He woke up every morning convinced it was real—his apartment, his job, the city humming outside his window like a machine with a heartbeat. But in the corners of his mind, something trembled. A dream that wasn’t a dream. A woman’s voice he had never heard, saying his name like a question. Every night he fell asleep to a life that felt borrowed. Every morning he swallowed the same pills that whispered, This is your truth. He was an engineer, or maybe a logistics analyst. The files said both. But the name on his ID badge didn’t feel like his. Not anymore.
The recall station was hidden beneath a noodle bar in Sector 12. Neon flickered as he descended—half-terrified, half-drawn. “Custom experiences,” the screen read. “Vacations. Adventures. Alternate lives.” He chose something simple: a spy thriller on a lunar base. Just a memory. Just a thrill. But the moment the neural cap settled on his skull, something inside broke loose. Not fiction. Memory. Suppressed and weaponized. He saw things. Did things. Escaped places no man should have left alive. The techs panicked. One shouted, “Echo protocol—he’s activating!” Then the bullets came, and he ran, and he kept running.
Now the city was hunting him—its drones, its agents, its synthetic bloodhounds coded to read brainwaves. They said he was a rogue asset. A stolen ghost. A liability. He didn’t know if he was a soldier, a spy, or just a man caught between programs. All he knew was the fragments returning: fire on Mars, a woman’s face, a rebellion buried under corporate lies. Each memory felt sharper than the last, like pieces of a map drawn in pain. The only thing he could trust was instinct—and the way his hands knew how to kill before his mind caught up.
He reached the edge of the off-world gateway as dawn peeled over the skyline. The ships overhead whispered of escape, of answers—or maybe more illusions. He found her waiting, the woman from his visions, with eyes like static storms. “You found me,” she said, not with joy, but with resolve. “Then you’re ready.” In that moment, he didn’t care if any of it was real. He didn’t need truth written in code or sealed in memory vaults. What mattered was choice. And as alarms wailed across the city, and the air shimmered with the pulse of approaching war, he stepped forward—not to remember who he was, but to decide who he would become.
