Afterimage Protocol

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The Echelon Archive smelled faintly of ozone and citrus solvent, a sterile sweetness that always settled into Mira Cass’s lungs the way prayer settled into a tired mouth. She had learned to call that smell comfort: the tang that meant machines humming in perfect cadence, that meant names could be stitched back into torn seams and lives could be smoothed so the city moved on without splinters catching underfoot. At night the archive became a cathedral of cool light and glass; technicians drifted between pods like caretakers around sleeping bodies. They were the people whose hands rearranged what a life was allowed to remember.

Mira’s pod flashed its soft teal when she drew near. She slid her glove over the interface and felt the familiar prickle of synaptic feedback: a chorus of imperceptible eddies that told her a memory was near its limit. Her work was surgical and quiet. She didn’t create narratives; she coaxed fragments back into coherence, pruned corrupt loops, and stabilized threads so that when citizens awoke they did not carry jagged shards of trauma into the public square. The job required a steady moral compass she had cultivated until it humored her like a second skin.

Her personal archive lived in the margin of that profession, a blank week she treated like a sensitive wound. On nights when her hands were empty and her eyes needed to feel the pull of something unfinished, she would study the gap and try to make maps from the nothing. The absence shaped her in ways small and stubborn: an old nickname with no origin, a scar with no history, the way a voice sometimes rose in her dreams and slid away before she could catch it. The notion that memory could be managed, contained, even mercifully excised was a doctrine she had always believed—because it had kept a city from fraying after the Incident, because it had given people the ability to function—but the missing week sat like a foreign knot under her skin.

Tonight she was scheduled for three standard restorations from the municipal cohort: a business owner whose replay had looped and a pair of elderly twins whose naming sequences had become contaminated by cross-deference. The feeds were routine—low-risk repairs, the kind that let your hands work on autopilot while your mind ate the quiet. At hour one hundred and sixty-seven, her console raised a red flag small as a moth: an untagged fragment, orphaned from any queue, sitting just outside the curator firewall.

Curiosity is a dangerous lubricant in that room. Mira had been trained to file curiosity away like contraband; a technician who followed every sideways itch fastened themselves to trouble. Still, something in the fragment’s header registered anomalous metadata: an imprint signature that matched nothing in public registries and a faint timestamp that predated local harmonization protocols. She opened it on the microstage, which allowed her to peer at a raw echo without integrating it into the main corpus.

The fragment unfolded like a streetlight catching dust. It was unrendered—so raw it flickered—and smelled, impossibly, faintly of dust and wet stone. The clip was short: an uneven sidewalk, the rusted lip of a delivery bay, a child singing to themselves and scraping at something soft with thumb and forefinger. Then a voice, high and intimate: "Miri—come on, Miri, look." The syllable hit her like an ache. Only family had called her that, in a half-syllable she had forgotten existed. Under the child’s breath, the camera panned to a tiny pattern of scars on a palm—three parallel crescents that cascaded like a folded comb. Her pulse tightened. That mark belonged to the only person whose hands had ever made that pattern in her memory: her brother.