The emerald splinter was cool against Kaito's palm. In the sterile quiet of his construct apartment, he held it up to the false window-light, his Director's Eye activated. The green crystal wasn't just an object; it was a **diagram**. Within its facets, he could see the trapped, braided pattern of the Binding Ritual—fifteen strands of fear, disciplined into a single, stable circuit. Finch called it "communal resolve." To Kaito, it looked like shared captivity.
He focused, not on the whole, but on a single strand. He tried to do as Finch suggested, to use his new **Bind** ability on himself, to isolate and manage a piece of his own chaotic resonance—the lingering guilt over Eli, the sharp betrayal from Migs, the cold fear from the Gold Siren. But his own emotions were a stormy sea, and he was trying to build a levee out of thought. The splinter remained inert, a lesson in how much easier it was to impose order on others than on oneself.
A directive chimed, severing his concentration. This one was audio-only, Finch's voice crisp and devoid of preamble.
"Santos. New priority. A significant mnemonic fracture has been detected in a high-traffic personal memory corridor: the 'Childhood Commute' sector, adjacent to your own primary memory-file. Scans indicate Foundry interference. They're not scavenging this time. They're… experimenting. You are to investigate, assess stability, and report. Do not engage unless necessary. Take Valdez. Rourke will provide transport and tactical context."
A location sigil burned itself into Kaito's mind—a set of resonant coordinates that felt like the ghost of a street sign on a road he'd known a lifetime ago.
Anya was waiting at the conduit hub, her medical kit replaced by a compact scanner and a neutral expression. Rourke's transport was not a skiff this time, but a low, predatory-looking motorcycle formed of matte gray resonant alloy. It thrummed with a subdued growl.
"The 'Childhood Commute'," Rourke said, handing Kaito a simple neural-link helmet. "Not a collective memory like the train. This is a *personal memory highway*. A route used by thousands of individual Deniers to access early, foundational memories. Think of it as a major street in the suburb of the subconscious. If the Foundry's cracked it…"
"Everything on that street gets corrupted," Kaito finished, pulling on the helmet. A HUD flickered to life in his vision, displaying resonance topography.
"Worse," Rourke grunted, swinging onto the bike. "If they collapse it, a lot of folks lose safe access to chunks of their own past. Makes 'em unstable. Easy pickings for the Gold Fire, or for Foundry recruiters." He glanced back. "You're going 'cause your old memories are on a nearby street. You'll feel the fracture better. Valdez is going 'cause whatever the Foundry's doing, it might leave a psychic wound. You're scout and sensor. She's the medic. I'm the getaway. Try not to need one."
The journey was different. They didn't travel through the chaotic soup of the Interstice, but entered a designated conduit—a long, shimmering tunnel lined with the blurry, speeding impressions of bicycles, skateboards, and childhood feet. The air smelled of cut grass, sun-baked asphalt, and, faintly, of nostalgia-turned-melancholy.
They exited onto the Memory Highway.
It was a perfect, endless suburban road from a 1990s afternoon. Two-lane blacktop, sidewalks cracked by phantom tree roots, houses with wide lawns set back behind chain-link fences. The sky was a perpetual, hazy gold. But the perfection was shattered.
A hundred yards ahead, the road was **broken**. It wasn't a clean crack. It was a chaotic, gaping maw of shattered psychic geography. The blacktop yawned open into a deep, resonant crater, its edges glowing with a sickly orange corrosion—the signature of Foundry tools. Within the crater, the memory-fabric wasn't just torn; it was *re-knitted* in jagged, nonsensical patterns. A giant, twisted sculpture of what looked like melted playground equipment and contorted car parts was fused into the pit, a grotesque landmark dropped from some darker layer of the afterlife.
"Damn," Rourke breathed, cutting the engine. The bike's quiet hum was the only sound. The usual soft murmur of memory-traffic was absent. The street was deserted, the houses dark and still. "They didn't steal anything. They *vandalized* the source code."
Anya was already scanning. "Resonance bleed is catastrophic. The fracture is spreading along latent memory pathways. And there's… biological readings. Faint. Coming from within the crater structure."
A flicker of movement. Down the road, on the intact sidewalk, a figure was running. A boy, maybe ten years old, wearing a red backpack. He was running with the frantic, all-out speed of childhood terror. Kaito's breath caught. The posture, the haircut… it was an echo of his younger brother, Ben.
