~ Chapter 2: Echoes of a future Wound ~

Elias didn't sleep. He couldn't. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the silver flash of the blade and felt the sickening slide of metal through muscle. He spent the remaining hours of the night pacing the narrow confines of his apartment, a space that now felt less like a home and more like a waiting room for a funeral. The walls were lined with shelves of old, physical books, a rare hobby in an age of digital saturation-but their familiar presence offered no comfort.

He sat at his kitchen table, a chipped plastic surface covered in half-finished circuit boards and empty nutrient pouches. He needed to be rational. He was a technician, a man of logic and data. There had to be an explanation. A hallucination triggered by neural fatigue? Possible. A sophisticated prank by a rival cleaner? Unlikely. The detail in the memory had been too dense, too textured. The smell of the cologne, the specific way the light refracted through the glass, those weren't things a standard simulation could replicate with such visceral accuracy.

He stood up and walked to the small, cracked mirror in the bathroom. He splashed cold water on his face, trying to wash away the layer of grime and fear that seemed to have settled on his skin. He looked at his reflection, searching for the man he had seen in the memory. He traced the line of his left eyebrow. In the vision, there had been a jagged scar there, a white line of puckered flesh. Here, his skin was smooth.

It's not real, he told himself, his voice sounding hollow in the small room. «It's a projection. A warning, maybe. But not real.

He reached up to rub his tired eyes, and that was when he felt it. A small, hard lump just beneath the skin of his shoulder blade. He frowned, twisting his arm back to touch it. It felt like a grain of rice, cold and inorganic. He didn't remember having a subdermal implant there. Most technicians had them in their wrists for easy interface access, but the shoulder was an unusual spot.

He grabbed a pair of surgical tweezers from his kit and sat back down at the table. With a steady hand born of years of delicate repair work, he made a small incision. He didn't feel the pain; his mind was too occupied by the adrenaline. He worked the tip of the tweezers into the cut and pulled.

Out came a tiny, translucent sliver of glass, no larger than a needle. It pulsed with a faint, rhythmic amber light. Elias stared at it. It wasn't a standard ID chip. It was a beacon. And if it was active, it meant someone knew exactly where he was.

A sudden, sharp chime echoed through the apartment. It was the front door's internal comms system. Elias froze, the tweezers still clutched in his hand. He hadn't had a visitor in months. He didn't have friends, and his clients always used the secure drop-box in the lobby.

He moved to the door, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He activated the external camera. On the small, grainy screen, he saw three men. They were wearing the charcoal-gray suits of Mem-Tech's internal security division. They didn't look like they were there to discuss a contract. They looked like they were there to clean a mess.

Elias? one of them said, looking directly into the lens.

 

This is an unscheduled audit of your workstation.

 

Open the door, please.

Elias didn't answer. He backed away from the door, his mind racing. If he opened that door, he would be taken to a corporate black-site, and the memory on the chip would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. He grabbed his jacket and the black-box chip, stuffing them into his bag. He had a secondary exit-a narrow freight elevator used for moving heavy equipment-but it was at the end of the hall, past the main entrance.

He looked around his room, the place where he had spent the last five years hiding from the world. It was all going to burn. He knew how these audits worked. They didn't just take the data; they erased the person.

He moved to the kitchen window. It overlooked a narrow ventilation shaft that dropped twenty stories into the bowels of the Low-Sector. It was a desperate move, but the sound of a heavy ram hitting his front door made the choice for him. The metal groaned, the frame splintering.

We know you're in there, Elias, the voice called out, devoid of emotion. «Don't make this a permanent deletion.

Elias didn't wait for the second strike. He climbed onto the ledge, the freezing rain instantly soaking his hair. He looked down into the dark, swirling mist of the shaft. Somewhere down there was the city's underbelly, a place where even Mem-Tech's reach was shortened by the sheer density of the chaos.

He jumped.

The fall was a blur of gray concrete and whistling wind. He caught a rusted service ladder ten feet down, the impact nearly wrenching his arms from their sockets. He scrambled down the rungs, his boots clanging against the metal, a frantic rhythm that matched his pulse. Above him, he heard his apartment door give way, followed by the heavy thud of boots on his floor.

He reached the bottom of the shaft and tumbled into a pile of discarded shipping crates. He was in the Low-Sector now. The air here was thicker, smelling of rot and cheap synthetic fuel. Neon signs for illegal limb-clinics flickered in the gloom, casting long, distorted shadows. He didn't stop to catch his breath. He began to run, disappearing into the labyrinth of narrow alleys and crowded markets. He needed to find Clara. She was the only one who dealt in the kind of data that could get a man killed before he was even dead.