Cole Harker sat motionless in the cold silence of the NeuroLease tower's penthouse, his eyes fixed on the massive holographic projection of New Lyra that dominated the room. The city's endless grid of lights flickered and shimmered across the wall like a sprawling digital mural—an artificial constellation of promises, lies, and hidden controls. His reflection shimmered faintly against the glass window beside it, fractured and uncertain, as if his mind itself had fractured into shards.
He felt like a ghost trapped between realities.
Cole's breath was shallow. His body still bore the tremors from the nightmare that had jolted him awake mere minutes ago—a scream strangled in his throat, a cold sweat pooling in the hollow of his collarbones. The mirror didn't lie; his eyes were hollowed by unrest, rimmed with dark circles that told the story of sleepless nights filled with memories that weren't his. Memories he hadn't lived but that haunted him like specters clawing from the depths of his fractured mind.
Faint echoes of other lives—the lives of those whose bodies he'd leased, whose neural imprints had leaked into his psyche—wove through his thoughts in dissonant threads. Some moments, he couldn't tell where his own memories ended and the borrowed ones began.
A sharp chime pierced the oppressive quiet. Lucid's voice cut in smoothly, digital and unemotional. "Message incoming. Urgent. From Board Member Ysen."
Cole waved a hand, and the message projected before him in crystalline clarity.
"Cole. We've intercepted a data spike originating from the tunnel sector. It bears Elian's signature. Whatever he pulled, he tried to upload it to a dead relay node. Someone retrieved it. Possibly the Echo Root."
The message was clinical, cold—and beneath it all, a threat.
Cole said nothing. He simply rose from his chair, the weight of the message anchoring him like a stone. He approached the vast window, the city sprawling below him like a living organism, brilliant and deceptive. New Lyra glimmered in the night, a dazzling lie told beautifully—a city built on layers of control and hidden fractures.
With a deliberate motion, he tapped into the hidden subnetwork only accessible to a handful of trusted insiders—those with clearance beyond official NeuroLease channels. The system hummed to life, pulling up a profile flagged in red: Nico. Or rather, one of many identities linked to the original host.
The label read: rogue asset. Dangerous. Unstable.
And yet…
Cole hesitated. Nico was more than a mere asset gone dark. Once, he had been a fallback persona, a safety valve designed for early-stage lease testing—a disposable echo designed to contain unforeseen leaks. But now, Nico had become something else. Something emergent.
An anomaly with intent.
Cole's mind raced as he considered the parallels. Nico's trajectory—this rogue, unstable figure carving his own path through the cracks of the system—mirrored Cole's own descent. Every attempt Cole had made to distance himself from NeuroLease's ethical rot had only pulled him deeper into the web, tethered by secrets and sins no one else could remember.
And now, faced with the evidence from Elian's data spike, Cole knew he had a choice—stop Nico before he unraveled the fragile balance or risk losing everything.
The sharp chime of his private line shattered his reverie. A secure connection blinked urgently on his interface.
He accepted the call. A distorted voice filled the room—raspy, urgent.
"Cole," Elian's voice whispered from a pre-recorded message, glitching slightly as if strained through time. "If you're hearing this, I didn't make it out. But you need to know—you were never the architect. You were the prototype. NeuroLease didn't build the bridge to connect people. They built a cage to trap them. And you were the first lock."
The call abruptly cut off, leaving Cole staring at the empty screen, the words reverberating like a cold slap.
The prototype. The lock.
His knees buckled slightly, the weight of that revelation pressing down on him. His hands trembled as he pulled up the earliest NeuroLease records—files long since sealed, many rewritten or altered under his own authority to protect the company's interests.
One file remained untouched.
A video clip, grainy and raw.
A young man strapped to a neural cradle, screaming in terror as streams of cryptic code were poured directly into his mind. His eyes wide with panic, mouth trembling to scream, body writhing as the invasive software rewired him from the inside out.
The name on the record wasn't Cole Harker.
It was his.
That man—the screaming figure in the cradle—was the original host whose body had been borrowed, overwritten, and transformed into the figure the world now knew as Cole Harker. The architect wasn't the creator but a creation, a product built and bound by the very system he'd helped maintain.
Control slipped from Cole's grasp like grains of sand.
A storm of rage, grief, and confusion tore through him. Memories warped by falsified histories. Identity fractured by a manufactured past. And beneath it all, a creeping terror—not of being discovered, but of not knowing who he truly was beneath the layers of borrowed memories and implanted personas.
If Cole Harker was an illusion—a mask layered over the truth—then who had lived underneath it?
With trembling hands, Cole accessed a secure terminal and sent a single command into the vast NeuroLease database: purge public records.
His own existence, erased from the eyes of the world, left only the fragile network of secrets behind.
Then, with resolve hardening his voice, he opened a private channel—an encrypted line to the one person who could understand the fracture within him.
"Nico," he said into the static.
"We need to talk."
Outside the towering windows, New Lyra's lights flickered and pulsed—a city unaware that its perfect architect had just shattered his own reflection, and with it, the fragile façade holding the entire system together.