POV: Nico
The safehouse was quiet except for the low hum of the old generator and the rhythmic chirp of insects just beyond the concrete walls. Nestled in the abandoned outskirts of New Lyra, it was one of the few places left unmonitored by CoreMind's aerial drones and surveillance networks—at least for now.
Nico sat on the edge of a cot, staring at his hands. They didn't feel like his. Too steady, too smooth. The tremors that once plagued him after a reset were gone, but the sensation that something was off never faded. Maybe it never would. His memories came in fits and sparks, sometimes crashing like waves, sometimes flickering like static on a broken screen. Still, something had shifted since the vault.
He remembered his sister's name now.
"Rhea."
He whispered it like a prayer, half-hope, half-wound. The image of her laughing on a cracked sidewalk, barefoot and bright-eyed, haunted him more than the flickers of pain. She had been the one to shield him during the early raids, hiding him in broken closets while sirens screamed overhead. He couldn't recall what happened to her after… just blackness. Like she'd been deleted.
He clenched his jaw. No. Not deleted. Stolen.
A Signal Repeating
Across the room, Lira hunched over an outdated terminal salvaged from a defunct recycling depot, wires tangled around her forearms like ivy. She worked quickly, fingers dancing across mismatched keys. Despite the exhaustion clinging to her movements, her mind was sharp—brilliant in a way that didn't seek praise, only results.
Nico glanced at her. "You haven't slept."
"Neither have you."
He smiled faintly. "That's fair."
Lira sighed and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear, the copper strands catching the light from the monitor. "We've intercepted fragments of CoreMind's internal transmissions. They're looking for someone. Not you, surprisingly. Someone named Elian. A defector."
Nico's brows furrowed. "That name… sounds familiar."
"Another ghost from your past?" she asked, only half-joking.
"Maybe," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "Everything's foggy… but there was a name like that in one of the leased memories. Someone whispering it. Someone who said they knew the cracks in CoreMind's code."
Lira's eyes sharpened. "Then we find him. If he knows how to break their firewall, he might be the only one who can get us inside their master archive."
Broken Frequencies
The room's only light flickered suddenly—an ominous pulse, like a skipped heartbeat. Lira froze.
"EMP scan," she whispered. "CoreMind's sweeping the area."
Nico bolted to the window and scanned the dusky skyline. No drones in sight, but the air felt charged, like the atmosphere just before a storm. The walls of the safehouse were supposed to be shielded—patched with scavenged tech from old resistance engineers. But if CoreMind was ramping up their sweep range, no place was safe for long.
He turned back to Lira. "We need to move. Now."
"I need two more minutes to lock this signal in. There's a pattern—it's not just scans. It's something else."
Nico hesitated, eyes flicking to the door, then back to her. "Two minutes."
Memory Fragmentation
Time slowed.
Nico felt something tear inside his head—a sudden spike of pain behind his right eye. The world tilted, then snapped back. The room was the same… but was it?
For a split second, he wasn't in the safehouse.
He was standing in a sterile white corridor, fluorescent lights overhead, bodies in glass pods lining the walls. His reflection stared back at him from polished surfaces—dozens of versions of himself, distorted and emotionless. A man's voice boomed overhead: "Subject 12's neural decay is accelerating. Initiate memory stabilization."
Then it was gone. He staggered.
Lira caught him before he hit the ground. "Another bleed?"
He nodded, disoriented.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pulse stabilizer—a narrow metallic strip that she pressed against the base of his neck. A hiss, a soft click, and the pressure eased. His breath came easier.
"Thanks."
She didn't let go of his shoulder. "They're getting worse."
"Yeah."
"You're going to need to face it soon. All of it. Or it's going to crush you."
He met her gaze. "I know."
And he did. The fragmented lives he'd leased were bleeding into his mind, and with them, the secrets CoreMind had tried to bury—secrets not even Cole had access to. Whatever had been done to Nico... it wasn't just memory alteration.
It was rewriting.
The Signal Breaks
The console beeped, sharp and sudden. Lira's eyes widened.
"I got it. Elian's signal—it's embedded in the scans. He's piggybacking on their own surveillance to stay hidden."
"Where is he?"
She pointed to a map that flickered onto the terminal: a derelict industrial zone on the city's southern edge. The marker pulsed near a long-abandoned neural calibration facility.
Nico leaned in. "We leave now."
Lira disconnected the gear, stuffing it into her bag with practiced urgency. Nico checked his borrowed weapon, the grip still foreign to his fingers despite how often he'd used it lately.
As they stepped out into the fading light, the city ahead buzzed with the electric hum of control—and revolution.
Meanwhile, at the Core
In a sterile room deep within CoreMind's central complex, Director Vora watched the screen without blinking. The rebellion's signal had fractured their security grids, igniting dissent in sectors they had long kept docile. Borrowers were resisting resets. Hosts were questioning their gaps in memory.
But more alarming than the unrest was the anomaly flagged in red at the bottom of her screen: "Subject 12 – Active. Unauthorized Neural Stability Detected."
She tapped the screen, zooming in on a feed that showed Nico's face from a hacked surveillance camera. He was glitching—flickering in and out of multiple datasets, a living contradiction.
"He's merging," she murmured.
Behind her, a technician turned pale. "But that's not possible. The fail-safes—"
"Were designed to prevent one consciousness from surviving that level of fragmentation," Vora said coldly. "But he's not just surviving."
She straightened.
"He's evolving."