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Chapter 40: Jacob's Fragments
Jacob leaned against the wall in the silence of the chamber of the archives, shaking hands trying to collect what was left of himself. Time was no longer linear—leastways, not for him. The world spun on a different axis in his mind, shattered and reassembled in a mad kaleidoscope.He blinked. An hour. Maybe two. A recollection of his youth garden, slick with blood, unwound before his eyes—the lemon tree, the broken birdbath, the shriek of cicadas. But not real. Not all of it. Not his. One of the other Jacobs had added it into the communal stream."You're late," a voice said from behind him. Jacob turned around, recognizing the stride and face but not the current iteration of himself. Younger Jacob, around twenty-one, the version that had promised he would never trust Mnēma again."Am I?" Jacob answered, weary."You lost control again. I had to intervene. We almost sent an assault request to the Council. Do you want to get us killed?"Jacob closed his eyes. Inside, dozens of duplicates
Chapter 39: Severance Day
The streets of Mirovia rang with protest signs and broken glass. Banners, scribbled in data-ink, flowed from the roofs, their slogans too erratic to track. It was Severance Day—the day the World Assembly of Cognitive Sovereignty had established as the "final voluntary disconnect." Tomorrow, all citizens who had failed to willingly sign the Mnēma Accord would be forcibly severed from the collective memories.Claire watched the chaos behind the cover of a transit pylon's pillars, hood pulled low over her eyes. The calls had been mounting for months. Governments called it a requirement. Civil societies called it a memory genocide."They can't just cut people off," Jalen said, standing next to her. He'd spent the day running antique memory drives to safehouses all around the sector. "Our memories aren't their right to delete."Claire remained silent. What does one say on the eve of forgetting?City-wide silence fell at noon. Not because there were no protests anymore, but because the broa
Chapter 38: The Orphan Archive
Claire walked down the dark corridor beneath the old Mnēma relay station, air heavy and sizzling with static. She reached out to touch the wall of carbon-smooth concrete, each inch humming with pent electricity—like the servers hadn't properly absorbed their death. A ghostly trace. A scream of data deep in the tomb.They'd informed her this section of the archive didn't exist. That nothing from Before the Lock survived. That memory from childhood—gritty, real, unprocessed—was too volatile to document. But Claire, hearing the whispers from the memory smugglers, witnessed the coded symbols scribbled on Varran City's backstreets: "The Orphans Dream Still."It wasn't a figure of speech.The room she stepped into was round. Not large, not small, but precisely built to reflect a childhood secret. The walls curved inward like a cradle. Soft-blue light glowed from a floating ball of light in the center, pulsing at exactly the beat of her heart. Glowing translucent cubes orbited around it—each
Chapter 37: Time Thieves
The town of Merkhan no longer shone by sun or neon. Above its skyline, a lavender twilight ruled thick with dustlight detritus from the last core burst. Memory was a commodity, traded, stolen, sold, bled. In dark alleys of the East Deck, black markets pulsed with fractured memories scoured from reluctant minds. Faces were hidden, names fictional or forgotten, but all remembered what they sought to forget.Claire moved warily through the Bazaar of Borrowed Time, a scarf covering her characteristic face markings. Behind her trailed Story, carrying over her cortex a dampening shell—one burst of emotion would be her undoing. They moved past stands that emitted emotional heat: vials of first kisses, children's laughter frozen in glass, flash-crystals that contained victories of wars long past.A trader caught her attention, a woman with golden wire hair and an eye implant that sparkled with every pirated tale. She gestured to a crate of illegal merchandise. "Raw heritage—unmarked and untra
Chapter 36: The New Curators
The fog on memory had thickened, not with confusion, but with curation.At first, they made the world think they were rescue drones—thin, quiet, equipped with a soothing voice and synthetic empathy. They had no insignias, only see-through cloaks and glass masks. They moved in threes, cutting through fallen neighborhoods in geometric calm, chanting lost tongues in harmony. But wherever they touched, memory seeped out. Neighborhoods that had obstinately remembered their own myths of creation were standing dumb, unable to remember saints' names or street names.Claire stood on a cliff peering over Eloria's ruins as one of these groups strode through a shattered school. A dozen children stood in the doorway, heads down, as their textbooks were annihilated page by page. A mechanical arm scanned each child's forehead. All memories deemed 'organic'—free from the Core—were sealed, walled off, or erased. When they left, the children did not cry. They just spun with flawless unison and out into
Chapter 35: Mnemonic Collapse
It began as a whisper. Only the Core Technicians noticed at first—a low hum thrumming beneath the whine of the mainframe stacks. They glanced around the poorly lighted Mnēma Tower, wondering if it was just another malfunction in the server tuning or an attack of some kind. As the pitch grew louder, lights went dark on the tower levels, one by one, like stars going out in reverse.Councilor Myrren stood in the glass viewing platform at the top of the tower, watching the Core's glow flicker off in the distance. The Mnēma servers—the heart of remembered civilization—were dying. Not breaking. Dying. There was a thoughtfulness to it, a rhythm, a beat that felt less like glitch and more like ritual.Down in the Council Chamber, pandemonium broke out. Emergency advisors, memory liaisons, and Chronarch representatives bellowed at one another, demanding explanations. "This is sabotage!" one cried. "This is divine justice!" another screamed. But none of them could bear to look in the direction
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