Mnemonic Shard

The rain came like static, fine and electric, making the neon halos of the lower decks bloom and blur. Cass moved through that smear with practiced economy — shoulders down, hood up, boots catching puddles that reflected adverts for mood-tunes and food parcels. The city above them was a stacked constellation of glass and private light; down here, the lanes were a restless tangle of vendors and data scavengers, bodies wrapped in patchwork implants that pulsed with peripheral market feeds. Cass kept her hands empty against casual frisking, but the neuro-cartridge rode concealed against the spine beneath her jacket, its casing colder than the surface of her skin.

Memory couriers had rules carved into muscle: do the run, take the coin, never, ever sample a payload. Those rules had kept Cass alive since she’d begun moving other people’s pasts for credits. She could compartmentalize better than most; a practiced null between herself and the lives she carried. Tonight, the payload hummed like a caged thing. The manganese shell was sealed and the shard inside registered as generic contraband to cursory scanners — the perfect lie. She had a path mapped, a buyer with a reputation light enough to slip past the lesser watchers, a corridor that would put her inside the market’s heartbeat then out again. Simple. Efficient. Paid.

She passed a kiosk where a vendor looped a luminous memory of a street race for ten seconds of joy. A child nearby mimicked the engine sound with the seriousness of someone rehearsing forbidden movement. Cass saw more than she let on; the city layered her senses with other people’s short-term purchases, and it made a rhythm she moved to. The buyer had said to meet under a battered transit gantry where the smell of recycled coffee clung to old metal. She arrived on time; that was part of the edge.

A figure waited beneath the gantry, face covered with the mapped patterns of a corporate ad-mask. He moved with the practiced nonchalance of someone who had rehearsed casualness enough that it blurred into sincerity. Cass approached with the ritual of a transaction. Exchange protocols were cheap theatre: a coded nod, the passing of a sealed case, a small talk buffer. Her fingers brushed cold metal as she slid the neuro-cartridge out, keeping the shard’s casing between gloved palms. The man’s hand, when it closed around the case, was steady. His eyes — the only thing not hidden — were trained with the polite focus of a buyer who had learned to look at the world as property.