In the neon haze of New Avalon, the air buzzed not with traffic, but with thoughts. Not yours—others'. Borrowed. Bought. Stolen.
Memories were the new currency. And Kael Draven, a once-proud detective of the Neural Enforcement Unit, was now a ghost wandering alleys of recollection.
His badge? Gone.
His mind? Questionable.
His purpose? One last question to answer:
Who stole his childhood?
---
The tech was illegal, of course. Governments banned it after the first neural riots. But like anything powerful, it never truly vanished.
People still lined up in flickering backrooms for just a taste—a soldier’s final battle, a rock star’s final concert, a stranger’s kiss on a rooftop in Rome.
They used EchoPods. Worn like headphones, they fed memories through neural pulses. Not simulations. Real experiences. As real as your own birthday.
Kael knew the taste too well.
It started with a case.
Six overdoses in one week. Victims collapsed with nosebleeds and eyes wide open—frozen mid-ecstasy.
They all had EchoPods.
But they all had something else in common: they died reliving the same memory.
Kael watched the footage in a backroom.
A swing set.
A child’s laughter.
A tall woman in yellow turning back to say, “Come on, Kael!”
His name.
He had never submitted his memories. Never sold. Never donated.
Then how was this moment—his moment—now in six corpses’ minds?
---
He tracked the memory to a dealer named Nino, a shadow in the underbelly of the New Avalon Bazaar.
“Who gave you the swing-set memory?” Kael asked, placing his old badge on the table. Just enough authority to scare. Not enough to get shot.
Nino blinked, his cybernetic eye adjusting to scan Kael’s brain waves.
“It wasn’t yours when I bought it,” Nino said. “It was labeled as synthetic.”
“Synthetic?” Kael spat. “That memory is mine. I lived it. That swing was in my backyard.”
Nino shrugged. “Talk to the girl who made it. She calls herself Lira.”
---
Lira was young. Barefoot. Eyes full of oceans and paradoxes.
She sat in a memory den, surrounded by buyers drooling in chairs. She didn’t flinch when Kael stormed in.
“I saw what you sold,” he said. “That was my childhood. How do you have it?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached into her pocket, pulled out an EchoPod, and placed it on his head.
“Just watch,” she whispered.
---
He saw himself—ten years old. Running through a field.
Only… he wasn’t alone.
A girl ran beside him. Lira.
They climbed a tree.
They swore an oath.
They kissed.
They said, “One day, we’ll expose the truth.”
Then came the men in suits.
Needles. Lights. Screams.
His memories being erased.
Kael tore off the EchoPod, gasping. “That… never happened. Did it?”
Lira nodded. “Not in this timeline. But once, we were rebels. We hacked the core memory banks. We almost stopped them.”
“Who?”
She leaned in. “The architects of Project Epoch.”
---
Project Epoch.
A myth among memory dealers. Rumored to be the original prototype—a vault of stolen memories from the entire population, fed into AI to predict humanity’s future.
Some say it was shut down.
Others say it became the government itself.
Kael’s thoughts raced. “So my memories were—what? Recycled?”
Lira said softly, “Erased, then repackaged. EchoPods started as a public service—to help Alzheimer’s patients relive family moments. But then… they turned it into profit. Your past was never deleted. It was sold.”
Kael’s fists clenched. “Why me?”
“You were one of us,” she said. “You tried to shut them down. And when they caught us, they wiped you clean.”
---
Kael left with his mind unraveling.
If what Lira said was true, he wasn’t just a detective.
He was a traitor to the system. A rebel.
And they had stolen his past, sold it to strangers, and left him hollow.
He made his decision.
One last EchoDive. One trip into the Project Epoch vault.
---
He broke in through the Old Core, where decayed servers hummed in forgotten rhythm.
Lira patched him into the Epoch Net.
“You have five minutes,” she warned. “Any longer, and your mind might not come back.”
Kael nodded and plunged in.
---
He saw memories flying past like galaxies.
Births. Murders. Weddings. Wars.
A tapestry of humanity.
Then he saw his file.
Labeled: KAEL_00723: Memory Blocked. Experimental Subject.
He opened it.
A thousand versions of himself.
Freedom fighter. Killer. Poet. Father.
Each life rewritten. Each ending different.
Kael clutched his head.
Too many truths. Too many lives.
He screamed.
---
He woke up.
Lira caught him as he collapsed.
Blood from his nose. A flicker in his pupils.
“You saw it,” she whispered.
“All of it,” he said. “They didn’t just sell memories. They rewrote people.”
“What do we do now?” she asked.
Kael smiled, weak but resolute.
“We give the world its memories back.”
---
A week later, every EchoPod in New Avalon glitched at once.
Then came the flood.
A broadcast of true memories. Real pasts. The erased. The stolen. The edited.
People wept. Others rioted. Some disappeared.
But truth had returned.
Kael walked through the chaos with Lira at his side.
A stranger stopped him.
“I remember you,” she said. “From a dream. A field. A tree.”
Kael nodded.
“Not a dream,” he said.
“A memory.”
