Rain tapped like knuckles on the synth-glass awning as Mira pushed through the midnight crowd of District 7. The streets hummed with digital ads and the low, electric echo of a city addicted to forgetting. She clutched the memory coin in her fist, its metallic grooves warm against her skin, as though it had a pulse of its own.
She'd found it that morning—no envelope, no stamp, just lying on the smallest shelf of her apartment's secure inbox. A vintage thing, designed in the old pre-cloud fabrication style: silver-washed coils etched with neural inscript glyphs… and her own handwriting, faintly engraved across the backside. To forget is not the same as to heal. Something she remembered writing—once. Or maybe not.
"I'm telling you, Mira, it's an echo," said the vendor, nervously eyeing the coin from behind his SOULS & REMNANTS kiosk in the underground Memory Bazaar. "Old tech. Illegal. Whatever's on that thing isn't just someone's past—it's a fracture. Those can't be scrubbed. They stick in your head. Change you."
Mira turned it over again. Images surged—fire on a rooftop, laughter under stars she didn't recognize, a woman's voice calling her from somewhere too far. Her chest tightened. "How much would someone pay for it?"
The vendor took a half step back, shaking his head. "People would pay to not be near that thing."
That evening, in her apartment's haze-lit window, Mira held the coin under her lens scanner. The glyphs wouldn't decode. Encryption layers were sealed in something unfamiliar—older than standard protocols. Older than her.
Her girlfriend, Eliah, leaned over her shoulder, warm and curious as always. "That thing's glitching the lights. Look—your hand."
Mira looked down.
A faint, fresh burn had bubbled against her palm, the shape of the coin's central spiral. Shallow, but unmistakable—like something had printed itself directly into her skin.
Later, in the dead hush of 3 a.m., Mira jolted upright in bed. The apartment trembled, briefly. Everything looked the same. But it felt… silent. Not like a pause. More like something waiting.
She stepped out into the hallway. Her neighbor's cat, normally perched by the stairs, was missing. The hallway painting? Different colors. She knocked on her building manager's door—Mr. Harrow, the old veteran who used to give her cinnamon candies when rent was late.
A man in his thirties opened the door instead, eyes bleary.
"Sorry," Mira said. "I was looking for Mr. Harrow."
"There's no Harrow here. I've been the super for three years."
Mira stared, blood draining. "That's not… What?"
The man raised an eyebrow. "You new to the building?"
Mira didn't answer.
Because behind his shoulder, inside the office, her file—her lease, photo, and identity scan—was absent from the wall cabinet where it had always been.
To be continue...