The streets were clean. No overgrowing hedges or vines. The glass panes weren't broken. People talking and laughing about, going with their life. Children playing in the parks. This was how life before the genesis was like.
Kshaya slowly entered the memory, walking along the footpath, recognizing a few faces. The man cutting the hedges, he would continue to do that forty years later. The woman cleaning the shopfront, he had seen her repeat those actions in the present Aiyra.
This was just a memory. The people here weren't real. He had to wake up from this.
But something within him made him stay.
Inside here, in this memory, Kshaya once again felt his mind clear up.
'I have lost sections of my memory, haven't I?' But the voices didn't answer him. Because inside an illusion, he was isolated from all his bonds.
Here, he was under no influence. Here he could try to figure out whatever skeletons that were hiding. And Aiyra itself was important to figuring out the past. So he did not fight against the illusion this time. He needed to dive deeper into this memory.
He stepped deeper into the city, into this illusion, letting the memory brush past him like wind.
The city continued with its daily life, paying no attention to the sudden intruder. To confirm his doubts, Kshaya went ahead to the man cutting the hedges. he waved his arms at him, trying to gain his attention. But the man continued with his job, ignoring him.
Standing in the middle of the road, he waited for a car to hit him, but it simply passed through him.
Nothing here was real. He looked beneath him, noticing how he did not cast a shadow. This was a very special space.
Confirming his doubts, he once again started moving. A destination already in mind.
The Warden was showing him its past exactly how it remembered it. How Aiyra truly was before the genesis. And just maybe he would be able to find his footprints here.
Before he could try to figure out the secrets buried in this city, he wished to find himself. There must be a version of him in this city as well.
If this was a truly intact memory, then the version of himself that he seemed to have forgotten must be here as well.
With a destination in mind, he started moving, retracing the steps from his last venture into the city. This time more urgent, he reached the building in less than ten minutes. The white building where he had seen his traces from past.
It looked alive, not abandoned yet.
The walls weren't cracked and he could make out people in white coats moving around. He looked up and spelled out the name of the building.
'RESEARCH HALL'
So it wasn't a hospital.
Earlier he had concluded that it must have been a hospital, judging from the receipt he had found. Kshaya had been diagnosed with cancer many years back when he had been discharged from the military. It was around this time that he decided to be a mercenary to pay for the cure.
Yeah, cancer was just another curable condition back then before the genesis. So the news hadn't broken him yet when he had learnt of his diagnosis.
The receipt he had seen yesterday made him think that this was just another hospital in the long list of places he had visited for treatment. Even if cancer was treatable, the technology was still costly and very few places had the means for holding a complete procedure. But looking at the title of the building, he had to rethink.
Slowly he made his way forward. The automatic doors split open, as if aware of his presence. Inviting him.
Wary, he decided to continue. Inside was chaos. And white.
Everywhere he looked, white greeted him. The walls, the coats, the trolleys and counters, the furniture. All white. It was disorienting. How were all these researcher unaffected?
The researchers moved with purpose, oblivious to the disorientation that gripped Kshaya. They carried slates thinner than paper, tapping commands that flickered holographic displays above their palms. Conversations buzzed around equations and neural maps, terms like "perception lattice" and "cognition scaffold" slipping past him. He pushed forward through the crowd, his form untouched and unseen.
A hologram hummed to life as he walked past the reception, projecting a web of departments.
Human Cognition
Memory Persistence
Perception Simulation
His gaze locked on the last one. Something twisted inside him, familiar yet alien. He followed the arrow, corridors stretching endlessly, lined with observation windows. Walking past white coats, following the directions he soon arrived in front of a familiar looking door.
AIYRA - RESEARCH WING 4
Human Cognition & Perception Simulation Lab
Only this time, the door was still intact. As he stepped forward, his headache from before resurfaced. But he wasn't going to stop till he had some answers. While still clutching his head, he passed through the door, taking in the view before him.
Behind the door, subjects lay in sleek pods, eyes darting under lids. Wires pulsed with faint light, syncing brainwaves to glowing arrays. One pod caught his eye. Empty, but labeled. He leaned closer, the plaque sharpening under his stare.
Captain Kshaya. Security Clearance Alpha-7. Escort Detail.
Not a patient. A guard. His military past, clean uniform and all. The dishonorable discharge felt distant here, a future scar not yet carved. But why escort? What needed protecting in a this lab? And how come he had no memory of this mission?
As questions started forming, the pain deepened.
The scene glitched. The empty pod filled. A man sat up inside, face shadowed, turning toward the glass. Kshaya's breath caught. His own build, his stance. The figure mouthed words, inaudible. "You were here," a soft voice echoed, not from the memory, but beneath it. The Warden was whispering to him now, inside this illusion of a memory.
He recoiled, chains clinking faintly despite the illusion. The memory glitched again, pod empty once more. No time to dwell. He needed proof, not echoes. Rushing out of the lab, he continued to explore building. Deeper corridors led him past security checkpoints, his ghostly form slipping through locked doors stamped with his old signature.
