Let me tell you something about nights in Santa Fe. They aren't quiet, not really. Sure, the streets go still, adobe bathed in shadows, and the tourists vanish like a mirage, but if you're listening—really leaning into the hum of things—you'll hear pockets of life bristling. Laughter from a far-off porch, coyotes yipping like they own the damn place, and, in my lab, the endless low whir of quantum processors: Memory Cartography interfaces pulsing with linguistic algorithms, the tick of systems mapping emotional landscapes I don't even fully understand anymore.
Tonight, my lab—MY lab—has been violated. I can feel it, taste it like metal on the back of my tongue. A breach in the quantum narrative grid. My Memory Cartography technology—a delicate ecosystem of cultural memory and algorithmic empathy—has been touched by someone's filthy corporate hands. This isn't just data corruption; this is an assault on collective storytelling.
The room's lit in pale blue fractures, holographic memory threads spinning and twitching erratically. Emotional Transmission interfaces shimmer then glitch. A Navajo sonnet Ha'steen Hoská recited earlier—smooth like honey and carrying generations of resilience—now stutters into jagged iterations. The words bend and twist, turning into some…multilingual jigsaw puzzle I don't recognize. It's wrong. More than wrong—it's a violation of narrative sovereignty.
Jericho Voss. His name hangs in my mind, heavy and accusing. It was only hours ago that Ha'steen left, gripping my hand in gratitude, his story of the Long Walk spilling into our shared air like an ancestral offering. And now? Corrupted. Dismembered. Trails of data haunted by timestamps I know lead back to Voss's empire of emotional extraction.
I pace, a pen jammed into my curls. My heartbeat feels louder than the servers. I jab at the console, index finger bruising against glass, scanning anomalies. The quantum narrative ecosystem hiccups. Whatever they've done—it wasn't just an attack. It's suppression. Erasure. A calculated attempt to disconnect communities from their living histories.
Tu abuela didn't raise you to quit, I mutter through clenched teeth, thumbing the smooth metal of her bracelet. And she didn't. My lab smells of burnt circuits—tech ozone—stoking the fight rising in me. Voss messed with the wrong storyteller. The wrong technology. The wrong guardian of collective memory.