The man on the screen was already dead.
Layla knew this — not in the dramatic, philosophical sense. He was literally dead. Buried, cremated, documented in three different countries with official certificates.
And yet here he was.
Smiling into a live feed, timestamped and geotagged just 3 kilometers from her location.
"I need you to remember me," he said into the lens, voice trembling. "Before they delete this too."
Layla paused the video. Her coffee had gone cold. Her office — a high-security vault buried beneath the Geneva Memorial Archive — was silent except for the soft hum of server stacks behind her.
She ran a facial match scan.
Result: 100% match.
Name: Dr. Elias Moreau
Status: Deceased.
Date of Death: March 2, 2037.
Cause: Auto-immolation. Suicide. Witnessed. Confirmed.
But the video was dated yesterday.
And that was impossible.
Unless someone had brought him back.
Or someone had never let him die.
The Geneva Archive wasn't like most data centers. It wasn't just history; it was memory. Personal, institutional, even classified. A hybrid of real-time surveillance and old-school testimony, curated by a dwindling group of specialists known as Archivists.
Layla was the youngest of them.
She was 32 and already looked older — not from age, but from the weight of what she read each day.
She'd seen dictators plead innocence in holograms. Heard the last voicemails of genocide victims. Watched governments rewrite time with a simple command: "Erase and replace."
But this?
This wasn't erasure.
It was resurrection.
She tapped into the deeper metadata.
The file had no public source. It came from a black node — one of the illegal satellite relays buried under the registry.
Only six people in the world had the key to even view it.
Layla was one.
She should have reported it immediately.
Instead, she played it again.
This time, she noticed something strange.
Dr. Moreau wasn't alone.
In the reflection of his glasses — just for a second — a figure appeared behind him. Unclear. Tall. Unmoving.
Watching.
Like they knew exactly when he would die… and who would be watching him later.
Layla didn't believe in ghosts.
But she did believe in false flags, synthetic memory loops, AI puppetry.
The tech was there. Hell, some of it was designed in the very lab Moreau used to run before he killed himself.
Or didn't.
She typed out a secure message to her supervisor, a man known only as Velt:
"We have a Class R Echo anomaly. Possible pre-death capture. Requesting chain review before deletion."
But before she hit send, the power flickered.
Once.
Twice.
And then the screen went black.
No alarms.
Just… silence.
Then her phone buzzed.
UNKNOWN SENDER
Audio message received.
She played it, heart thudding.
"Archivist Rami," a voice whispered.
"They know you saw it. You have twenty minutes. Leave the Archive. Do not use the elevators. Burn this device. And whatever you do…
don't look at the mirrors."
The phone exploded in her hand.
Not with a blast — with static, the screen cracking open like a blister, plastic fuming. She dropped it, breath caught halfway to panic.
Someone had just used a one-time neural overload pulse.
Military-grade.
Whoever sent the message wasn't warning her.
They were instructing her.
Layla stood fast.
Years of training kicked in — micro-sprint to the manual override, bypass security locks, grab only analog documents and off-grid backup drives. No digital IDs. No fingerprints. She ditched her Archive badge, shoved a fireproof micro-journal into her boot, and headed to the emergency stairs.
It was twelve floors to ground level.
Each step an echo.
Each shadow… too quiet.
At floor six, she heard the first footstep that wasn't hers.
Slow.
Measured.
Metallic.
She didn't wait to investigate.
By the time she reached the access tunnel, sweat clung to her neck and her muscles ached with adrenaline. The hallway was lit in red — emergency mode — and somewhere far behind her, she thought she heard a familiar sound:
The whispering hum of memory scanners.
They were coming to erase her.
Not kill her.
Not yet.
First, they'd make it so no one remembered her ever working here.
Then maybe she'd "vanish in an unrelated boating accident."
That was how they did it these days.
Clean.
Untraceable.
Unreal.
She slipped into the extraction hatch and sealed the magnetic lock behind her.
The last thing she saw before it closed?
A reflection.
Not her own.
Someone standing at the end of the hall.
Face covered.
Eyes… not quite human.
Just watching.
Fifteen minutes later, Layla emerged in an alley behind a meatpacking warehouse in outer Geneva.
The air smelled like ozone and cold iron.
She was alive.
Unregistered.
And on the run.
But she had something they didn't.
She had the video.
Moreau's voice. His plea. His eyes.
And something told her this wasn't a message to the past.
It was a warning from the future.