The metal case sat on Eira's table like a sealed coffin. Even now, hours after he had hidden it away and pulled it back out, it continued to hum with that faint, almost imperceptible vibration—like a dying heartbeat. In the silence of his room, the resonance crawled through the cracked walls and under his skin.
He'd thought about tossing it. Maybe even pawning it off at a salvage stand for a few precious minutes. But something about it—its weight, the way it reacted to touch, and that strange warmth—felt wrong. Wrong and familiar.
Eira's implant ached again. A slow, thudding pulse behind his left eye. The sync point at the base of his neck had been overheating since the last refill. Time implants weren't meant to be topped off with gutter-market sync fluid. Still, he couldn't afford the licensed stuff. Not with just thirteen hours and twenty-six minutes left on his clock. Thirteen hours to live unless he found another delivery.
He sat down, gently turned the latches, and opened the case.
Inside was a single object: a time-chip data drive, old tech, roughly palm-sized, matte-black with one blinking crimson diode that pulsed irregularly. No brand logo, no registration number. Nothing marked it as legal.
Just three letters engraved deep into the side: TIB.
Time Integrity Bureau.
"Shit," Eira muttered.
He hesitated. For a moment, just a breath, he considered slamming the case shut and pretending he'd never seen it. But he knew better. TIB didn't lose drives. And if they did, they didn't stay lost for long.
He touched the chip. The diode blinked faster.
His hand hovered over the portable decryption unit on his desk—an old, modded Scrye-X given to him by Tarin years ago. It wasn't connected to the city grid. It wouldn't transmit data or flag anomalies, at least not unless someone had embedded a trigger.
"Okay," Eira muttered, voice tight. "Just a peek."
He slotted the drive into the Scrye-X port. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the device buzzed softly, the screen lit up with corrupted strings—overlapping data, flickering static, then a hard-coded boot menu.
Asset File Detected: TIB // CLASSIFIED
AUTHORITY LEVEL: REVOKED
FILE INTEGRITY: DAMAGED
Proceed? Y/N
Eira pressed Y.
Lines of code blurred past too quickly to read. He leaned in, tapping keys, slowing the scroll. Data packets were labeled in blocks, encrypted in a mix of dead dialects and outdated TIB shorthand. He recognized fragments—Raya had taught him the basic terms when they'd both run under-city deliveries. He spotted terms like EXPIRED ASSET, MANUAL EXTENSION, UNTRACED YEARS.
Then, for a moment—just a sliver in the stream—his HUD flickered.
His timer, that ever-present deathclock wired to his vision, stuttered. The digits warped.
13:22:57... 13:47:31... 12:18:02... ERROR...
Resyncing.
Eira's breath caught. His body jerked back. The pain in his neck flared—sharp, surgical, like someone had jammed a needle directly into his sync port.
Then the timer re-aligned.
13:22:56.
"What the hell..." he whispered, clutching his neck.
The Scrye-X beeped again.
On screen now was a grid—rows and rows of names, some blinking, some marked with a skull symbol, others labeled with a red EXPIRED tag. Hundreds of them. No, thousands.
Names. Timecodes. Death stamps. Data points cascading like tombstones.
His eyes scanned rapidly—then froze.
Eira Vance.
Citizen ID: 612-XX4-980.
Official Time of Death: 5 YRS 3 MTHS 19 DAYS AGO.
His heart stopped.
The screen blinked again—pulling up a fragmentary file tied to his name. No photo. No full bio. Just a sentence embedded in the data log:
"Asset manually extended by U.C. clearance. Trace scrubbed."
"What does that even mean?" he whispered. "Who—?"
He pulled back from the screen, heart pounding. That couldn't be real. He'd been alive the past five years. Working. Eating. Struggling. How could he have died?
He unplugged the chip with a shaky hand and powered down the Scrye-X. A silence followed—thick and stifling.
Eira backed away, paced. He opened the small closet that doubled as a kitchen and splashed synthetic water on his face. The faucet sputtered. His reflection in the mirror was pale, hollow-eyed, jittery.
A knock.
He froze.
Three soft taps. Not loud. Not forceful. Just... knowing.
He didn't move.
Another knock. Same pattern.
He reached slowly for the shock-stick under the table.
Nothing came after.
After five full minutes, he cracked the door open.
Nothing. Just the hallway, flickering lights, and a faint chemical scent from the upper vents.
But on the floor: a flyer.
No, not a flyer. An ad-strip, still glowing.
He picked it up.
It displayed a familiar face. Raya, smiling, in grainy color. She looked tired, older than he remembered, but the voice was unmistakable.
"Got a sync burn? Timer glitch? Feeling your seconds leak? Come to Raya's—the only place in Lower Ditch where your time won't run out before the anesthesia kicks in."
He flipped the strip over. A handwritten line beneath the looped ad:
"You need to see me. Tonight. Don't run. —R."
The message chilled him. It meant she already knew.
He stepped back into the room, eyes scanning the now-closed case.
The chip had glitched his timer. Showed him data that shouldn't exist. Told him he'd already died.
If that were true...
Then every second from this point on was borrowed.
To be continued…