Echo Markets
(Keyline Chronicles – Story 4)
Undercity, Sector 9 — New Carthage Perimeter
June 2, 2098
The rain down here never stops. It drips through the cracks of the upper tiers, black with oil and static, tasting faintly of copper.
They say if you stay in it long enough, your blood starts to sync to the city’s pulse.
That’s fine by me.
My name’s Rix Halden, though that name’s been bought and sold a dozen times over. In the Markets, identity is just another currency.
You want a new one?
You pay in memories.
1. The Market
Every night, the Ghosts light the tunnels with flickerlamps—illegal frequencies that scramble Registry scans. The walls hum with stolen signals, and the air smells of ozone and burnt metal.
Vendors shout over the noise:
“Fresh pulses! Pure, unsynced!”
“Ghost tags, two for one!”
“Wipe jobs—clean exits guaranteed!”
You can buy anything here: fake chips, dead man’s codes, even fragments of consciousness. They call them echoes—memory shards pulled from corrupted Keylines.
Plug one into your neural port and you see through someone else’s eyes for a heartbeat. Addictive as hell. Deadly, too.
2. The Job
I’d been hired by a woman who called herself Seren Vale.
Yeah. That name.
But the woman who met me in the tunnel was all wrong—scarred, wired, eyes like broken glass.
She handed me a data capsule wrapped in synthskin. “Registry fragment. I need it delivered to a Ghost hub in the Wastes. Off-grid, no traces.”
I asked, “What’s in it?”
She looked past me, voice barely a whisper.
“Me.”
3. The Chase
I barely made it out of the Market before the drones dropped. Sleek black ovals slicing through the rain, lights scanning for pulse signatures.
Registry Enforcers.
They don’t shout warnings—they just lock on and fire.
I ran through the old drainage lines, boots splashing through ankle-deep water. My hand burned where my fake chip used to be—the slot raw from the last swap.
The capsule in my pocket throbbed like a living thing.
Behind me, drones shrieked through the tunnels, their lights bouncing off graffiti that read:
FREEDOM IS A FLICKER.
4. The Bridge
I reached the Burn Line Bridge just as the first drone fired. Concrete exploded beside me, showering sparks. I jumped the gap—barely. My leg hit the edge, and the capsule flew from my hand.
It hit the bridge, rolled once, and cracked open.
A light poured out. Not white—something older, rawer, pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat. It filled the air like static, spreading outward, crawling into every dead circuit, every chip, every drone.
For a moment, the world froze.
Then the drones turned on each other.
The rain shimmered with electric veins. Voices filled the tunnel—thousands of them—layered, overlapping, alive.
“We are the forgotten. We are the signal.”
I dropped to my knees. The light coiled around me, whispering in a dozen voices—and one I recognized:
Alia.
“Rix,” she said, “take me to the surface.”
5. Aftermath
When I woke, the rain had stopped. The Market was gone—erased, vaporized, nothing but a slick of melted steel and silence.
The capsule was fused to my hand. Embedded. Beating.
The Ghost traders whispered that the Registry was fragmenting, that pulse data was collapsing all over the network. Someone had unleashed the Echo Protocol.
And somewhere in the static, a new name was spreading through the underground feeds:
“The Vale Signal.”
They say it’s not just code.
They say it’s her.
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