The intake form asked if Bataar Khulan possessed original consciousness or licensed duplicate. He checked "original" because the other box triggered mandatory verification scans he couldn't afford.
"Citizenship status?" The clerk didn't look up from her terminal, fingers dancing across holographic keys that left phosphorescent trails in the air. Her neck port glowed amber—third-generation neural stack, probably leased from Axiom Dynamics at 23% APR.
"Provisional," Bataar said. "Timeline refugee. Cascade Event zeta-7."
Now she looked up. Her pupils dilated as her stack accessed his file, pulling data faster than baseline cognition allowed. "You're from a pruned branch."
"Technically erased, yes."
"But you're still here." Not a question. Accusation.
Bataar had this conversation seventeen times since arriving in Prosperity Heights six months ago. The city squatted in former Mongolian steppes like a chrome tumor, sovereign territory answerable to no nation because three megacorps owned it jointly and competing jurisdictions made law meaningless. Perfect place to exist when your timeline got corporate-deleted for intellectual property violations.
"I jumped before the wipe," Bataar said. "Emergency temporal displacement. Legal under Nakamoto Accords."
The clerk's expression said she knew the Accords had seventeen subsections rendering that statement meaningless depending on which timeline's version you cited, but arguing timeline law was above her pay grade. She returned to her terminal.
"Purpose of consciousness backup request?"
"Standard personal security." The truth—he needed backup before taking a street-fixing job in the Larynx, the city's sprawling enhancement district—would flag his application for review that took months he didn't have.
"You understand backup duplicates are Axiom Dynamics property for first five years? Consciousness licensing clause 7-B?"
He understood. Everyone understood. Axiom owned your uploaded mind and could license it for computational labor, virtual entertainment, or worse. But living without backup meant one bullet, one temporal accident, one consciousness hack made you gone forever.
Bataar signed the release. The clerk scanned his wrist port—he still had original biosignature from his erased timeline, unmarketable but functional—and processed payment. Three months salary for insurance he prayed he'd never need.
"Report to Sublevel 19, Consciousness Archival. They'll extract during off-peak hours." She was already calling next in line before he'd moved.
The Larynx writhed with neon at ground level, but Bataar's meeting was forty floors up in Helix Tower, where real power nested. His fixer contact—street name Origami—had brokered the introduction to Kayla Skovgaard, VP of Timeline Integrity at Kronos Solutions.
Corporate insider hiring street fixer. Bad combination. Worse when the insider was straight-corporate and the job involved off-books work.
The elevator played ads directly into his auditory cortex through induction field. His skull became speaker: "Tired of baseline limitations? Helios Gene Clinics offers 0% financing on designer embryos! Your children deserve optimal start!"
Floor 87. Executive level. Reality shifted—carpets appeared, air smelled filtered, even gravity felt lighter through localized field adjustment. This was the world the enhanced inherited.
Skovgaard's office overlooked the Larynx. From here, the district's chaos looked almost beautiful—temporal distortion fields shimmering like aurora, genetic clinics pumping bioluminescent waste into reclamation tanks, consciousness upload centers blinking as millions of minds spooled to corporate servers.
"Mr. Khulan." Skovgaard didn't offer her hand. Executives rarely touched unknowns—too much risk of nano-infiltration or consciousness leeching. She was obviously enhanced: skin too smooth, eyes too focused, movements precisely economical. Military augmentation package, probably. "Origami says you're discreet."
"I exist in jurisdictional limbo," Bataar said. "I'm legally nobody. Discretion is survival."
She smiled without warmth. "Perfect. I need someone who doesn't exist to investigate people who shouldn't exist."
Skovgaard pulled up holos—faces, dates, incident reports. "Kronos Solutions manages timeline stability for Prosperity Heights. We monitor branch pruning, prevent paradoxes, ensure smooth causality flow. Standard corporate temporal management."
"Except?"
"Except we're finding ghosts. People from erased timelines appearing in baseline reality. Not refugees like you who jumped legally. These individuals were in the pruned branches when they got deleted. They should be gone. Instead, they're here, with no records, no authorization, no explanation."
Bataar's stomach tightened. He knew what that meant. "Someone's pulling them out. After the erasure."
"Impossible," Skovgaard said. "Timeline pruning is absolute. Once corporate review determines a branch violates IP law or poses stability risk, it's wiped from existence. Nothing survives. That's the entire point of preventative timeline management."
"But they're surviving."
"Yes. And someone is hiding them." She leaned forward. "I need you to find who. And why."
Bataar studied the faces in the holo. Sixteen individuals. Various ages, ethnicities, enhancement levels. Only commonality: all from timelines pruned by Kronos Solutions in the last two years. All appeared in Prosperity Heights afterward.
"What happens when I find them?"