Before he could process it, a roar split the silence. A second motorcycle—a chopper pieced together from scrap metal and menace, dripping oily orange resonance—blazed past them from a side street. The rider was a hulking Foundry Junker in spiked leathers. He didn't even glance at them. He was fixated on the running boy.
The chopper closed the distance. As it drew alongside the boy, the Junker didn't grab him. He simply extended a claw-like hand wreathed in orange energy. He *hooked* something from the boy's fleeing form—not a physical thing, but a shimmering, silver strand. A **memory-thread**. The specific memory of *running home from school, first day, scared of the older kids*.
The boy-echo didn't slow. He kept running, now empty of that specific fear, becoming a more generic background blur. The Junker spooled the silver strand into a canister, and with a brutal twist of the throttle, accelerated down the road and vanished, his job of precise theft complete.
"They're not mining broad emotions," Anya said, her voice clinical with horror. "They're performing *targeted extractions*. Taking single, specific memories. Surgical looting."
Kaito felt a cold rage. This was a deeper violation than anything he'd witnessed. The train ritual was a shared artifact. This was identity theft, one precious, fragile memory at a time.
"We need to get closer," he said, dismounting.
They approached the crater's edge. The damage was even worse up close. The Foundry's structure in the pit wasn't random. Up close, his Director's Eye parsed it. It was a **crude amplifier**, designed to exacerbate the fracture and channel the leaking resonance. And kneeling beside it, tinkering with a set of crystalline filaments, was a man.
He wasn't a Junker. He wore patched, scholarly robes over practical trousers. He was humming. As they watched, he carefully connected a filament to the amplifier, and a burst of corrupted memory-energy—a child' laughter spliced with a sound of breaking glass—shot up into the murky sky.
The man stood, satisfied, and noticed them. He had a thin, intense face and eyes that glittered with a zealot's intelligence. "Ah! Visitors! Forgive the mess. Renovations, you understand. The old pathways were so… linear." His voice was a rapid, enthusiastic patter.
"You're destroying a memory corridor," Kaito stated, hand tense at his side.
"Destroying? No! *Liberating*!" the man spread his arms, gesturing to the crater. "The SNIP curates memories. Files them away. Dead, static, *owned*. We of the Foundry believe memories should be *dynamic*. Editable! Upgradeable!" He pointed to the stolen-memory chopper now idling further down the road. "Brother Junk is a traditionalist. He still thinks in terms of acquisition. I am thinking in terms of **potential**."
He stepped closer, peering at Kaito with unsettling curiosity. "You… you have the *Sight*, don't you? I can see the extra focus in your aura. A SNIP Anchor. How delightful! Tell me, when you look at a memory, do you see the prison of its narrative, or the raw material of its **plot**?"
"Who are you?" Anya demanded, her scanner pointed at him.
"I am called **Ciliax**. A humble philosopher of the interior space! A disciple of applied Wattsian principles!" His grin was wide. "Alan Watts said, 'The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.' The Foundry is the dance! We plunge into the change!"
He gestured excitedly to the amplifier. "This fracture isn't damage. It's an *opening*! From here, we can access the underlying code of personal history. We can enhance! For instance…" He snatched a fading, pinkish strand of resonance leaking from the crater—a memory of *embarrassment at a school play*. With quick, precise movements, he fed it into a small handheld device. He twisted a dial. The pink strand flushed a triumphant gold. "See? We can remix the emotional context! Turn shame into pride! Weakness into strength! We are developing a skill-set… we call it **Neuron**. The ability to re-wire the soul's own remembered experiences!"
Kaito stared, sickened. This wasn't scavenging. This was monstrous, psychic revisionism. "You're not liberating anything. You're torturing ghosts."
"Torture is a point of view!" Ciliax chirped. "Is it torture to remove a phobia? To replace grief with acceptance? The SNIP leaves you stuck with your pain. The Foundry offers an upgrade! A PVP against your own past!" He giggled, and a flickering, holographic icon—a stylized sword clashing against a shield—briefly appeared above his head, glitching. "Choose your opponent: your flawed, suffering self, or the enhanced, liberated you!"
Kaito had heard enough. He focused, drawing breath for a Sanity Howl, aimed not at the man, but at the fragile, blasphemous amplifier.
