POV: Dr. Elira Marell (NeuroLease R&D Director)
The servers were screaming again.
Elira Marell stood in the humming depths of NeuroLease's Central Core Archives, her gloved fingers twitching as she scrolled through the cascading errors on the primary feed. The data didn't make sense. Neural signature echoes were supposed to degrade within seconds of host release—soft fades, like fingerprints on glass.
But this? This was an imprint stuck. Embedded. It wasn't degrading.
It was replicating.
She stared at the flickering stream—clusters of identical cognitive loops blooming like tumors across the data lattice. That shouldn't be possible. NeuroLease tech was never built for permanence. The entire system was designed for fluidity. In, out. No residue.
Unless someone had tampered with the foundation code.
Her stomach tightened.
"Lucid," she called out, her voice clipped. "Run another scan on the anomalous imprint signature flagged at 02:43AM. Cross-check it against our executive user base."
The AI responded instantly.
"Confirmed. Signature match: Harker, Cole. Level-1 authorization."
"No, no, no," she whispered.
Cole was supposed to be in scheduled reset—standard protocol, a twenty-four hour empathy immersion in a neutral proxy. Executives like him weren't supposed to touch the bleed sectors.
She pulled up the cradle logs.
The session looked normal. Safe. Routine.
But the exit? There was no exit. The stream had been hijacked mid-transfer. Redirected into an unregistered host. A street ID tagged as Nico Varn—urban tier, flagged as unstable. Former lease client. Suspended for cognitive contamination.
They were never supposed to meet.
Her hands shook.
Corporate Secrets
Elira hadn't risen to Director of NeuroLease R&D by being sentimental. She believed in the system. In calculated empathy. In using tech to help bridge the gap between rich and poor, client and host. That was the narrative. And it worked—mostly.
But she also knew about the fractures.
She'd seen what happened when memory barriers failed, when lease clients carried too much of someone else's trauma back into their lives. When the wealthy got addicted to other people's pain. When the poor started dreaming of lives they'd never truly had.
This was worse.
This was consciousness crossover. Illegal. Unstable. Unprecedented.
She pulled up Cole's psychological profile, trying to assess risk. He was brilliant, ambitious, narcissistic—but stable. Contained. The perfect poster boy for NeuroLease.
Until now.
If his mind was caught inside a low-tier host without consent, with no neural anchor back to his own body…
He could unravel.
Or worse.
He could become someone else entirely.
The Call
Her comm implant buzzed.
She tapped her temple. "Marell."
A familiar voice, smooth and commanding: "Dr. Marell. We have a situation."
Of course they did.
"Let me guess," she said. "You've lost track of Cole Harker."
A pause. Then: "We believe he's been compromised. There was a signature trace in one of the Lower Ring transit nodes. A resistance cell might have him."
"Echo Root?"
"Most likely. We've dispatched recovery units. But if they realize who he is—"
"They'll extract him like data from a hard drive."
The voice softened. "We need to know what he knows. If he's unstable, we can't afford to bring him back intact."
Elira's blood went cold.
"Are you saying you want him wiped?"
"I'm saying you have six hours. If he can be recovered safely, do it. If not…"
Silence.
She ended the call.
Rogue Code
Back in her private lab, Elira accessed the shadow network—an off-grid digital sandbox only a handful of people even knew existed. She uploaded a partial imprint from Cole's last known session, quarantined from the public logs.
As she parsed the stream, a strange thing happened.
The data responded.
Not just passive memory recall. Not simulation.
But active restructuring.
She watched in stunned silence as the imprint rewrote fragments of its own logic. Like it was adapting.
"Who were you before the mirrors?"
The phrase scrolled across the terminal.
Her breath caught.
That wasn't a code error. It was a message. The same one Cole had received on his private system days ago.
Someone had embedded a trigger phrase inside the leasing framework. A psychological virus.
And Cole had activated it.
The Conscience Test
Elira sat down, heart pounding, and activated a secure file—something she never thought she'd need: Project Eidolon.
An abandoned experiment from five years ago. Prototype tech that allowed dual-layer imprinting—a host and a guest, sharing mental real estate. It had been shut down after a single test subject suffered a total identity collapse.
That subject had been Nico Varn.
She hadn't made the connection until now. The street-level hacker. The rogue empath. He'd survived. And now he was hosting Cole Harker.
Not just hosting.
Merging.
If Cole retained his memories and access—but absorbed Nico's ethics, his beliefs, his trauma—he wouldn't return as NeuroLease's golden child.
He'd return as its greatest threat.
Decision Point
Elira stared at the terminal, the weight of decades pressing into her spine. She could kill the uplink now. Send a remote neural burn that would fry both minds.
Quick. Clean. Untraceable.
Or she could do what every part of her training told her not to:
She could watch.
Let them continue. Let Cole see what the world really was. Let him change.
The system needed revolution. Maybe this was how it started.
She shut down the interface.
And for the first time in years, Elira Marell made a decision that wasn't driven by fear.