Mira ran.
Down the side of the rooftop, hand slick on the rails, chasing the fading vision of herself—older, harsher, haunted—and escaping whatever angular object had just descended behind her like a silent guillotine. The sky seemed to warp around it. Her breath felt like it belonged to someone else.
She didn't stop moving until she reached the old tram underpass—a half-collapsed tunnel that once ferried memory devs between districts before the privatization surge. Now it lay soaked in shadows and trades best left unspoken.
She needed answers. Someone who wasn't legally tethered to the Archives. Someone who worked with corrupted timelines the way scavengers work with bones.
She needed Riven—a black-market memory diver.
Word was, he operated out of an abandoned clinic in Sector Theta-5. Mira hadn't stepped foot there since the Great Archive Glitch over a year ago, when half the district had gone dark for two days and sixty thousand people woke up remembering lives they'd never lived.
She found the clinic by memory—and instinct. Bent siding. Vines weaving through broken windows. A flickering data sigil carved onto the wall in pulsewire. She knocked five times. Waited. Then three.
The door slid open silently.
Inside: flickering halogen lights, stacked neural encoders, and a man seated cross-legged atop a surgical table wearing a VR visor and six different memory threads woven through his fingers like marionette strings.
"You're not dead yet," Riven muttered as she entered, not removing the visor. "Shame. I get more answers from ghosts than I do from clients."
Mira slid the memory coin onto a tray. "It has my fingerprint. My face. My memories. And a version of me I've never been."
Now he looked at her.
"You're carrying a tether fragment," he said. "That's why the system's cracking around you. Old timelines aren't just overwritten—they're flushed. Anyone who survives a flush with fragments intact… well. Doesn't stay 'intact' for long."
He studied the coin, rotated it, then tapped one of her temples with a cold silver node. "Let's dive."
What unfolded in her vision was not a single memory… but an entangled cluster.
Twisting flame. The rooftop again. Three versions of Mira. One screaming. One crying. One turning away.
And then—the silhouette.
A tall figure in a red coat holding a file marked:
ASSET: M-721
Timeline Deviation: 3.24 years
Extraction Candidate: REJECTED
Status: STILL ACTIVE (terminate sync authority pending)
Mira's breath caught.
"I wasn't the thief," she whispered.
"No," Riven said, eyes glassy. "You were the timeline they tried to steal from."
Then Riven froze.
He held up the coin again—closer to the light. "This isn't just any echo token. It's part of a severed tether. You never left the original timeline."
"Then what am I in now?" Mira asked, almost afraid of the answer.
Riven smiled grimly as a chill settled in the air.
"A replacement. A copy. A fabricated world meant to hold you in place."
Footsteps echoed outside the clinic. Heavy. Synchronized. Like machines.
The lights flickered.
Metal scraped against metal.
Then a new voice echoed through the old speaker system—calm, modulated, and crushingly familiar:
"Unregistered fragment detected. Subject M-721: prepare for memory extraction."
It was her voice.
But she wasn't speaking.
To be continue...