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A repair artisan dives into a virtual loom-city to rescue her sister's trapped memory. In a LitRPG of stitches and code she steals a corporate pattern, sparks a public uprising of reclaimed memory, and builds a cooperative that mends what profit tried to own.
Etta woke to the smell of solder, coffee burnt thin in a chipped mug, and ocean brine that pressed up through the cracked tiles of the neighborhood. The stall above Mend & Marrow rattled as a freight skiff moored at the pier bumped its hull. Light from holo-billboards pooled across the workbench where she kept a row of instruments that had names nobody outside her trade used aloud. Spanners with micro-etches, a palm-sized flux loom, a spool of braided copper threaded with nanofibers—these were her familiar things. She lined them up with the careful ritual of someone who could imagine them as living things.
Across the narrow alley Marin’s cart called with the familiar clank of spice jars; she heard his laugh and the soft vibration of a market drone. Etta propped the shop's metal awning and lifted the lid of a tiny case where a patient waited: Lian’s neural locket. The girl's pulse had always been loud when she came in, restless with ideas. Now the locket’s casing was warm, its lens spidering with a hairline fracture that threw blue sparks when Etta touched the seam. She tapped her wrist and the overlay lit: [MEND & MARROW // DIAGNOSTIC] pulsed in pale green.
"Subroutine corrupted," the HUD read. "Weave lock unstable. Neural link suppressed. High risk: permanent desynchronization." Etta’s mouth went dry. She remembered the night Lian came home after chasing a quest in Threadveil; the way her hands had trembled, the way her eyes had been full of a quiet gravity as if she'd learned something she shouldn’t have. Lian's laugh used to come through like a bell. Now it hovered like a fragment of music cut in half.
She ignored the market's murmur and focused on the filament. The locket's surface felt like cold silk under her fingertips. A fine smell of ozone rose as she gingered open the casing with a blade so old its edge had a history in her callouses. Inside there was a dead shimmer and a sliver of text scrawled into the module's underside with a hand that was not neat.
— PROPERTY: HELIX YARNS —
Etta's breath snagged. Helix Yarns was a corporation that sold crafted weaves for everything from weather routing to memory stitching. They made licenses that folded into people's heads. Their agents had the government contracts, the quiet vans, the security badges that opened doors. The word felt like a shutter falling. She sat back on her stool and the shop tilted for a second; the ocean wind lifted a ribbon of paper and it skittered across her floor like a small, urgent animal.