Neon Palimpsest — Chapter 1

Mara Kest kept her hands steady because that was the only thing she had learned to trust. Routine was the only small mercy left in the clinic above the wash tunnels, where the Aurelia Sprawl breathed hot metal and synthetic jasmine. Her station smelled of ion-cleaners, cooling gel and the faint, persistent tang of vinyl from the low-tier neural sleeves she coaxed back to coherence. She worked with tidy gestures—retract the cranial cap, coax the daemon through the cortical mesh, sing the wavemap a quiet tune until the memory nodes hummed in sync. Clients came with scrapes and holes: the bus driver who’d lost a sequence of route names, the seamstress who couldn’t remember a face, a scrapped corp temp who carried loyal overlays like a second, nervous skin. They paid in chipped credits and favors, in barter and half-forgotten recipes, and Mara accepted them all because she was good at returning people to themselves, or as close as they chose to let her.

The neon below the clinic bled through translucent panels and painted her instruments in smeared blues and bruised magentas. Through the window, the tiers stacked like ledger pages—residential cantos, service decks, glinting towers that bore the logos of the big architects of memory. Calyx Dynamics had a halo of light on the skyline, a corporate crown that pulsed advertisements: STABILITY THROUGH CONTINUITY. The slogan comforted some and suffocated others; Mara kept her opinions tucked under the lab coat where they could not interfere with soldering irons and microtweezers.

That morning a courier left a small module in her drop box without a face or a note. It was the rhythm of the sprawl—unbranded packages, anonymous jobs—and Mara felt the same professional curiosity as always. The module looked like an old childhood toy, rounded plastic scuffed to a dull sheen, but inside it held a wafer the size of a thumbnail. She ran it through her isolation sled, fingers moving by habit, eyes colleting refracted lines on the diagnostics. The wafer’s metadata did something in her chest like an unexpected key under a loose tile: an overlay signature she’d seen once before in a faded forum scrap and then dismissed. This was cleaner, tighter—an imprint with the corporate hash of a gated vendor. Calyx.

Mara’s throat tightened. She had repaired Calyx overlays when clients could not afford proper replacements, but she knew their marks meant more than branding. These signatures were permissions and locks—little legal skeleton keys that could keep a person locked inside a version of themselves. She slid the wafer into a private channel and watched as the fragments unfurled across the sled’s holo. Among the expected textures—family dinners, a summer market, a metallic laugh in a rain corridor—something else blinked. An encrypted shard, compressed and timestamped with a date that did not fit the story the rest of the wafer told.