_neptune_
"You wore my scarf in the cold, and now you want to burn the whole universe down just to keep me warm?"
In a world rebuilt from the ashes of a forgotten catastrophe, the past is no longer a right but a luxury. Humanity survives inside a heavily regulated society where memories have been turned into the ultimate capitalist commodity, bought, sold, and traded in encrypted digital shards. To remember who you were is to be wealthy; to be empty is to be compliant.
Every year, the system executes a mandatory global overwrite. A clean slate. A collective brainwashing designed to keep the population moving forward without the burden of yesterday's ghosts.
Iori is an ordinary facility worker who should have forgotten everything. He should have contentedly lived his life in the quiet, hollow margins of the city. Yet, following the latest New Year's purge, a strange, agonizing anomaly occurs. Against all digital logic, a singular, stray memory fragment slips through the cracks of his mind-leaving him with a phantom ache for a past he cannot name, and a desperate urge to hoard his grueling salary for a broken proxy system he shouldn't even recognize.
But as Iori begins to pull at the loose threads of his own compliance, the world around him starts to warp. The central database is glitching. Reality itself is bleeding digital tears. And standing silently in the periphery of his fractured life is Yuki-a supposedly ordinary confidant whose watchful, unblinking observation begins to feel less like supportive friendship, and more like an architect monitoring a crumbling blueprint.
When the entire framework of existence is built upon a profitable lie, remembering the truth is the ultimate act of cyber-terrorism.
Because some souls would rather watch the world burn down to the ground than forget the one person they were meant to protect.