Chapter One: Fragments
Keira Salvo's hands hovered above the console, her fingertips brushing the edge of the memory disk. The faint glow of Echo 179 pulsed like a heartbeat beneath the Vault's sterile lighting. The Memory Vault was quiet, save for the gentle hum of the retrieval units-a symphony of silence that Keira found oddly comforting. She wasn't supposed to linger. She wasn't supposed to feel anything about the memories she processed.
But this one was different.
The fragment wasn't cataloged, its metadata corrupted beyond recognition. That alone should have warranted an immediate purge. Unregistered memories were unpredictable-dangerous, even. Yet something about the swirling, ghostly image on the disk made her pause.
Against protocol, she slid the disk into the interface port. The memory flooded her neural interface in an instant, cold and sharp as a winter storm.
A street, shrouded in mist. The muffled sound of footsteps on wet pavement. Then, a figure-tall, cloaked in shadows-emerging from the haze. They moved quickly, purposefully, toward someone standing beneath a flickering streetlamp. The victim's face was obscured, but their fear was palpable, radiating like static through the memory feed.
Then came the knife. A flash of silver. A scream that was cut short.
Keira jolted out of the memory, her breath ragged, the weight of the fragment still pressing against her mind. She ripped the neural interface from her temple and stared at the disk, her hands trembling.
"Who are you?" she whispered, though no one was there to answer.
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YOU ARE READING
Echoes of the Fragment
Science FictionIn a world where memories can be bought, sold, and traded like commodities, 28-year-old Archivist Keira Salvo stumbles upon a memory fragment labeled "Echo 179." The fragment holds a cryptic and vivid scene of a murder, but there's no record of the...
