Chapter One: The Static Between Seconds
The rain in Sector 4 didn't wash the streets clean; it just made the grime slicker. It coated the neon advertisements in a greasy sheen, turning the promise of "Syntheti-Sleep: Dream Better" into a blurred, weeping smear of electric blue.
Elias Vane watched the downpour from the window of his third-floor office, nursing a cup of coffee that tasted mostly of burnt chicory and regret. Below, the pedestrian traffic was a river of black umbrellas and hunch-shouldered misery. No one looked up. In a city where the sky was permanently grey-washed by the Atmospheric Shield, looking up was a waste of neck muscles.
The chime above his door rattled—a genuine brass bell, an antique worth more than the desk it sat near.
Elias didn't turn around immediately. "We're closed, unless you're selling Pre-Collapse vinyl or first-edition paperbacks. If you're here for the debt collectors, the safe is empty."
"I'm not here for vinyl, Mr. Vane."
The voice was ragged, wet, and terrified.
Elias turned. Standing in the threshold, dripping water onto his fake hardwood floor, was a man who looked like he'd been assembled from spare parts of other, more tired people. He wore a heavy synthetic coat three sizes too big, and his hands, clutching a small, lead-lined box, were trembling violently.
"You're a Sifter," the man said. It wasn't a question.
Elias set his coffee down. "I prefer 'Authentication Specialist.' Sifter implies I dig through trash."
"But you can tell if it's real," the man insisted, stepping further into the room. He smelled of ozone and the deep, stale air of the subway tunnels. "You can tell if a memory is a forgery or… or the truth."
"I can," Elias said, leaning back against his desk. He crossed his arms, trying to look bored, though his heart did a traitorous little skip. Desperate men usually carried dangerous things. "But my rates are high, and you look like you haven't eaten a solid meal since Tuesday."
The stranger didn't haggle. He didn't even blink. He simply walked to the desk and slammed the lead-lined box down on the blotter. "I don't want money. I want you to look at it. And then I want you to tell me I'm not crazy."
Elias looked at the box. It was standard containment for volatile mnemos—memory chips harvested from the cerebral cortex. Highly illegal to trade without a license, which meant Elias was interested.
"Name?" Elias asked.
"doesn't matter," the man snapped. "Just… look."
Elias sighed and sat down. He pulled a jeweler's loupe from his drawer and a pair of fine-point tweezers. He unlatched the box.
Inside, nestled in black foam, sat a single memory drive. But it wasn't the standard jagged shard of a raw harvest, nor the smooth, polished pearl of a commercial fabrication. It was a rough, crystalline structure, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic amber light.
Elias froze. He hadn't seen amber static in ten years. Not since the shielding went up.
"Where did you get this?" Elias asked, his voice losing its practiced indifference.
"I found it," the man whispered. "In the Old Library ruins. Beneath the concrete."
"Nothing survived the Old Library fire."
"This did."
Elias picked up the crystal with the tweezers. It was heavy, dense with data. He moved it toward his interface port—a silver socket embedded in his left temple. He hesitated. Jacking in unknown drives was a good way to fry your neural pathways or catch a malware virus that would rewrite your childhood memories into advertisements for soap.
"If this is a virus," Elias warned, "I have a shotgun taped under this desk, and I will use the last of my brain function to use it."
"It's not a virus," the man said, tears welling in his eyes. "It's… sunshine."
Elias frowned. He slotted the crystal into his temple.
Click.
The world of the office—the rain, the smell of chicory, the trembling man—vanished instantly.
Sensory input: Overload.
Temperature: Warm. Impossible warm. Not the humid heat of the vents, but a dry, caressing heat.
Visual: Blue. An endless, impossible expanse of blue above. No grey shield. No steel girders. Just… sky. And a ball of fire so bright it hurt to look at.
Sound: A rhythmic crashing. Water. But not rain. A colossal body of water, green and blue, smashing against golden sand. The smell of salt and organic decay.
There was a woman standing at the edge of the water. She turned, her face obscured by the lens flare of the sun. She raised a hand, pointing at the horizon, and spoke a single word that didn't translate through the interface.
Elias ripped the crystal from his head, gasping for air. He fell back into his chair, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The office came rushing back—grey, cold, miserable.
He looked at the man. The stranger was weeping openly now.
"You saw it," the man choked out. "The sky. It was blue. They told us the sky was always grey. They told us the Shield saved us from the vacuum. But… it was blue."
Elias stared at the amber crystal in his hand. It was warm to the touch.
"That wasn't a fabrication," Elias whispered, the horror slowly creeping in. "Fabrications are perfect. They don't have lens flare. They don't have the smell of rotting kelp."
"It's a historical record," the man said. "From before."
"No," Elias said, his mind racing. "I know history. I know the Pre-Collapse archives. The sky was scorched black long before the Shield went up." He looked up at the stranger, his eyes wide. "This memory isn't from the past, friend."
He looked at the timestamp embedded in the crystal's code, glowing faintly on his retinal display.
TIMESTAMP: 48 HOURS FROM NOW.
"This memory," Elias said, his voice trembling, "hasn't happened yet."
Before the man could answer, the glass of the office window shattered inward. A red laser dot danced across the stranger's chest, and a heavy, subsonic thrum filled the air—the sound of a Government Suppression Drone spinning up its turbines.
Elias grabbed the crystal and the stranger's collar.
"Run."