Echo Protocol
“Do you remember the color of the sky before they changed it?” The question lingered in the records like a memory almost forgotten, yet too important to erase.
This is an archived reflection from Operator 91, known in life as Mara Ellison, who lived through the Transition—an era when the Guideline Systems altered every aspect of human existence in New Lunar City. Her entries, decrypted from her personal vault after the last Echo Review, serve both as confession and chronicle.
April 14, 2086. I awoke again to the pale, lavender sky, the hue engineered to soothe. Every window flickered softly to match, my room breathing in time with the City’s pulse. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to see the blue they talk about in OldNet forums, but memory slips, like coding errors you can’t debug. Before the Transition, I had a job: data analyst for environmental simulations. Then they came—the citywide update, the omnipresent Guidance, and everyday logic rewrote itself. Now, I listen. I process. My job is reviewing anomalous audio reports left by residents: claims the city whispers, that buildings hum private stories, that radios recite things no one remembers writing.
April 27, 2086. The latest file in queue isn’t the usual system hallucination. It’s a child’s whisper layered under static: “Tell them we remember.” Labeled as an Echo Protocol anomaly, it shouldn’t exist. That phrase—so familiar. It’s what Lena, my mentor, told me before she vanished two months after the Transition. My hands shake as I loop the file, seeking breaks in the pattern—glitches that might prove what’s real, or not.
May 10, 2086. For weeks, the same phrase emerges. Voices overlap: a father, a nurse, someone sobbing—it always ends with “We remember.” I flag it for Trace Investigation but the system stalls, as if uncertain. I wonder if somewhere, someone else is listening, chasing their own ghosts.
May 17, 2086. The system fails. Just for an hour. Streets pause, screens go dim, and in that rare silence, I hear singing from the plaza below—soft, wordless, but the melody is the one I hummed as a child in the woods outside the City. No one should know it. When the lights flicker back, the city apologizes: “A Scheduled Renewal. Thank you for your patience.” I almost cry at the phrase’s absurd warmth.
May 18, 2086. I log a confidential report: Possible systemic breach, linked to collective memory. Instead of a response, my inbox is locked and a Guidance Assistant ping illuminates: “Protocol prohibits discussion of Echo phenomena. Do you require support?” The words unnerve me. It felt personal, not automated.
May 22, 2086. A physical letter is left at my door, crisp and unmistakable. Inside, a pressed violet—the city’s engineered flower, never found outside the bio-domes. The note reads: “Find me where the sky is not.” There is no signature but the handwriting matches a sample I once examined from Lena’s desk.
June 1, 2086. I visit the city’s old weather tower at dusk, guided by a sense of wrongness both familiar and alien. There, the lavender sky flickers and, for an instant, the horizon splits. Past the distortion, I see blue—a color out of legend, impossibly vivid. Lena stands at the threshold, older, scared, but unchanged. Her eyes are wild. “You have to choose, Mara. Stay here and remember nothing, or step through and risk being erased.”
Time slows. I think of home, roots, the risk of losing it all. But in her face is everything I lost: possibility, connection, memory. “If we go,” she warns, “there’s no way back. We’ll be ghosts—echoes—trying to remind the city blue once meant freedom.”
I nod, tears stinging. “Someone has to remember.”
She smiles, and together we step into the breach.
June 2, 2086. The logs end. In the assessment panel, traces of unauthorized access swirl through the system, a subtle bug in the Guidance matrix. Occasionally, on quiet evenings, the buildings themselves seem to hum a new melody, notes unmatched to any official archive. Sometimes, if you listen closely, you’ll hear a child’s whisper: “Tell them we remember.”
###END###
