought before the neural relay shattered was simple:
They see me. Not the mask. Not the product. Me.
And then everything went white.
He woke to silence.
Dim lights. A bandage on his temple.
Lira sat beside him, eyes red.
"It worked," she said softly. "They're rioting in four sectors. NeuroLease stocks have collapsed. Half the board fled the country. The rest are under investigation."
"And the stream?"
She hesitated. "We had to kill the node. Your brain was hemorrhaging. But the memory logs survived. We have evidence. We have traction."
Nico appeared in the doorway, holding a tablet.
"You're a ghost, Cole. Legally declared dead by NeuroLease as of two hours ago."
Cole chuckled hoarsely. "Then it's time I started living."
Outside, the city roared. Not with industry, not with blind progress.
But with truth.
And the echo of stolen lives finding their way home.