Ghostcode

The market called itself the Gutter because the rain always found its way through the arcology’s cracked skin and pooled at the feet of those who could afford nothing better than puddle-reflected neon. Vendors hung their wares beneath strings of hacked lumin, each bulb a different illegal spectrum. Smells layered — frying oil, ozone, the metallic tang of solder, a sweeter chemical bouquet from bootleg mood-threads. Iris Kade moved through it like a ghost with an appointment: shoulders wrapped in a fraying coat, hood frayed with fiber implants that still whispered low-priority diagnostics into the bones of her skull.

She’d come to do what she always did when money ran thin — sell expertise, not muscle. Neural restorers were a rare breed; they repaired shredded autobiographical threads for clients who wanted to forget, or remember, or build comfortable myths. It paid in credits and in information. Tonight she needed both. Her younger sibling, Mika, was held in a corporate labor-holding three spans east, tethered into an anchor program that skimmed pay directly from their cortex. Bail was not a legal term anymore; it was a sequence of maintenance patches and mood adjustments, and it took time and capital to unfasten. Iris had long ago learned how to move between kindness and the calcified geometry of businesslike detachment.

Rae found her in a stall that sold vintage synth-flowers. The woman’s eyes were too wide for someone who trafficked in secrets; she kept looking over her shoulder as if expecting a patrol drone to nestle behind a rusted pillar. In her fist was a tiny capsule the size of a thumbnail — matte, scarred, and humming in a way Iris could feel through the soles of her gloves. A micro-shard. Illegal. Dangerous. Expensive.

“You sure it’s what you think?” Rae asked. Her voice bounced off braided copper like a prayer.

Iris tilted the capsule with a gloved finger. The surface swallowed light and then gave it back in short, impatient pulses. “It’s memory hardware,” she said. “Someone’s been stitching lives into a tractable vector.” She didn’t need to say they were usually Helix tech or ex-Helix hacks.

Rae swallowed. “I don’t want to know who paid. I just want out.”

They made the transfer in silence. Iris hid the shard’s warmth under her coat where her spine met her skull and began home the way she always did — through alleys that taught you subtler geometry than the city planners intended. The shard thrummed a private rhythm, like an animal uneasy in a small room. When she reached her workshop, a single window that looked over a service duct and a blinking courier tower, she set the shard on the bench and connected her portable decoder: an old Helix field unit she'd kept in a drawer, the kind bureaucrats used for diagnostics in the days before memory became marketable.

The interface lit with a familiar blue-white. Iris fed the shard’s handshake into a sandbox. It pushed back at first like a wary thing, filling the buffer with disjointed frames: a child counting the fingers of a parent who smelled like an oil slick, a protest chant sliced into three pitches, the sound of someone singing a lullaby in a language Iris didn't place. The frames stitched together into a chorus, not quite coherent, as if a hundred hands were trying to fold a single paper into a different shape.

Then the shard stopped being anonymous. Somewhere in the chorus, a voice threaded through that had cadence and grammar and a stubborn insistence on being recognized.

“My name is Iris Kade.”

The words were not an echo; they were a direct mapping — the shard used the same lexical signature as her own name string. The bench hummed. Her palm left a print on the field unit and she felt the hair rise at the back of her neck. She didn’t remember saying those words inside the archive; she remembered never saying them aloud in any room that had Helix on the floor plates. The shard continued, spooling imagery faster: a lab corridor, the hum of cryo, a face she knew from old employment rosters — pale, tired, Director Halvorsen mid-speech about civic continuity and curated memory.

The image hit like a strike. Iris’s hands went cold. For a second the workshop was a synaptic theater and she sat suddenly very small in a chair that wasn’t hers.