Fragments in Neon
Neon lights flickered as she realized her memory had been hacked.
The pulsing sign above the alley buzzed erratically, casting jagged shadows on the slick cobblestones of Sector 7. A cold drizzle clung to the air, warping colors into oily halos. Veya stood still, one hand braced against a graffiti-covered wall, the other trembling as it hovered near her temple.
Her name was Veya. That much she knew. The rest… stuttered.
The alert shimmered across her vision, a soft red glow overlaying her natural sight:
UNAUTHORIZED MEMORY ACCESS DETECTED. NEURAL LOCK BREACH. TRACE FAILED.
She blinked the message away. It returned.
Blood thrummed in her ears. This couldn’t be right. Her mental firewall was Council-forged, spell-threaded, and personalized. The kind of protection used by licensed technomancers across the Spire Cities. It wasn’t supposed to be hackable.
Yet her mind was fragmented.
She remembered waking up that morning. Coffee, synth-toast, a to-do list. But everything after that twisted. The time was wrong. Her fingers were coated in dried ink she hadn’t used in years. And there was a faint pulse of pain behind her right eye, like a forgotten name trying to claw its way out.
That’s when she heard it.
A voice, distant but familiar.
“You shouldn’t have come back.”
She turned sharply. No one in the alley.
Not a hallucination.
An echo.
Whoever had broken into her mind left a footprint.
----------
She made her way to The Hex Grid.
Tucked between a curse-weaving parlor and a collapsing AI repair shop, The Hex Grid was a known haunt for off-grid spellcrafters and psymancers. Its glamour spell kept it hidden from Normals, and even most licensed mages avoided it unless they wanted to be forgotten.
Milo, the bartender, looked up as she entered. His glowing eyes narrowed.
“You look like you fell through your own spell and landed in a pit of regrets.”
“Someone hacked me,” she muttered, pulling her hood back. “Not just a spell. A full breach.”
Milo set down a glass he hadn’t started pouring and ducked beneath the counter. He emerged with a vial of swirling silver liquid.
“This’ll stabilize your recall for a few hours,” he said, sliding it over. “Then you’re on your own.”
She downed it in one gulp. Ice spread down her spine, followed by a crackle of heat. The room swam and then clarified. Some memories began to float back.
“Karis,” she whispered. “It was her.”
Milo froze. “That’s not possible. Karis Vell died three years ago. Right after you turned her in.”
“I don’t remember turning her in.”
“You testified before the Council. Said she was splicing dream logic into living minds.”
She pressed her fingers to her temple. “But I remember working with her on EchoNet projects. We were building a cognitive resonance bridge. We were... friends.”
“You were until she started altering people’s perceptions without consent.”
“Are you sure that was her? Or is that just what we’ve all been told?”
Milo said nothing. His silence spoke volumes.
----------
That night, Veya plugged into her own neural stream. Her spell-rig buzzed softly, flickering runes floating around her like moths made of glass. She initiated a dive—not into memory, but into the Echo Layer, a semi-sentient residue left behind by deep emotional experiences.
Her vision darkened, then flared.
She stood in a world built of feelings. Not quite real, not quite dream.
Flickers of old conversations hung in the air like ghosts: laughter on a rooftop, whispered promises under starfall, a bitter argument in a Council courtroom.
She followed the emotional residue deeper.
There, at the heart of it, was a sealed glyph, rotating slowly like a coin spinning in water. She reached for it.
Pain slammed through her.
----------
A vision bloomed.
She was strapped to a chair. Karis stood over her, eyes hollow, mouth trembling.
“I’m sorry,” Karis whispered. “You told me to do this. You begged me to erase it. To keep you safe. You said: If they find out what we learned, they’ll burn us both.”
“Don’t,” Veya’s past-self pleaded.
“You’ll forget the Archive. The glyph. The rewrite protocol. You’ll forget me.”
The memory cracked.
----------
Veya sat bolt upright in Milo’s back room, drenched in sweat.
It had all been real. The experiments. The truth buried beneath their city. The thing they’d found in the Deep Archive; a protocol capable of rewriting not just minds but reality.
Karis hadn’t betrayed her.
She’d protected her.
And now someone had tried to unlock it.
----------
Veya needed answers. She slipped out of the Grid and into the night, walking fast through neon-lit streets. Her boots splashed through puddles reflecting fractured magic signs: “CLONE YOUR MEMORIES,” “DISCOUNT HEX CLEANSE,” “REALITY IS RENTED, NOT OWNED.”
Every ad suddenly felt like a threat.
She took the old freight elevators down into the Underline—the forgotten layers of the city beneath the central spire. There, carved into data-stone and glyphglass, lay the Council’s discarded tech and half-formed ideas.
And there she found it.
A mirror.
No reflection.
Only a pulsing glyph.
Karis stepped from the shadows.
“You remember,” she said.
Veya didn’t flinch. “Why now?”
“Because they found it. The Protocol. You buried it, but the Council’s shadow branch has been digging.”
“I trusted them.”
“You trusted me, once.”
They stared at each other.
Karis looked the same. Ageless. Her aura flickered with layer upon layer of protection and illusion. No one else would have recognized her.
Veya took a step forward. “What does it do—really?”
Karis gestured to the mirror. “Project Ashfall doesn’t just erase memories. It rewrites mass perception. If you control enough minds, you control reality itself. Not just what’s remembered. What’s true.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It’s not. You helped build it.”
----------
Veya staggered back.
She remembered the nights. The late hours mapping synaptic alignment charts. The forbidden dive into the Deep Archive. The realization that shared consciousness was editable. That reality was fragile.
She had helped design a spell that could fracture cities.
And then she had run.
She stared at the glyph.
“Who triggered it?”
“The Council,” Karis said. “To erase a riot. A failed assassination. A bad election. It was small at first. But now they’re wiping whole events.”
“And the breach in my mind?”
“They think you might still have a backup. They’re afraid of what you’ll remember.”
“So what do I do?”
Karis held out a glowing crystal. “Take it. It’s the original glyph. Bypass code. Broadcast it through the EchoNet, and it will cascade into every layer of the city’s memory. People will remember what was erased.”
“What happens then?”
“Chaos. Truth. Freedom.”
Veya hesitated.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you keep living in someone else’s story. And so does everyone else.”
She took the crystal.
----------
They met again the next night, on the rooftop of the old Ministry of Lore. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The city glittered like a jewel made of lies.
Veya held the crystal up.
Below, people walked, worked, dreamed, never knowing what had been taken from them.
Karis watched silently. No pressure. Just presence.
Veya whispered the activation phrase.
The sky rippled.
The glyph exploded into light, spiraling across the psychic grid of New Thessara. Minds flared. Forgotten names returned. Old griefs. Erased lovers. Censored truths.
A girl stopped walking and remembered the sister she’d been told never existed.
A man awoke in a hospital and screamed a name no one recognized.
A building, long forgotten, shimmered back into existence on a street corner.
The truth had returned.
----------
Veya collapsed, eyes wide. The glyph burned across the sky one last time.
And then... peace.
She smiled through the pain.
“I remember.”
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This story is based on the prompt: “Neon lights flickered as she realized her memory had been hacked.” You can find more free prompts here.
I’ve also published Elara’s Pocket Prompts #1 – May Edition, featuring 30 prompts to spark your imagination. Check it out here.
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