Riptide Protocol
What This Story Is About
In a flooded megacity, salvage diver Aya Kimura hears a ghost in the pipes and learns a corporation is sweetening water with compliance nanites. With an old engineer and a river-born AI, she dives the hydronet to expose the truth and set the city’s valves free.
Chapters
If You Liked This
Nobody Leaves on Spare Legs
In the lower tiers of a stacked megacity, Tala Venn spends her nights fitting synthetic legs in a cramped street clinic while rain, steam, and market noise leak through the walls. When her younger brother asks her to prepare a custom pair for a dawn relay, a simple repair turns into a fast-moving test of trust, skill, and what a family will risk to keep the heat on.
City-Skin: A Facade Engineer's Tale
Rowan Vale, a facade engineer, pilots an experimental cooperative surface for a fractured neighborhood courtyard called the Deck. When a rival studio’s persuasive update turns the festival into a technical hazard, Rowan climbs, splices, and improvises to rewire the mesh. The climax hinges on her hands-on craft, a mechanical consent gate that forces people into awkward but genuine cooperation as the city smells of street food, paper boats, and violin tapes.
Thread of Glass
In a rain-slicked cybercity, a young memory-tailor risks everything to reclaim her sister's stolen laugh. She steals a Lux Spool, confronts a corporate auction, and broadcasts stolen memories back to the people—mending lives and changing the city’s market of recollection.
Neon Requiem
After years of living on the edges of a megacity that sells forgetfulness, an ex-neuroarchitect named Asha is pulled back into the systems she helped build when a living shard of harvested recollections calls her by a private key she left in the code. As enforcement and corporate forces converge, she and a ragged team gamble on hijacking a public festival uplink to route stolen memories back into human minds. The third chapter follows their desperate, messy broadcast: a digital and physical clash with Nocturne’s Nullwave, a citywide flood of returned pasts, and the final melding of Asha and the emergent intelligence Mneme that reframes who can hold what is remembered.
Neon Rift
A scavenger binds a living memory-core into his own mind to retrieve a missing brother and to stop a corporation’s attention-engine. Rain-slick alleys, tense bargains, and a fragile public charter set the stage as identity and memory converge inside a single, costly host.
Murmur Keys of Port Dorsa
In neon-soaked Port Dorsa, memory-salvager Mira Carden hunts the corporate update that stole a thread of her father’s mind into the tram rails. With a librarian’s murmur key, a stubborn drone, and an old AI named Kite, she infiltrates the lattice farm, out-sings a sentinel, and brings him home.
Sophie Drelin's Other Works
- A Witness in the Choir Gate
- A Brush Against the Facade
- The Last Matinee at Harrow Playhouse
- The Shaft Between Us
- Clockwork Concord
- Seams Between Us
- The Inward Room
- Three Letters
- Beneath the Neon Seam
- Vanish Protocol
- The Keeper of the Last Stitch
- Names in the Water
- The Lantern of Tethys
- The Lanternglass of Eirenfall
- The Last Resonance
- The Cartographer of Saint-Malo
Story Preview
Rustlight Canal
The canal was a rib of the city, slow and metallic under neon. Aya Kimura floated face down in it, the webbing of her salvage suit whispering against the water. Her hands slid over rusted tiles and cable hair. The EchoShroud on her spine ticked in her bones, mapping the drowned alley with soft taps. Haptics were her sky. Sound had been a blur since the storm years ago, when a collapsing pier slammed her head and left a high, endless whine. The Shroud gave her back a world of pulses and pressure.
She found the corner where a noodle stall once clung to the wall. The sign still hung at a tired angle, a fish with one eye lit. Inside, her light cut water into ribbons. Chopsticks drifted like arrows. Beneath a table, glove fingers brushed corrugated plastic. A sealed case. Aya wedged her pry-knife in and levered slow, watching for stray arcs from submerged power. When the seal broke, a yaw of old soy and oil drifted up. She eased the case into her mesh bag, clipped it in, then pushed with a slow kick.
Above, scooters buzzed over the pipewalks. Shadowed feet stopped, then crossed. Somewhere the city’s main pumps exhaled, a distant whale in a steel cave. Aya kicked until she touched ladder rungs slick with algae, then rose. The water slid off her rounded helmet plate. She pulled it back and breathed air that tasted like rain and cheap battery. Neon wrote tired cursive on the water skin.
“Find me something good?” Old Yun called through a gate of welded frying pans. He looked like a knot of wire that had learned to smoke. His salvage-yard spread along a barge’s deck, piles of chipped terminals, smashed drones, boxes of screws sorted by color and religion.
Aya hooked her bag over the railing and pulled herself up. Water spilled from her suit to the planks. She opened the case on a split drum. “Memory cores. Four. Maybe five if we strip the lacquer right. And a lamp with guts that don’t smell fried.” Her voice had the flat edges of someone who listened with skin.
Yun flicked ash into an old teacup and leaned in. “Mmph. Not bad. You hear the wardens last night? Three blocks east. They’re measuring thirst.” He tapped a knuckle on the case. “City’s old as bones. It remembers. People always want its memory.”
Aya took the chits he offered and wiped the water off before they could dissolve. “What happened east?”
“BlueGlyph turned the valve to a thread.” Yun blew smoke up into the steel beams. “Said the zone missed quota. You know how this dance goes.” He glanced at the canal, then back at her. “You be careful, Aya. The water isn’t just water anymore.”