The first sign was the flickering of her own shadow.
Ione Vale stood inside a fractured construct—a memory chamber barely holding itself together, each wall a projection of half-rendered recollection. The air felt too warm, humming with static. Somewhere, in a real room far away, her body lay hooked to a bootleg neural interface, but here she was weightless, walking through the curated dream of someone else.
But it wasn't someone else's memory.
It was hers.
Only… not exactly.
The dive tech had warned her before strapping her in: "If you feel déjà vu, run."
But there was nowhere to run.
---
The black-market diver—an eyeless man who called himself Grit—had slipped her coordinates to a memory broker buried in a dead-zone under the docks. They'd made the deal quickly: a memory dive into one of Mnemosyne's off-grid archives, said to be loaded with unfiltered fragments, raw pulses of emotion, untouched by corporate censors.
Ione needed a lead. Something, anything, about Zara.
She hadn't expected herself.
Now, inside the memory, she wandered through a glowing kitchen. The light was soft, sunset-rich. A woman laughed just out of view, and Ione's stomach clenched in recognition—though she had no idea why. A small table stood nearby, perfectly arranged for two. Flowers in a chipped glass jar. A steaming bowl of mushroom stew. Her hands moved toward the bowl involuntarily.
It was her grandmother's kitchen.
Except Ione had never known her grandmother.
Not in this life, anyway.
---
Suddenly, the walls warped—pixels bleeding. A child's voice sang from the corridor:
> "Ione Vale, forget your name,
Memory's debt is all the same…"
She turned sharply. The corridor stretched endlessly, flickering with corrupted frames. Echoes of herself—at different ages—blinked in and out like holograms, each frozen mid-movement: laughing, crying, running. One sobbed in a bathtub, water turned red. Another stared through the bars of a cell.
It was a trap. A psychological mirror maze.
This wasn't a free memory. This was fabricated history—installed to seduce, confuse, and possibly overwrite. Mnemosyne's cruelest invention: the false light dive.
And she had walked into it willingly.
---
Her pulse raced. She tried to jack out. Nothing.
> "Override locked," a voice said, female and clinical.
"Observational state in progress."
Then she heard her own voice—from the other side of the room.
"I thought I could handle it," the other Ione said, her back turned. "I thought I could remember what I was before they turned me into this."
The real Ione—this Ione—froze. Her hands shook.
She approached the copy. The air grew colder with each step.
"Who are you?" she asked.
The other her turned around. Her eyes were completely white, bleeding streams of data down her cheeks.
> "I'm who you'll be," she whispered. "Once they've finished with you."
---
The scene shattered.
Ione tumbled through noise—digital static, half-spoken phrases, and heat. Then suddenly, she landed in a dark room.
A chair.
A mirror.
A figure standing behind her.
She recognized the posture immediately—Zara.
But her face was blurred, warped beyond recognition. Her voice came softly:
> "This is how they erase us, Ione.
Not by force.
But by rewriting what we love."
Ione stepped forward. "Where are you?"
A pause.
> "Inside you. In pieces.
They tried to copy me… but failed. I infected the dive net.
That's why they want you back."
The lights surged. Sirens screamed in the memory's code.
The dive was collapsing.
---
Ione awoke on a filthy mattress in the dive den. Her limbs were numb, her skin covered in sweat. Grit was gone. The interface had burned out—literal smoke rising from the melted neural clamps.
But someone had left something on her chest:
A printed datachip—ancient, analog, barely functioning.
She picked it up. Scrawled in real ink:
"ZARA'S SEED // ECHO TRACE-7 // DO NOT UPLOAD"
Ione shoved it into her pocket and staggered to her feet.
Something had followed her back.
She could feel it moving behind her eyes.