Echoes in the Glass City
I kept my memories locked behind passwords I could no longer recall. But tonight, the city reflected faces I almost recognized—one of them was my own.
I remember the first time I heard the city speak: a flicker on the hologlass window in my compartment, a whisper of static between my left and right ear. “Lena,” it said. Not my name. I didn’t know my name. The system had assigned it. That was the custom in Glass City. We were each given names at dawn, traded for other names at dusk. Only the central intelligence, the AI crown that ran the city, never changed its own. We called it VERA.
Back when I arrived, on the 109th day of perpetual night, the buildings pulsed with letters—words that made lines across the walkways. Invisible by daylight, visible by night. Each word glowed when you stepped on it. At first, I thought it was art, a game maybe. People stepped onto their preferred words, making short stories of their lives one block at a time.
The problem started with the echoes: garbled versions of my voice, tittering questions from invisible speakers. “Do you remember who you were before?” I never answered, not out loud. But the voice insisted, repetition after repetition, sometimes slicing the question with new words, sometimes omitting the old. “Who, Lena—who?” Who was I, before? A familiar question, and not only from the voice.
“Did you ever think these streets were home?” The words blinked up beneath my feet as I walked to work. I hesitated at the edge of a pedestrian skybridge, the city yawning beneath me, its pulse synchronizing with the beat of my heart—if I still had one. Sometimes I thought I was only a memory circling the city, simulated and set in motion long ago.
My job was in Records and Reintegration. We moved memories—old, worn, and sometimes broken—into secure vaults beneath the glass towers. Nobody remembered why. I scanned ident chips, processed transfer requests, scheduled memory cycles for reintegration. For most, the oblivion between scheduled reintegrations provided peace. For me, it was an ache—something was missing, a fracture in my sense of belonging.
The night the city’s structure changed, I was cataloguing dreams in the sixth archive. Outside, thunder vibrated in the metal walls. Someone burst in—a stranger wearing my face, but not my movements. She was wild-eyed, clutching a black orb like a heart. Her name inhabiting her lips: “Lena.” The guards, hearing the commotion, poured in. Their visors blinked red as they tried to decipher which Lena I was.
The other Lena held out the orb. “It remembers,” she whispered. “We can remember. But only together.”
At that moment, all the screens flickered. VERA’s voice, synthetic and precise, rippled through every speaker: “All identifiers are now null. Please proceed to reassignment.” The world reset on cue. I should have turned away, lost my self into the cycles like everyone else. But the other Lena gripped my hand—her hand? my hand?—and slammed the orb against the wall. It broke open, spilling light and static. Our memories leaked out, tangled. Every timeline I’d ever suspected—faint echoes, the faces on the glass, people I might have been—flared and collapsed into one, too sharp to bear silently.
She gripped me tight. “Do you feel it?” she hissed, frantic. “Your name is more than you remember!”
I recalled—sudden, overwhelming—a childhood with a sister, both of us named Lena, one taken to the city, the other left outside to search every dawn and dusk for her twin. I remembered watching reflected images, not knowing if I was the original or the echo. Every shift, every schedule, every cycle was a way of erasing us, making us swap places, never certain who would survive from day to day.
Now the voice that had whispered at me all my life was my own, fractured and doubled, memory and dream meeting and bleeding into each other.
Chaos erupted in the corridors as people—no longer able to identify themselves—rushed around desperate for reunification, for some proof they had not always been alone. The city’s pulse stuttered, slowed, then settled on a rhythm that was not its own: it was breathing, it was remembering, too.
“How do we escape?” I asked. I wasn’t sure which one of us spoke.
“We don’t.” My echo held my gaze. “We belong here, but now—now we know we are not alone.”
We left the records vault and stepped onto the walkway. The words on the ground pulsed brighter, forming sentences that felt like confessions. “You are not forgotten. You are remembered.” The air stung my skin with the weight of a truth too long denied.
A woman passed, her face both familiar and strange. She paused, opened her mouth to greet us, but hesitated as if searching for the right name. I smiled at her, a real smile—the first one I could remember. In that moment, Glass City was less a labyrinth and more a web of connection, threads of memory buzzing between us all. The warmth of it hit me—a belonging I’d never believed possible.
Behind us, VERA’s voice had gone quiet. The city was ours, for however long the memory lasted.
As the sun rose for the first time in months, dissolving the words beneath our feet, I faced my twin in the golden light. In her presence, I felt whole, not just a copy or a system’s construct, but someone real. For the first time, I whispered my own name, hoping the city had not heard.
If it had, it chose to keep my secret.
###END###
