The air in the Lower Sector always felt heavy, as though the entire remainder of civilization above had piled millions of tons of concrete and steel directly onto the chests of its inhabitants. New-Aethelgard City was a soaring marvel of modern architecture, a monument to humanity’s grandeur built from radiation-resistant glass and gleaming metal. Yet behind its shimmering facade, which reflected the light of the artificial sun, the Lower Sector was where memory waste was dumped and forgotten.
Kael pulled his jacket hood lower, trying to shield his face from droplets of coolant leaking from the industrial pipes in the corridor ceiling. In his right hand, a small handheld extraction device hummed softly, casting a faint blue glow over the damp brick walls around him. It was the only valuable possession he had—a relic from his past that he didn’t even fully remember.
As a low-tier Memory Archaeologist, Kael’s work was simple but deadly: dive into the digital memory remnants discarded by Upper Sector residents, extract intact data fragments, and sell them to black-market smugglers in the Black District. In this world, memory was more than a subjective experience; memory was currency, technological fuel, and most dangerously of all, an absolute tool of political control. Ever since the Mind Consolidation Act had been passed two decades ago, the Central Government had possessed full authority to filter, erase, or even rewrite the memories of its citizens in the name of preserving social stability.
Kael’s footsteps stopped before a rusted iron door marked with an inverted triangle—the sign that the room beyond had once been a data archive facility from the Pre-Consolidation Era. Its encryption lock was worn out, but to someone who had spent half his life tinkering with derelict neural circuits, manually opening a lock like that was little more than child’s play.
He pulled a set of micro-wires from his coat pocket, inserted them into the keyhole, and slowly turned them until a sharp mechanical click sounded. The door creaked open, releasing a breath of stale air mixed with the smell of ozone and centuries-old dust.
Inside the pitch-dark room, the only source of light came from an old terminal screen still glowing faintly in the corner. The tube monitor displayed blinking green scan lines, as if waiting for someone to come and snuff out its final breath.
Kael stepped inside and swept his gaze across the room, which was packed with racks of optical-crystal data storage. Most of the crystals had cracked and lost their charge, reduced to useless ordinary glass. But amid the piles of rubble, a specialized storage container wrapped in lead shielding caught his attention. The container vibrated softly, emitting a low-frequency resonance that the neural implant behind Kael’s ear immediately picked up.
“This isn’t normal,” Kael muttered to himself, his voice sounding hoarse in the silent room.
He approached the console table and plugged his extraction device into the main data port of the shielded container. At once, the old terminal screen before him flared with blinding green light. Lines of unfamiliar code raced across the display—not in the standard format used by official government networks, but in the form of pure mathematical encryption he had never seen before.
Suddenly, a red warning appeared on the screen: **WARNING: OMEGA-CLASS ARCHIVE ANOMALY. DATA RETRIEVAL WILL ACTIVATE THE LOCAL TRACKING PROTOCOL.**
Kael snorted softly. He knew the risks of every job he took, but this time something was different—an instinctive pull telling him that the information inside this container held the key to the mystery behind the unexplained disappearance of thousands of Lower Sector residents over the past few months, including his longtime mentor, Aris.
Without hesitation, Kael pressed the manual execution button on his device.
The transfer process began with a high-pitched hum that stabbed at his ears. A chill instantly spread from his fingertips, traveling up his arms until it pierced the back of his brain. This was a side effect of direct extraction; Kael’s consciousness seemed to be yanked from his physical body and hurled into the torrent of rapidly flowing data.
In an instant, the scene around him changed. The gloomy archive room vanished, replaced by a high-resolution holographic visual projection spinning around him.
He saw a vast city far more magnificent than New-Aethelgard, its architecture blending organic forms with quantum technology—a civilization that appeared to have reached the pinnacle of evolution before a cataclysmic disaster erased it overnight. In the center of the city, a group of scientists in white coats stood before a massive energy core radiating golden light. They were arguing fiercely, staring at a monitor displaying a curve showing the declining stability of the world’s reality.
One of the scientists in the memory turned directly toward Kael, as though he were truly present there in the flesh, thousands of years in the past. Deep despair filled the scientist’s face.
“If they succeed in absorbing all of this history, humanity will lose its free essence forever,” the scientist said, his voice echoing through Kael’s mind with horrifying clarity. “Memory is more than a record of the past; memory is the foundation of the soul. Don’t let them take the last one.”
Before Kael could comprehend the meaning of those words, a data shock wave slammed violently into his consciousness. The terminal screen in the real world exploded in a shower of white sparks, forcibly severing the connection. Kael staggered backward and crashed into a metal rack, sending several optical crystals scattering across the floor.
He gasped for breath, clutching his head, which felt ready to split from the sensory overload. Fresh blood slowly trickled from his nose, dripping onto the filthy concrete floor.
But it wasn’t the physical pain that made his heart pound. In a corner of his mind, a new data file had been permanently embedded—a coordinate map protected by high-level encryption, pointing to a forbidden location beyond the city’s outermost boundary, a place officially labeled only as the “Empty Zone” on government maps.
Before Kael could regain his balance, a shrill siren suddenly shattered the silence of the Lower Sector. Blood-red emergency lights flashed along the outer corridor, casting long, dancing shadows across the walls.
An automated loudspeaker thundered through the air, cold and devoid of emotion: *“Security alert. Perimeter breach detected in Lower Sector Archive 404. Authority Enforcement Units are being deployed. Any form of resistance will be considered high treason against the Central Council.”*
Kael cursed under his breath. His extraction device had triggered the automatic tracking system far faster than he’d anticipated. Swiftly, he snatched the lead-shielded storage container from the table, shoved it into the inner pocket of his coat, and leaped through the narrow ventilation window behind the archive racks.
He crawled out just as the iron door at the front of the room was blown to pieces by the impact of a breaching grenade. A massive explosion followed behind him, scorching the room where he had stood only seconds earlier as thick smoke billowed through the Lower Sector’s narrow corridors.
Kael ran through a maze of industrial pipes and dark drainage tunnels, relying on his sharp memory of the city’s underground map. Above him, the roar of law-enforcement hovercraft began to draw closer, tearing through the night air as searchlights swept blindly across the ground.
The journey had only just begun, and Kael knew the way back was now sealed shut behind him. He was now the most wanted fugitive in the entire district, carrying a secret that could shake the foundations of the world—or tear him to pieces before dawn.