A lounge area opened up, researchers sipping from steaming cups, debating ethics over data streams. There. In the corner, nursing a black coffee, sat his past self. Uniform crisp, eyes scanning the room like a hawk. No cancer pallor yet, no chains and his arms still made of flesh. Just a man on a job.
Kshaya approached, hand outstretched. His fingers passed through the figure's shoulder. Up close, details sharpened. A concealed holster. A data chit clipped to the belt, marked "Warden Prototype - Oversight." The name tugged at buried threads. He had authorized something here. Watched over it.
The past Kshaya looked up from his coffee, as if sensing a gaze. Their eyes seemed to connect for just a moment, almost as if in recognition before they went past. Another illusion. Another look of deceit. The Warden was trying to tell him something but also hiding from him. Manipulating him.
The lounge flickered.
For a heartbeat everyone in the room froze, cups halfway to their lips, eyes mid blink. The world turned grainy, as if someone had taken a cloth and wiped across the memory.
Kshaya straightened.
The pain in his head sharpened into a line, running from the back of his skull to his temples. His chains, which should not be active here, tightened around his arms. Metal bit into skin. He looked down in shock.
The bindings shimmered faintly, like something pushing through from outside this illusion, forcing its way in. Symbols along the links ignited and faded, trying to hold shape inside a place they did not belong to.
Still here, not alone again he realised. They are still watching me, even in here.
The Warden did not like that.
The scene snapped back into motion, as if nothing had happened. Laughter resumed. Steam curled from cups. Past Kshaya stood up, chair scraping neatly back into position. But the edges of the room were wrong now. The ceiling lights stretched too long. The floor tiles repeated in patterns that did not line up. A corridor at the far end repeated twice, like a copied section.
Outside interference. His seals were pushing against the cage. The artifacts on him did not like being excluded.
A low, grinding sound rolled through the building. The kind of sound that did not belong in a memory at all. Metal dragging over stone. His chains vibrated in answer, links humming against each other.
The Warden's whisper echoed inside the corridor, no longer soft like before.
"You are not finished here yet," it hissed, everywhere and nowhere. "You came to see what you did. Stay. Watch."
Images slammed into him, too fast. The research hall. The pods. His signature on clearance forms. A white room under the city with cables sunk into stone. Something waking.
His chains burned.
Another voice cut through, heavier, familiar. Not the Warden, not the city's. The same voice that had warned him in the broken hospital earlier.
... you sealed it once ... do not open it again ... focus ...
The lounge shattered like glass.
Fragments of the scene hung around him, floating shards of white walls and tiled floors, drifting in a dark void. Through the gaps, he could see other streets in Aiyra. The man cutting hedges. The woman wiping glass. The city center, far away, where a single pillar rose like a tooth.
And just for a second, through the cracks, he saw something else.
Mira slumped against a wall that did not exist in this time. Taren standing guard, jaw clenched. Lume, somewhere deeper, walking in circles around an unseen point. All of them caught in their own strands of the illusion, separated like bugs in amber.
His heart hammered. Past and present were bleeding into each other. The Warden had started with recorded memories. Now it was stitching the living into the same fabric.
The external pressure against the illusion grew stronger. His chains clanged, louder now, like someone shaking them from the outside. The symbols flared again, unleashing a wave that rippled outwards.
Every person in the lounge turned in unison to stare at him.
Eyes white, faces blank, coffee spilling without falling. The Warden spoke through all of them at once.
"You will not take him," it said. "He walked here on his own. A fair exchange."
Heat pulsed through his arms.
... enough ... the deeper voice inside his bonds snapped. Wake up, Captain. The past can wait. Your team cannot.
The word "Captain" hit something old in him. Training. Orders. He tasted dust and gunpowder for a heartbeat, the way it used to cling to his throat on the firing range.
He clenched his jaw.
The world around him lurched, like a train skipping a track. The lounge became a corridor. The corridor became a stairwell. A blink later, he was standing in the middle of the street outside, the research hall still looming behind him. Time had jumped. The Warden was trying to drag him back inside, rewind him to where it wanted him.
His chains refused.
Each time the scene tried to snap, the bindings flared, anchoring him. For the first time in hours, he felt something like control. The city hissed in irritation, streetlights flickering wildly.
"If you stay in here, you will keep tearing things open," the inner voice grated. You sealed more than just your own memory. You sealed it. Go any deeper and you will undo your own work.
More fog cracked at the edges of his mind. Citadel. A tunnel of light. A containment protocol that used his own mind as part of its lock. He grasped at the fragments, but they slipped away, dissolving into static.
Not now.
He breathed out slowly, forcing his hands to unclench. His original plan, to hunt for himself and the truth of his past, he could no longer afford to do that. The past could wait, but the present was running out of time soon if he didn't act fast. And the Warden had bad intentions in trying to reveal the past to him like it did, he needed to calm down and find other ways later.
"Fine," he muttered, glaring at the clean, unreal street. "You win that one."
The city did not answer, but the air around him tensed.
"I am done chasing ghosts today," he said, turning away from the research hall. "You have my footprints already. I am going to find the others."