The fan squealed above Aria Santiago, its rhythm matching her impatient pulse as it struggled against the thick coastal heat wafting through the faded cafe. Condensation beaded on her vintage data pad—a relic from her days as a memory broker working the city's most dangerous neural networks. She scanned the room, a microcosm of urban survival where survival meant more than just staying alive. Locals with chipped ceramic mugs sat alongside ex-pats, their augmented reality overlays casting faint blue halos across their brows like digital halos of desperation.
Aria checked the time display on her data pad again, the numbers blurring momentarily before sharpening like her rising irritation. Her contact was late, and in a city where memories were a currency more valuable than credits, tardiness could mean betrayal—or worse, imminent danger. Here, time wasn’t simply measured. It was negotiated, traded, sometimes stolen.
The soft chime of the doorbell cut through the ambient hum of cheap machinery. A shadow flickered near the entrance. A boy, no more than twelve, darted inside. His chest heaved as if he'd been running from something more terrifying than mere pursuit. His wide, alert eyes locked onto Aria with a purposeful intensity that defied his years—eyes that had already seen too much of the city's brutal memory trade.
"You Aria Santiago?" he whispered, his voice barely audible over the ambient din of clinking mugs and murmured conversations.
She frowned, her hand instinctively shifting closer to the neural scrambler hidden beneath her worn leather cuff—a protective gesture practiced over years of navigating this city's memory black markets. "I don’t work with kids."
"This ain’t work," he spat, his street-hardened bravado cracking just enough to reveal a layer of desperation beneath. "This is survival."
He thrust something small and glinting toward her—a neural dongle no larger than her thumb. Even from a distance, she could hear its faint, rhythmic buzz, a sound like a trapped cicada. Illicit consciousness extraction. Her jaw tightened. That sound was unmistakable: raw human experience, compressed into dangerously unstable digital contraband.
"Where did you get that?" she hissed, lowering her voice to a razor-thin whisper.
His hand trembled, the once-firm grip faltering. She could see both determination and fear etched into his trembling intensity. "Cartels... they promise better memories. Cleaner ones. Memories without pain."
Her shoulders stiffened. The promise was always the same—sanitized experiences, stripped of context, of truth. She set her gaze, sharpening the question into a verbal scalpel. "And?"
The boy’s eyes flicked toward the door, his fear momentarily overwhelming the mask of streetwise confidence he'd worn when he entered. His voice dipped lower, just above a whisper. "They’re leavin’ holes. Big ones. People don’t remember who they are anymore.”
Aria inhaled slowly to steady herself, her frustration building as pieces of a larger picture interlocked in her mind. The cartels. Cheap promises. But this? Memory wipes leaving people as shells of themselves? She should’ve known it would come to this.
Before she could question him further, the back of her neck flared with sudden heat, a searing pain spiraling inward—a neural alert. The burn was visceral, paired only a second later by the buzzing that warped into a disembodied voice, unnervingly clear within her augmented reality interface.
"Another rollback has been executed. Forty-eight hours removed for sustained peace."
The words hung in the air, a cold, mechanical edict as the cafe's ambient murmur sank into silence. Heads turned. People froze mid-sip, their mugs paused just before their lips. Aria’s hand clenched around the table edge, her knuckles white. She wasn’t surprised—but that didn’t make it any less infuriating.
"Where?" she demanded, her voice steeled into a lethal calm.
The boy flinched but stood his ground. Bravado warred with uncertainty before he finally nodded, his wide eyes darting between her and the door. He looked like a sparrow caught between the claws of a predator and the faint hope of salvation.
"You’d better come with me," he whispered, already retreating toward the door.
Aria grabbed her jacket off the chair, slipping the data pad into the inner pocket. She knew walking out with him meant stepping into another storm. It was always a storm. With one last glance at the faded walls of the cafe—a false haven for desperate lives—she followed the boy, her leather cuff tight against her wrist like an anchor poised for battle.