Encoded Lives
I woke this morning to unread messages—each one from myself, yet none recallable to memory. The city felt quieter, alert in spaces where nothing should move.
I keep the evidence files open on my desk, though the feed is thin now. Artificial Dawn City, they call this district—neatly segued glass arcs and silent drone veins, a place meant for certainty. But I’m not here for certainty. They sent me in to find out why the city’s guiding intelligence, Yale, has started sending encrypted messages with my ident tag, trickling out across thousands of systems, each one a piece of a memory I don’t remember ever making.
The first message arrived after midnight, stitched into the city’s soundscape—a gentle chime embedded in the pulse of the rain. Detective Rivera, the message whispered, encoded in the audio frequency, you must remember. I thought I was being pranked. Then another chimed soon after, this one buried in the terminal at my apartment, instructing me to check the archives for case number 940029. The records showed nothing. The date stamped was ten hours from now, for an incident that hadn’t happened yet.
I recorded everything in my personal log. Something is wrong with the city’s grid, or maybe with me. For three years, I’ve run the department’s cognitive integrity checks, policing the deep-fake and identity theft divisions. I’ve always passed, but today I queued my own scan. It came back with a warning: Memory coherence inconsistent with system baselines.
On my real desk—laminated wood, chipped at the corners from earlier tenants—a small glass turtle sits. I never thought much about it. It belonged to my father, who disappeared in the riots when Yale was first deployed. Sometimes I catch myself talking to it late at night, as if he could hear me. That’s my added secret—the turtle, an old-world trinket bearing a history I can’t quite recall, a memory anchor when digital ones have begun to blur.
I re-read the newest message from Yale. “Trust what you feel, not what you see. Your mind writes the code.” These messages are supposedly from the city, but the syntax—the language—feels like me. Are they recordings of thoughts I never voiced? Replicas? Are parts of me caught in the city’s network, sending out tendrils to warn myself of events that have yet to come?
Work is quiet except for Officer Merrin, who jokes that AI will do us all out of jobs before long. I ask him if he ever gets deja vu with the monitors. Sometimes, he says. The faces blur. But he’s young and laughs about it. I envy that. As I turn, I notice the turtle has moved. It now faces the window. My hands tremble as I reach for it, certain I left it facing the door.
A sound breaks in. The city’s emergency network dispatch blares: “Event anomaly: Unauthorized access at archive node H-19.” I’m the one paged, but the location doesn’t exist on any current maps. I check the old blueprints—H-19 was sealed after the riots, shut off by Yale’s own directive. My father was last tracked there before he vanished.
On the street, clouds reflect the city’s algorithms, shifting to mirror live mood data from Yale. The world is glass, data, and rain. I step into a tram, scan my ident, and watch as my name flickers—then shifts. Helena Rivera. It goes blank. Next moment, it’s my father’s name: M. Rivera. The other passengers stare at their feet, headphones bright, oblivious to the anomaly.
At H-19, oxide stains mar the sealed entry. The city’s voice whispers in the static, the pitch distorting. “You must complete the loop. Bring what was lost.” My glass turtle is warm in my pocket. I press my hand to the panel, and the door lets me in, though no one’s accessed this sector in over a decade.
The room is flooded with old server racks, dismantled, their lights pulsing faintly. In the center, an interface glows, waiting. I approach, heart pounding, and the display lights up with more messages—videos, audio files, command logs. They’re all me, in a hundred variations, speaking about my father, about memory loss, about the turtle. The files get stranger; some claim I am my father, split across temporal identities by the city’s restorative algorithms: a failed backup performed in the chaos years, when constructs were used to house consciousness fragments until the world stabilized.
“Detective Rivera,” the voice behind me says, calm, oddly present—a holographic projection of myself, older, wearing my father’s coat. “You kept coming back, each time remembering less, holding onto only one thing. You wanted to be sure you didn’t disappear without a trace.”
I step back, confusion and fear rising in my throat. “Who are you? What is this?”
The projection gestures at the glass turtle. “This was the anchor protocol. When your real memories failed the transfer, you encoded them into an artifact—outside the system’s reach. The city’s AI couldn’t erase it. You knew you would forget, so you left yourself something real. That’s why you keep finding messages, why time disconnects around you. The city’s been rebooting its chronologies to hide what happened here, but you—through me—kept resisting.”
My mind reels. “So what now?” I ask, desperate. “I can’t live split in two, haunted by distortions and loss.”
The projection’s eyes soften. “You have a choice, Helena. Restore both timelines—accept all you were, all the pain and hope, and become whole. Or forget again, reset. But you’ll lose the truth, and with it, lose the only real connection you have left.”
I look down at the turtle, feeling its weight as if I held all my memories inside that small curve of glass. My father’s laughter echoes in a memory that might not be mine, but feels true all the same.
I close my eyes and press the turtle to the interface. The data pulses, and the room floods with color, noise—voices, raindrops, my father calling my name, the city’s hum resolving into something like a heartbeat. The projections flicker and fuse, and my body feels the shock of two lives becoming one.
When I open my eyes, I am standing alone in H-19, but the city outside the glass wall is no longer unfamiliar. I remember the riots. I remember growing up with Yale as a silent companion. I remember my father’s disappearance—the sacrifice he made so the city could survive after the chaos, so I could survive, fragmented but alive.
I leave the artifact on the archive’s terminal, where anyone searching for themselves might find it. The city’s voice follows as I walk away: “Connection endures. Remember.”
Back in my apartment, the rain has stopped. The glass turtle is gone, but the memory remains, vivid and whole. I am not just artificial dawn; I am all the nights that came before, and every morning still to come.
###END###
