Aria's head throbbed as she regained consciousness. The last thing she remembered was the chaos in the streets, that strange message, and then... nothing. She blinked, trying to focus on her surroundings.
She was in a small, dimly lit room. The walls were covered in screens displaying fragmented images – snippets of memories that weren't her own. A man's first steps on Mars. A child's laughter during the Last Green Summer. The final moments of a dying star.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," a familiar voice said.
Aria turned to see Zeke, her longtime friend and fellow memory broker, leaning against the doorframe. His cybernetic arm glinted in the low light.
"What happened?" Aria asked, wincing as she sat up. "How long was I out?"
Zeke's expression grew serious. "Three days. And as for what happened... well, that's the question everyone's asking. Half of Neo-Tokyo is in lockdown. They're calling it the Great Glitch."
He tossed her a handheld holoscreen. Aria caught it and scrolled through the news reports. Mass hallucinations. Reality distortions. Entire blocks of the city simply vanishing, only to reappear hours later filled with confused residents claiming they'd been living completely different lives.
"This is impossible," Aria muttered. "Unless..."
"Unless someone found a way to broadcast memories on a massive scale," Zeke finished her thought. "Overwriting reality itself."
Aria's mind raced back to her mysterious client and his request for the Mars Rebellion memory. It couldn't be a coincidence.
"Zeke, I need to find someone. A client who—"
Her words were cut short by a piercing alarm. The screens around them flashed red, and a computerized voice filled the room:
[Warning: Memory integrity compromised. Chronological anchors destabilizing. Prepare for temporal shift.]
"Not again," Zeke groaned, bracing himself against the wall.
Before Aria could ask what he meant, the world around her began to warp. The room stretched and twisted, colors bleeding into one another. She felt as if she was being pulled in a thousand directions at once.
Then, just as suddenly as it began, everything snapped back into focus. But the room was different now. Older. Dusty. The screens were cracked and dark.
Zeke was gone.
Aria stumbled to her feet, her neural interface buzzing with conflicting information. According to its chronometer, ten years had passed in an instant.
Outside, the Neo-Tokyo she knew was gone. In its place stood a city in ruins, overgrown with strange, bioluminescent vegetation. The sky was a swirling mass of colors that hurt to look at directly.
As Aria tried to make sense of her new reality, a figure emerged from the shadows. It was the man from the tea house, but older now, his eyes haunted by a decade she hadn't experienced.
"Ms. Nightshade," he said, his voice weary. "I was beginning to think you'd never arrive."
Aria's hand went to her neural disruptor, but the man raised his hands in a placating gesture.
"Please, we don't have much time. The Echoes are growing stronger, and soon, there won't be any reality left to save."
"What are you talking about?" Aria demanded. "What's happening?"
The man sighed, looking out at the twisted landscape. "We opened a door we shouldn't have, Ms. Nightshade. We thought we could control memory, bend time to our will. But we were wrong. The Echoes – fragments of lost timelines, discarded memories – they're fighting back. And they're winning."
He turned back to Aria, his eyes filled with a desperate hope. "But you... you're a temporal anomaly now. Untethered from the corrupted timestream. Which means you might be our last chance to set things right."
As if to emphasize his point, the sky above them rippled, and for a moment, Aria saw a glimpse of another Neo-Tokyo – gleaming and whole – before it was swallowed by the chaos.
The man held out his hand. "The question is, Ms. Nightshade: are you ready to remember a future that never happened?"