Bataar's apartment occupied a converted storage unit in Sublevel 7, where the city's foundation met bedrock and artificial gravity fields flickered during peak usage hours. Rent was cheap because the walls sweated condensation and the air tasted of recycled industrial output, but it had three things he needed: no corporate surveillance feeds, cash-only landlord, and proximity to the gray-market clinics that didn't ask questions about biosignatures from erased timelines.
He hadn't slept. The anonymous caller's words said in his mind like a corrupted memory file: You're one of us.
The faces from Skovgaard's holo stared at him from his cracked tablet screen. Sixteen people. He'd cross-referenced them against missing persons databases, refugee registration logs, even consciousness rental listings. Nothing. They'd appeared in Prosperity Heights like digital ghosts made flesh—no entry records, no immigration stamps, no temporal displacement permits.
Professionally thorough identity erasure. Or something worse.
His wrist port buzzed. Message from Origami: "Street word says you're asking about timeline ghosts. Advice: stop asking. People who dig into that shit end up in consciousness brothels, renting their minds to corpo execs who want to experience what erasure feels like. Fun for them. Not fun for you."
Bataar typed back: "Need a meet. Information broker who trades in subcity rumors."
Three minutes passed. Then: "Yesui. Operates out of the Bone Garden in Sublevel 12. Mention my name, she'll charge you double. Don't mention it, she'll assume you're corporate and you'll leave in a reclamation bag. Your choice."
Sublevel 12 wasn't on official city maps. It existed in the infrastructure gaps where three megacorp territories met and jurisdiction became meaningless. The Bone Garden was a consciousness bar—not the sanitized corpo versions on surface levels, but the real thing. People jacked into communal neural networks and experienced pooled memories, sensations, identities. Consciousness tourism for those who couldn't afford full upload but wanted to taste what it felt like to be someone else.
The bar's entrance was a converted maintenance hatch. Bataar descended through narrow tunnels where bioluminescent fungi—escaped from some genetic lab years ago—provided sickly green lighting. Enhancement clinics lined the walls, most just plasteel cubicles where unlicensed technicians installed black-market augmentations. He passed a teenager getting her first neural port installed by a man whose hands trembled from his own malfunctioning motor cortex enhancements.
The Bone Garden's interior was womb-dark except for the neural connection pods lining the walls, each pulsing with soft light as occupants experienced borrowed consciousness. The air smelled of ozone and human sweat. Consciousness mixing created peculiar atmosphere—you could almost feel the overlapping awareness, dozens of minds bleeding into each other through poorly shielded neural interfaces.
Yesui sat at a corner table, her form barely visible in the darkness. As Bataar approached, emergency lighting caught her profile. She was heavily enhanced—not the sleek corporate augmentation but the brutal patchwork of the subcity. Mismatched neural ports studded her skull like cybernetic acne. One eye was obviously synthetic, a different color and quality than the other. Her left arm terminated in a multi-tool prosthetic that looked scavenged from industrial equipment.
"Origami said you'd come." Her voice had artificial smoothness of cheap vocal cord enhancement. "Said you're asking stupid questions about smart topics."
Bataar sat without invitation. "I need information about people appearing in the city with no records. Timeline refugees who shouldn't exist."
"That's a corpo problem. Why's a timeline ghost like you working for corpo interests?"
"How do you—"
"I trade in information, Khulan. Your biosignature is from Cascade Event zeta-7. Erased timeline. You got out legal through emergency displacement, but you're still ghost walking borrowed ground." She leaned forward. "And now you're hunting other ghosts for the same corporations that deleted your world. That's some tragic irony."
Bataar kept his expression neutral. "I'm hunting criminals who are creating paradoxes and consciousness violations. Whoever is pulling people from pruned timelines is destabilizing causality."
Yesui laughed—a harsh digital bark. "You actually believe that corporate propaganda? Causality destabilization? The only thing destabilized is corporate profit margins when their genocide operations get interrupted."
"You know about the extractions."
"Everyone in the subcity knows. There's a group—nobody knows their real name, street calls them the Anchors—pulling people out of timelines right before corporate pruning completes. They're saving lives, Khulan. They're heroes to baseline humanity."
"They're criminals creating existential paradoxes."
"No. They're Robin Hood with quantum technology." Yesui pulled up a holo from her wrist port—grainy footage from subcity surveillance. It showed a temporal distortion field opening in an abandoned warehouse, and figures stumbling through, disoriented, terrified. Other figures—faces obscured by scramblers—rushing to help them, wrapping them in what looked like emergency biosignature spoofing blankets.
"This footage is three weeks old," Yesui said. "Warehouse in Sublevel 15. Kronos Solutions pruned a timeline for 'economic instability'—meaning the branch developed worker cooperatives that threatened corporate dominance. Forty thousand people erased. The Anchors saved eleven."
Bataar watched the footage. The rescued refugees looked shell-shocked, their bodies partially translucent as reality struggled to incorporate consciousness from a timeline that no longer existed. Then the spoofing blankets activated, and they solidified, gaining physical coherence.
"Where are they now?"
"Gone. The Anchors move them constantly. False identities, biosignature masks, consciousness encryption. They're ghosts in the machine." Yesui paused. "You want to find them, you'll have to become one of them. The Anchors only recruit people with nothing to lose."
"I have plenty to lose."
