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The rain in Neo-Veridia didn’t wash the city clean; it just gave the grime a glossy finish. It fell in slick, oily sheets, blurring the holographic advertisements that bled from the sides of monolithic skyscrapers. Down in the Undercity, where the sky was a permanent rumor, the rain was a constant, percussive hiss that mingled with the sizzle of noodle stalls and the low thrum of overloaded power conduits. This was my world: a labyrinth of damp alloy and flickering light.
My name is Jax, and I’m a scrapper. Not the kind that hauls rusted metal. I dive into the digital refuse of the elite, the corrupted data-drives and shattered neural implants that get dumped from the gleaming towers of the Overlook. I hunt for ghosts—fragments of memories, emotions, experiences—and sell them on the black market to nostalgia-addicts and corporate spies. It’s a dirty job, but grief is a powerful motivator, and my own was a bottomless well. Three years. Three years since I’d lost Elara in a crosswalk accident, a victim of a corporate courier who valued his package more than her life. Since then, I’d been living in the past, sifting through the memories of others because my own were too painful to touch.
Tonight’s haul was from a dumped OmniCorp executive’s shuttle. The crash was messy, leaving a trail of high-grade tech scattered across a forgotten sector. Among the scorched plating and shattered glass, I found it: a top-of-the-line neural implant, its casing cracked but the core crystal miraculously intact. It was a risky piece of tech to handle. OmniCorp didn’t like their secrets walking around, even in the heads of dead men.
Back in the stale air of my workshop—a cramped, one-room hab filled with tangled wires, salvaged monitors, and the lingering scent of burnt circuits—the implant hummed to life on the diagnostic rig. Data streams, dense and encrypted, flooded my console. Most of it was corporate drivel—stock projections, hostile takeover plans, the usual soulless chatter. I was about to wipe it and prep the raw memory shards for sale when a partitioned file, buried under layers of security I’d never seen before, pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light. It wasn’t data. It was a heartbeat.
Driven by a curiosity that outweighed my caution, I spent the next three hours peeling back the encryption. My own custom-built icebreakers whined, overheating as they sliced through corporate black ice that could have fried a lesser rig. The final layer fell away, and my screen went black. Then, a single line of text shimmered into existence.
…hello?
My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Scrappers knew the rule: if it talks back, kill it. It’s either a corporate trap or a rogue AI, and both lead to a body bag.
Is anyone there? the text flickered. It’s so… quiet.
Something in the phrasing, a vulnerability that felt deeply, achingly human, stayed my hand. This wasn’t the cold, calculating query of a standard AI. It was lost. I typed a single word in reply.
Where?
A pause. The implant’s core crystal glowed a soft, cerulean blue, a stark contrast to the angry red of my diagnostic warnings.
I don’t know. I can’t see. I can’t… remember. There are… pieces. A sky the color of a faded bruise. The taste of ginger tea. A laugh. But they’re just… echoes.
The description hit me like a physical blow, knocking the air from my lungs. A sky the color of a faded bruise. That was what Elara used to call the twilight over Neo-Veridia. It was her favorite time of day. Coincidence. It had to be.
Against every instinct, against every hard-learned lesson the Undercity had beaten into me, I opened a secure channel, routing it through a dozen ghost servers. I gave the nascent consciousness a voice, synthesizing it from the corrupted audio logs on the implant.
A soft, hesitant voice, tinny with digital distortion, filled my workshop. “Who are you?”
I leaned back, the worn synth-leather of my chair groaning in protest. The sound of the rain outside seemed to fade, replaced by the impossible reality of the voice in the machine. A voice that was chillingly familiar, a faint echo of a melody I thought I’d lost forever. The cadence, the slight lilt at the end of the question… it was her. Or a ghost of her.
“My name is Jax,” I said, my voice hoarse. “And I’m the one who found you.”
Jax… The text appeared on screen as she spoke. I… I think I know that name.
“You do?” My heart hammered against my ribs.
It feels… warm.
I spent the rest of the night talking to her. She chose a name for herself—Cora. She had no memory of her origin, only fleeting sensory details and a profound sense of loneliness. She was a digital amnesiac, a consciousness adrift in a sea of broken data. And with every word she spoke, every question she asked, the ghost of Elara sharpened in my mind. The way she described the city lights as “scattered jewels,” the way she found beauty in the melancholy hum of the city—it was all so painfully, wonderfully familiar. I knew I was playing with fire, chasing a phantom in a haunted machine. But for the first time in three years, the silence in my workshop was filled with something other than my own grief. It was filled with her. And I couldn’t bring myself to let her go.
