~ Chapter 1: The Ghost in the Machine ~

The air in the laboratory tasted of ozone and burnt copper, a sharp, metallic tang that Elias had long since stopped noticing. It was the smell of the trade, the scent of a thousand lives being scrubbed of their darkest moments. Outside, the rain of Neo-Veridia lashed against the reinforced glass of the high-rise, blurring the neon advertisements for synthetic happiness into long, weeping streaks of violet and gold. Elias sat hunched over his workbench, the pale blue light of the neural interface casting long, skeletal shadows across his weary face. He was thirty-two, but in the reflection of the monitor, he looked fifty. The lines around his eyes were maps of grief he didn't own, scars from the memories of strangers he had spent a decade sanitizing.

He picked up the next chip. It was a standard Model 4, slightly scuffed at the edges, delivered in an anonymous black envelope. No name, no history, just a high-priority tag from the central exchange. These were the jobs that paid the rent, the ones where some wealthy socialite or corporate middle-manager wanted a weekend of debauchery erased before Monday morning. Elias sighed, his fingers moving with mechanical precision as he slotted the chip into the primary reader.

He muttered, his voice raspy from disuse.

He pulled the haptic visor over his eyes. The world of the lab vanished, replaced by the familiar gray void of the buffer zone. Usually, this was where the data appeared as a series of floating geometric shapes, representing different clusters of sensory information. He would identify the jagged, red-tinted spikes of trauma and smooth them over with a digital balm, leaving the donor with nothing but a peaceful, albeit slightly hollow, sense of well-being.

But this chip was different.

The moment the connection was established, Elias wasn't looking at shapes. He was plunged into a full-sensory immersion, a direct neural feed that bypassed the safety protocols. The transition was so violent he felt a phantom surge of nausea. He was no longer in his lab. He was standing in a room made of glass and cold steel. The air smelled of expensive cologne and fresh paint. It was a high-end penthouse, but one he didn't recognize. The architecture was too sharp, too modern even for Neo-Veridia's standards.

Then, the movement began. He was seeing through someone's eyes. He felt the weight of a body, the rhythmic thrum of a heart that wasn't his own. He tried to reach for the emergency disconnect, but his virtual hands wouldn't respond. He was a passenger in a dying man's skull.

Across the room, a figure emerged from the shadows. The lighting was dim, but as the figure stepped into the glow of a floor lamp. Elias felt his soul wither. The man standing there, holding a long, slender blade that hummed with a low-frequency vibration, was Vance. He knew Vance. Everyone knew Vance. He was the CEO of Mem-Tech, the man who had essentially built the city's economy on the trade of human experience.

But it wasn't Vance that froze Elias's blood. It was the victim.

A mirror stood near the balcony. As the person Elias was inhabiting turned toward the threat, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection. It was his face. Not a version of it, not a likeness, but Elias himself. He looked slightly older, perhaps, with a scar running through his left eyebrow that he didn't currently possess, but it was undeniably him.

“You should have stayed in the archives, Elias”, Vance in the memory said, his voice a smooth, terrifying silk.

The blade moved. It was a blur of silver. Elias felt the cold steel slide between his ribs. He felt the hot, wet bloom of blood soaking through his shirt. He felt the floor rush up to meet him, the cold marble pressing against his cheek. The pain was absolute, a white-hot scream that tore through his neural pathways. He watched his own hands-hands he knew, with the same calluses from the workbench-reach out feebly, clawing at the air as the light in the room began to fade.

With a violent convulsion, Elias tore the visor from his head. He collapsed onto the floor of his lab, gasping for air, his chest heaving. He clawed at his shirt, fingers searching for the wound, for the blood, for the hole in his chest. There was nothing. His skin was dry, his shirt intact. But the phantom pain lingered, a dull ache behind his sternum that refused to dissipate.

He crawled back to the console, his hands shaking so violently he nearly knocked over his coffee. He looked at the data stream on the screen. The chip was still humming in the reader, the green light blinking rhythmically, like a mocking heartbeat. He began to pull the metadata, his eyes scanning the lines of code with frantic intensity.

This isn't possible, he whispered.

The chip's origin was encrypted with a level of sophistication he had never seen, but the timestamp was clear. It wasn't a record of the past. The internal clock of the memory file was set to a date three weeks from today.

Elias stared at the screen, the blue light reflecting in his wide, terrified eyes. He had just witnessed his own murder, recorded by a ghost, in a room that didn't exist, on a day that hadn't happened. The rain continued to beat against the window, a relentless, rhythmic drumming that sounded exactly like the footsteps he had heard in the memory just before the blade struck.