Skovgaard's expression went flat. "We determine if the extraction process created consciousness violations, timeline contamination, or corporate IP theft. Then we correct the anomaly."
Correct the anomaly. Corporate euphemism for erasure. Again.
"And if they're innocent refugees? If someone saved them from unjust deletion?"
"There's no such thing as unjust deletion, Mr. Khulan. Timeline pruning is reviewed by three-corporation consensus. Branches get erased because they threaten stability, violate patent law, or reduce shareholder value. The people in those branches are unfortunate collateral damage, but corporate temporal sovereignty is absolute under Nakamoto Accords. No timeline has right to exist if it threatens the whole."
Bataar had heard this justification before. His timeline got pruned because someone independently invented quantum-biological processors similar to Axiom Dynamics' patents. Seventy million people erased for accidental parallel innovation.
"Why hire street fixer for this? You have internal security."
"Because whoever is doing this has access to Kronos systems. Internal investigation might tip them off. I need outside contractor with no corporate ties." She paused. "And someone who won't ask moral questions. You're timeline refugee, Mr. Khulan. You understand the rules. You exist by corporate permission. Don't make me regret granting it."
The threat was clear. Help, or join his timeline in non-existence.
Bataar left Helix Tower as day-cycle lighting dimmed to night-cycle amber. The Larynx transformed after dark—enhancement clinics gave way to consciousness brothels where people rented out their uploaded minds for others to experience their memories, sensations, or just possess their perspective for an hour.
His wrist port buzzed. Message from Origami: "Got your payment. 15% finder's fee. You're fucking yourself taking corpo jobs but that's your funeral. Literally, probably."
Bataar knew. But he needed the money. Consciousness backup was just first expense. He needed genetic stabilization treatments—timeline jumping caused cellular degradation—plus gray-market papers establishing fictional identity, and eventually a real neural stack instead of the biosignature port marking him as unenhanced primitive.
His phone rang. Actual voice call, which nobody used anymore except people avoiding data trails.
"Bataar Khulan?" The voice was young, female, artificially distorted. "I know what job you just took. Don't do it."
"Who is—"
"We saved those people. We pulled them from pruned timelines before corporate erasure finished propagating. It's rescue operation, not crime."
"That's impossible. Nothing survives timeline deletion."
"Nothing is supposed to survive. But pruning takes 4.7 seconds to fully propagate through quantum foam. If you extract consciousness during that window and anchor it in stable timeline, the person survives. Corporate genocides are preventable, Mr. Khulan. We're preventing them."
Bataar's heart hammered. "You're creating paradoxes. Consciousness violations. These people don't have legal existence in this timeline—"
"They don't have legal existence anywhere. Their home timelines are gone. We give them identity papers, biosignature spoofing, shelter. We save them from corporate murder."
"Kronos will find you. When I report—"
"You won't report. Because you're one of us. Timeline refugee who got out legally, sure, but your entire reality was deleted for corporate profit. Seventy million people gone. You think that was justice?"
Bataar said nothing. He thought about it every day. His parents, friends, colleagues—gone. Not dead. Worse. Retroactively never existed. Even his memories of them were legally questionable—Axiom Dynamics argued survivors experienced false memories of timelines that never happened, that consciousness from erased branches was corrupted data.
"Walk away from this job," the voice said. "Or we'll assume you're enemy and act accordingly."
The call ended.
Bataar stood in the Larynx's neon chaos, enhanced humans flowing past him like he was stone in a transhuman river. Above, corporate towers scraped the sky. Below, in the subcity, millions of baseline humans lived in industrial dark, trading years of consciousness-labor for genetic scraps and broken augmentations.
He thought about the faces in Skovgaard's holo. People who shouldn't exist, rescued from non-existence by unknown saviors willing to commit timeline crimes to prevent corporate genocide.
Then he thought about his own face in his apartment's mirror, a ghost from erased reality living on borrowed permission in a city owned by the same corporations that deleted his world.
Bataar pulled up his comm, found Skovgaard's contact.
Typed: "I'll take the job. Need advance payment for investigation expenses."
The response came instantly: "Approved. 50,000 corporate scrip transferred. Regular reports expected."
Bataar pocketed his comm and walked deeper into the Larynx, where enhancement clinics promised transcendence and consciousness centers sold immortality on installment plans.
He'd find these timeline criminals.
He'd report them to Kronos Solutions.
He'd collect his payment and get his enhancements and his legal papers and his chance at survival in this chrome nightmare.
Because that was the rule: you played the game or you stopped existing.
Bataar was very good at not stopping existing.
Behind him, unnoticed in crowd blur, three individuals with black-market neural stacks and erased-timeline biosignatures began following at professional distance.
The city's night-cycle lighting cast everything in amber warning.
Nothing was about to get better.