POV: Lira
The rain in New Lyra never truly stopped. It only changed forms—needle-thin sleet in the outer sectors, chemical mist in the heights, copper-tasting drizzle in the alleys where the
gutters coughed grey runoff. Lira didn't mind it. The rain made it harder for the drones to track body heat.
She moved quickly through the back corridors of the Central District's abandoned commuter rail hub. It was here, buried under rusted metal and forgotten schedules, that Echo Root had discovered a relic: a dormant NeuroLease conduit terminal.
And it had just powered back on.
Lira tapped her comms implant. "Sura, is the encryption holding?"
Sura's voice buzzed back, short and clipped. "Holding, but not for long. Someone's pinging the uplink from the corporate side. They're trying to trace us."
"Buy me ten minutes."
"You've got five."
The terminal pulsed with faint blue light as Lira reached it. She placed her palm against the cracked biometric plate. It scanned, hesitated—then accepted.
Inside the data shell, an interface unfolded like a holographic flower. The ghost of NeuroLease's old infrastructure still lived here, buried deep beneath the system's latest iterations. It was here that the truth might live too.
She entered the passcode Cole had whispered through Nico.
Inside the Archive
The terminal groaned. A slow-loading file surfaced, marked with an oblique tag:
SUBJECT: HARKER, COLE — IDENTITY COMPARTMENTALIZATION TRIAL
Lira's heart slammed in her chest. She opened it.
Dozens of fragments cascaded onto the screen. Video files, internal reports, psych evaluations. Words like personality segmentation, false memory grafting, and core obedience override leapt out at her.
Cole Harker hadn't just leased bodies. He'd leased himself.
He had been the prototype.
A subject in an illegal trial where NeuroLease executives tested personality bifurcation—splitting an identity into marketable fragments, controllable slices that could be sold, reused, erased. Every confident smile Cole gave on screen, every charismatic speech, was layered over systemic fractures in his core identity.
She scrolled further. One file refused to open. Locked behind a black cipher.
FILE: MIRRORWALK
"Come on, come on…" Lira muttered.
Sura's voice cut in. "Three minutes. I've got counter-hackers chewing my firewall like wet paper."
Lira typed in a blind override. Cole's birthday. The name of his mother. A phrase Nico once murmured in his sleep: before the mirrors.
The file opened.
The Mirrorwalk Protocol
Lira blinked at the lines of code and the attached document.
MIRRORWALK enables complete transference of neural identity across disparate hosts with shared mental resonance.
Designed as a backup survival route for elite NeuroLease figures in case of bodily termination.
Cole Harker was not the designer. He was the vessel.
She reeled.
Cole's consciousness had been duplicated—mirrored—and implanted into multiple backups, waiting to awaken in matching hosts. Nico wasn't just hosting a glitch.
He was one of several.
"Lira," Sura gasped through the comms. "They've found the signal. You need to move."
But Lira was already ripping the drive from the console, jamming it into her coat as she sprinted up the stairs two at a time. Footsteps echoed above her—corpSec teams were already descending.
She reached the surface just as the first drone zipped past. Bullets carved into the wall behind her.
Lira didn't stop. She vanished into the rain.
Back at the Safehouse
Nico flinched as she burst in, soaked and panting. Cole surged forward in his mind, startled by the panic racing through her.
"They know what you are," she told him.
"What do you mean?" he said, standing.
"You're not hosting him. You are him. At least, a version. A backup copy."
Nico reeled. "No. That's not— I'm me. I lived my life. I remember—"
"Memories can be rewritten, Nico. You know that better than anyone."
Cole's voice whispered. She's right.
"I don't want to be you!" Nico snapped.
"But what if you already are?"
He stumbled back, pressing his hands to his temples.
Lira handed him the drive. "See for yourself. But we need to go underground. Once NeuroLease confirms you're a live instance, they'll send full retrieval. No sedatives. No warnings. Just a kill-switch."
A New Mission
They moved deeper into the city's underbelly, below the transit lines, into the ruins of Old Lyra—once a marketplace, now a graveyard of concrete and rusted hope.
Echo Root gathered in a shattered cathedral beneath a broken neon crucifix. Lira explained everything: the trial, the backups, the Mirrorwalk protocol.
Some wanted to destroy the data, erase Cole completely.
But Nico stood, trembling, and said, "If I'm a copy, then I can be the flaw in their system. A ghost they can't trace. A glitch they can't control."
Lira nodded. "And if we awaken more like you, we don't just bring NeuroLease down. We bury their entire reality."
Cole, silent for long moments, finally spoke with calm certainty.
Then let's start breaking mirrors.