The flickering glow from the cracked screen washed Eira's face in blue light. His breath was shallow, barely moving the dust that hovered in the stagnant air of his tenement crawlspace. The data drive sat in its makeshift socket, humming softly like a restless thing. Across the screen, rows of code translated into a crude, blocky interface—his old decryption rig could barely keep up, but it was working.
He leaned closer, ignoring the stabbing ache in his shoulder. The sync port on his neck was raw and red from repeated manual resets, and the implant beneath his skin throbbed with dull heat. He had overclocked it to tap into the drive faster, risking system burnout. If it shorted mid-read, it might take his entire nervous system with it.
Lines of text scrolled slowly, almost mockingly.
Registry // Time Integrity Bureau // Expired Assets File #49288-B // Priority: Obscured
Below that, a table formed. Names. Tags. ID numbers. Timestamps.
NAME: Ayin, Kell.
T.O.D.: 18:44:02 — 07.16.94
STATUS: Expired
NAME: Vant, Lira.
T.O.D.: 21:09:30 — 03.09.97
STATUS: Expired
NAME: Salix, Neru.
T.O.D.: 03:12:56 — 11.22.93
STATUS: Expired
The list continued, endless. Hundreds. Thousands. The screen glitched briefly, text stuttering before correcting. Eira adjusted the contrast on the HUD, heart hammering.
Every name had a timestamp beside it. Not a "deceased" notice. Not "deactivated" or "de-licensed." The words were exact:
Time of Death.
This wasn't a standard obituary list. These were official records. Government-sealed. Likely classified. The Time Integrity Bureau—TIB—had stamped their approval on each entry. But why store them on an unmarked drive? And why were the files corrupted?
Eira kept scrolling, the drive whining louder, like a feral creature resisting dissection.
Then—
He froze.
NAME: Calen, Eira
T.O.D.: 19:22:14 — 02.17.95
STATUS: Expired
Eira's breath caught.
His name.
His full name, listed exactly as it appeared in his central registry.
Calen, Eira.
He blinked, hoping it was a hallucination, a trick of stress and poor lighting. But the timestamp stared back, static and damning.
Nineteen twenty-two hours. February 17th. Five years ago.
He died five years ago.
A cold spike of nausea punched through him. His mind reeled, trying to rationalize. A glitch? A mistaken identity? But TIB death logs didn't glitch. They were synced, verified, and sealed with biometric certainty. This wasn't like a private timestamp or a hacked implant feed. This was system-level clearance. Bureau-certified.
Eira's hands trembled. He yanked his sleeve back and jabbed two fingers to the sync jack beneath his elbow, opening his internal registry. A tiny AR display blinked on:
NAME: Calen, Eira
ID: 921-F37-BL
SYNCED LIFE REMAINING: 10 Days, 3 Hours, 17 Minutes
STATUS: ACTIVE
He was alive.
Officially.
Which meant one thing: someone had manually overridden his death. They'd extended his life without approval, outside the system. That was impossible—no, it was illegal. Not just black-market illegal, but high-treason illegal. The kind of act that could only be done by someone with access to the root ledger. Someone inside the government.
His stomach turned again.
Why him?
Why extend the life of a street courier barely scraping by? And more importantly, why hide it?
The questions clawed at his brain. He pushed back from the screen, the crawlspace suddenly too tight, the walls too close. He needed air. No—he needed to think. To run. To disappear.
He crawled out of the compartment into his tiny flat. Cracked ceramic tiles, flickering ceiling lights, the reek of recycled air. Every sound now felt like a threat. The hum of the fan? Surveillance. The creak of the old pipe? A footstep.
Paranoia surged like an infection.
He forced himself to stay still. He had to follow the logic. What did he know?
One: He had found a government drive, lost or dumped, marked "Expired Assets."
Two: Inside it was a record of people who should be dead.
Three: His own name was among them, with a death time five years in the past.
Four: He was alive. Somehow.
Conclusion?
He wasn't supposed to be.
He should've died that day. But someone changed that. And now, whoever had made that change… either didn't want him to know, or didn't want him alive anymore.
His mind snapped to the man who'd followed him earlier—the faint steps, the shadow in the mirrored glass of the escalade station. He thought he'd imagined it.
Maybe not.
Maybe someone had noticed that the drive was missing.
His sync implant buzzed—just a vibration. No call, no alert. He checked it out of habit.
A timer glitch.
His life counter had just jumped forward by two minutes. Then reset. Then stuttered again.
His implant was being pinged.
Remotely.
Someone was trying to trace him.
Eira yanked the chip out of the reader. The screen flickered and died with a shriek of electronic protest. He tossed the chip into a radiation-lined tin—the old kind used to store illicit biometrics—and buried it beneath a false floorboard in the far corner of the crawlspace. He yanked a thermal jacket from the wall, jammed a blade into his boot, and opened the door.
Time to disappear.
He took the maintenance tunnels instead of the streets. The underwalks were old mag-train shafts, now flooded with runoff and steam. Vagrants slept in alcoves, bodies covered in thermocrete blankets. None looked up. No one cared.
That was the only rule in the forgotten parts of ChronoCity: don't look, don't ask, don't follow.
He slipped past a flickering wall-tag ad showing a smiling couple laughing over a dinner table.
"Trade Time, Live Better!"
"ChronoExchange: A New Hour for a New Life."
He resisted the urge to spit.
Whoever extended his time had done so illegally. That meant no one could know. Not the Bureau. Not the Syndicates. Certainly not the public, who would tear him apart for stealing five years of someone else's future.
He thought of Raya—the voice from the implant ads, promising cheap sync repairs and pain-free black-market tuning. He hadn't met her yet, but she was a ghost name in the slums, always one step ahead of the Bureau. If anyone could shield him while he figured out the truth, it was her.
But first, he needed proof. The chip would only last so long before they traced its last known reader.
He had a backup decryption terminal—buried deep in the sublevels of Sector 12, where the old subspace relay used to run. If the data survived a second pass, he might be able to pull the rest of the list. See who else was "dead" but walking.
Maybe he wasn't the only one.
Maybe he wasn't even the first.
To be continued…