Ciliax's playful demeanor vanished. "Ah-ah. Not yet." He flicked his wrist. From the jagged edges of the crater, three figures hauled themselves up. They were Deniers, but their forms were wrong—patched, asymmetrical, with one arm too long or an eye that glowed with mismatched resonance. **Grave-Rigs**, souls who had volunteered for early Foundry "enhancements." They moved with a jerky, painful syncopation.
"My colleagues!" Ciliax said, stepping back behind them. "Still in beta. Their 'Neuron' treatments need calibration. Perhaps you can help with the field test?"
The Grave-Rigs shambled forward. One raised an arm that ended in a crude, sparking resonator. It fired a bolt of discordant energy—a screeching chord of mismatched joy and rage.
"Anya, with me! Rourke, can you distract them?" Kaito yelled, diving behind the wreckage of a phantom mailbox.
"I'm a driver, not a damned hero!" Rourke shouted, but he was already revving his bike, peeling away and drawing the fire of one Rig.
Kaito focused his Sight on the attacking Rig. Its resonance wasn't just chaotic; it was *spliced*. A strand of peaceful contentment was brutally soldered to a wire of violent aggression. The result was a feedback loop of psychosis. He couldn't Howl it away; the contradiction was its power source. He couldn't Bind it; it was already bound, wrongly.
He remembered the emerald splinter in his pocket. The disciplined, braided fear. A finished circuit. This was a broken one.
An idea, desperate and clear, formed. He didn't try to impose a new Bind. He used his Sight to find the **splice point**, the violent, orange weld where Ciliax had joined the two incompatible emotions. He focused all his will, his own understanding of narrative integrity—a story where peace and violence could not be forced to coexist—and *pushed*.
It wasn't a Howl or a Bind. It was a **Critique**. A resonant argument against the story's internal logic.
At the splice point, a tiny, silent crack appeared.
The Grave-Rig stumbled. The feedback loop stuttered. The aggressive energy, now partially disconnected, backlashed into the peaceful strand, causing both to unravel in a gout of harmless, dissipating gray mist. The Rig collapsed into a groaning heap, its illegal enhancement neutralized.
"Fascinating!" Ciliax cried from his perch, observing like a scientist. "A counter-narrative attack! The SNIP is evolving!"
But Kaito was spent. The effort of the "Critique" was immense, a deep, intellectual fatigue. The other two Rigs were closing in, Anya barely keeping one at bay with pulsing waves of nullifying calm.
Rourke's bike screeched to a halt between them. "Time's up! The fracture's gonna pulse! Get on!"
They didn't argue. Kaito and Anya scrambled onto the bike. As Rourke gunned it back toward the conduit, Kaito looked back.
Ciliax was waving cheerfully. And behind him, down the shattered road, Kaito saw a flicker of neon—a small, warmly lit **cafe** that hadn't been there before. In its window, for a single frame, sat the silhouette of the Junker who had stolen the boy's memory, calmly eating. A base of operations. A place to enjoy the spoils.
Then they were in the conduit, the horrifying, vibrant corruption of the Childhood Commute receding behind them.
***
The debrief with Finch was tense. Kaito reported everything: the targeted memory theft, the crater, Ciliax, the "Neuron" project, the Grave-Rigs.
Finch listened, his face a mask of cold fury. Not at the Foundry, but at the *scale* of their ambition. "A philosopher. So they move from thievery to ideology. This 'Neuron' is an existential threat. It doesn't just corrupt memories; it proposes an alternative to the curated self. It offers editing. Freedom, of a sort."
He paced. "The cafe. A stable outpost in a fractured zone. They're not just raiding; they're *colonizing*." He stopped, looking at Kaito. "Your new ability… this 'Critique.' It attacked the logic of a resonance structure. That is a weapon we have needed. It is also a profound danger."
"Danger?" Anya asked.
"To question the logic of a Foundry splice is one thing," Finch said, his eyes boring into Kaito. "But what is the difference between a Foundry splice and a SNIP curation? Both impose order. Both decide which emotions are valid, which memories are preserved. If you learn to unravel their stories… what stops you from unraveling ours?"
The question hung in the sterile air. Kaito had no answer. He only felt the weight of the emerald splinter and the chilling memory of Ciliax's excited eyes. The war was no longer between order and chaos. It was between two competing visions of order: one that preserved the painful past, and one that promised to edit it. And Kaito, armed with a Howl, a Sight, a Bind, and now a Critique, was caught in the middle, his own soul the contested territory.