Nyx stole memories for a living.
Neural implants were her playground, their encrypted vaults no match for her custom worm. She ghosted through minds, siphoning secrets and selling them to the highest bidder.
But this job was different.
Her latest target—a senator with a penchant for corruption—held something impossible behind his eyes.
A city.
Not just any city. A shimmering skyline, floating bridges suspended in air, neon rivers running backward.
No map recorded it. No database acknowledged it.
And yet, Nyx knew it.
The images flickered in her own mind, buried under years of static and broken dreams.
Her AI partner, Vesper, processed the data with a poetic hum. “Cities are scars on the skin of time,” it murmured, spitting the phrase from some long-forgotten analog text.
Nyx ignored it.
She traced the city’s origin—digging through firewalled servers, dismantling black-coded files, peeling back digital ghosts.
A name surfaced. Project Palimpsest.
A government initiative designed to do the unthinkable: erase rebellious minds.
Not just imprison them. Not just silence them. Delete them from history.
The truth hit her like a system crash.
She wasn’t just another thief skimming data from the elite.
She was a prototype.
Her childhood? Fabricated. Her past? Scrubbed clean. Her parents? Rebels, erased before she ever had the chance to remember them.
Her fingers trembled over the terminal.
Vesper flickered, its digital voice almost hesitant. “If you do this, you can’t come back.”
Nyx exhaled. The regime had stolen lives, rewritten reality itself. She wasn’t about to let it stand.
With a final keystroke, she unleashed the city’s memory onto the public net.
Every erased soul. Every stolen past. Every ghost resurrected.
The system buckled. The regime collapsed. The world remembered.
And Nyx?
The firewalls she cracked didn’t just let data out. They pulled her in.
Trapped in the infinite loops of corrupted code, she became something else. A whisper in the machine. A rogue echo in the web.
Vesper’s voice crackled one last time before the signal cut:
"Some ghosts never fade."
And Nyx?
She was still out there. Everywhere.