"No. You don't. You're timeline refugee living on corporate permission in a city that would erase you for convenience. You have no family—they're retroactively non-existent. No legal identity—your papers are provisional fiction. No future—enhancement costs more than you'll earn in a lifetime." She leaned close enough that Bataar could smell the ozone coming off her mismatched implants. "You have nothing except survival instinct. That makes you perfect recruit or perfect traitor."
"I'm being paid to find them."
"And what happens when you do? Skovgaard pats your head and gives you legal citizenship? Bullshit. You deliver the Anchors, Kronos Solutions eliminates witnesses—including you. You're timeline ghost, Khulan. You're loose end."
Bataar had considered that. Probably why Skovgaard hired external contractor instead of internal security. Plausible deniability. Disposable asset.
"If the Anchors are so noble, why the secrecy? Why not go public, expose corporate timeline genocide?"
Yesui's expression darkened. "They tried. Two years ago. Whistleblower named Marcus Holt went to independent media with evidence of unjust timeline pruning—branches being erased for corporate profit, not causality protection. Three days later, Holt's consciousness got hacked. Someone rewrote his memories, made him believe he'd fabricated everything. He recanted publicly, then committed suicide by walking into a reclamation processor."
"Could have been fake memories. Consciousness corruption from—"
"He had backups. Multiple secure locations. All simultaneously rewritten. That's not corruption, Khulan. That's corporate consciousness violation on mass scale. The Anchors realized they couldn't fight in the light. They went underground. Now they just save who they can."
Bataar absorbed this. If true, it meant Kronos Solutions—and by extension, the other megacorps—had capability for retroactive consciousness editing. Not just pruning timelines, but rewriting the minds of survivors who spoke against them.
"I need names. Locations. Someone connected to the Anchors."
"I don't have that. Information brokers who dig too deep end up with corrupted memory stacks." Yesui tapped her mismatched neural ports. "Half my augmentations are to compensate for the holes in my head. I know what I know, but I'm careful about knowing too much."
"Then what can you give me?"Yesui considered. "There's a genetic clinic in Sublevel 9. The Vestige. They treat timeline refugees—stabilization therapy for quantum degradation, biosignature masking, that specialty work. If the Anchors are bringing people through, they'd need medical support. The Vestige doesn't ask questions and doesn't keep records."
"Name?"
"Doctor Sarangerel. Former corporate geneticist. Quit after her daughter got caught in branch pruning. Now she runs underground clinic, helps ghosts stay solid." Yesui's synthetic eye whirred, focusing. "But understand this, Khulan—you walk into the Vestige asking corporate questions, you won't walk out. That clinic is sacred ground for timeline refugees. You're one of us, so you get chance. But betray that, and the subcity will erase you more thoroughly than any corporate timeline wipe."
Bataar left the Bone Garden with more questions than answers. The subcity tunnels twisted like intestines, occasionally opening into vast chambers where baseline humans lived in vertical slums, stacked housing units climbing toward distant ceiling lights that simulated day cycles.His wrist port buzzed. Skovgaard.
"Status report."
Bataar found a maintenance alcove, activated privacy scrambler. "Initial investigation suggests organized operation. Unknown group extracting refugees from pruned timelines, providing them false identities and medical support."
"Names?"
"Still gathering intelligence. Operation is highly compartmentalized. Need more time."
Silence on the line. Then: "You have forty-eight hours, Mr. Khulan. After that, I'll assume you're compromised and activate alternative assets. You understand what that means."
Alternative assets. Corporate euphemism for wetwork teams. They'd eliminate the Anchors, the refugees, and Bataar himself as contaminated resource.
"Understood."
The call ended.
Bataar stood in the alcove, surrounded by the subcity's perpetual gloom. Above him, forty-seven levels of Prosperity Heights reached toward the sky—corporate towers where enhanced humans lived impossible lives, where consciousness was commodity and time itself was corporate property.
Below him, the subcity's depths continued down into bedrock, where baseline humanity survived like bacteria in a wound.
His tablet displayed the sixteen faces. People who shouldn't exist. People someone was risking everything to save.
People Bataar was being paid to deliver to oblivion.
He thought about his parents. His friends. Seventy million people erased because of accidental patent violation. He'd survived because he worked for a temporal research firm that had emergency displacement authorization. Everyone else—Gone.
Not dead. Never-existed.
And the corporations called it legal.
Bataar pulled up his comm, started composing message to Skovgaard. Three words: I found them.
His finger hovered over send.
Instead, he deleted the message.
Pulled up his banking app. The 50,000 corporate scrip sat in his account—enough for gene therapy, maybe even a budget neural stack.
Enough to become slightly less of a ghost.
He closed the app.
Typed a different message to Origami: "I need an introduction to the Vestige. Tell Doctor Sarangerel I'm a refugee looking for help. Nothing more."
The response came quickly: "You're making a very expensive mistake."
"Not the first time."
Bataar pocketed his comm and descended deeper into the subcity, where the walls wept industrial condensation and the air tasted of rust and desperation.
Somewhere above, corporations pruned timelines like gardeners culling diseased branches.
Somewhere below, the Anchors saved what fragments they could.
And Bataar Khulan, ghost from an erased reality, walked the line between salvation and erasure, knowing whichever side he chose, nothing was going to end well.
The sublevel lighting flickered amber.
Warning.
Always warning.