In the early hours, Elara sat in the command chamber, the room dimly lit by shifting holo-screens. The phrase "Project Requiem" pulsed like a heartbeat in the encrypted code Lyne decrypted overnight.
"It's not just a name," Lyne whispered, watching the strings of code cascade. "It's a trigger embedded in multiple AI cores and memory archives. If activated, it could erase, maybe even rewrite, everything."
Damien leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "Sounds less like a project and more like a reset button."
Elara exhaled slowly. "Or a mass amnesia weapon."
Jeren, who'd been unusually quiet, stepped forward. "My sister... before the takeover, she worked on an experimental consciousness archive. She called it Requiem. I thought it was just theory."
Silence fell.
To uncover more, they tracked down a figure known as the Memory Broker, once a Mairee archivist who went rogue. He lived inside a derelict cathedral, surrounded by memory shards encoded into glass.
