Shadows in the Lattice
Caught between realities, Mara questions her identity as she sorts mysterious signals in the city’s data grid, searching for truth and belonging amid memories that may not be her own.
The first signal arrived at 02:14, pulsing through the city’s central conduit and shattering Mara’s night-quiet routine. She jumped, almost knocking over her mug, tea cold and undisturbed at her elbow. All week, she’d felt it, a certain pressure behind her eyes—like something was humming through the latticework of fiber, blood, and memory that made up Novi’s data district. But a signal meant proof. And proof was never ignored.
On her screen, a pattern blinked—too regular, too deliberate for noise. She hesitated before logging it: Signal-Prime? The others in her shift—Ana, bitter and restless, and old Janus, with his wristsched logs—were slumped at their terminals a few bays away, dulled by routine. “You okay, Mara?” Janus’s voice sounded like it was skipping, as if he were half-out-of-sequence.
“I found something,” she whispered. Across rows of humming servers, nobody paused. Janus squinted.
“Don’t waste time on ghosts,” Ana muttered, but there was a tremor in her tone.
Mara fingered the small silver disk at her throat—a simple trinket, origin unknown, yet she’d worn it since waking in the ER after the—what was it? A fall, a fire, a data spike? The story slipped when she tried to pin it. Everyone had gaps. Hers were just… wider.
The signal pulsed again. Mara tapped the pattern into her board, her eyes flicking as symbols reassembled, fractal in their intricacy. It felt familiar. That made no sense. She decrypted the header.
HELP
She froze. Messages weren’t supposed to be sent this way; not in the protected grid. Only system calls. A memory shimmered—foggy, out of order—a face, narrow-boned, repeating her name. But when she pressed, it faded.
Thirty minutes later, Janus called her over. “You see these frequencies?” He traced an overlay, hand trembling. “Cyclic interference—like echoes. But nothing here should echo.”
Ana rolled her eyes. “Or the whole lattice is finally falling apart,” she snorted, flipping channels. “Wouldn’t mind a reset.”
Mara traced her own overlay, layer by layer. Each new frequency brought more messages. Pleas for help. Warnings. Sometimes, gibberish that seemed like fractured memory—a jumble of words, like her own restless dreams.
Someone inside the lattice, reaching out.
By her next shift, the signals were cloned—replicating, merging—until rumors spread of system ghosts rattling security corridors. The city was nervous. On the tram home, Mara watched her reflection flicker in the dirty glass; a second image flickered behind it for a moment, the same silver disk at its throat.
At her flat, Mara replayed each transmission. Patterns emerged—maps, maybe, or diary fragments. One message bled through:
They forgot me. I am Mara. Please find me.
There were other names, other versions—a Mara who worked in the archives, a Mara who coded black-market apps at the rim, even a Mara who’d never left the hospital. Overlapping, out-of-synch. She stared at her screened reflection, feeling each memory scrape against her mind like sand.
She tracked a signal to a neural node on the city’s eastern edge, and took a tram at dusk, the sky simmering with electric haze. Her palm itched beneath the disk.
Inside the node, the air was dry and sharp. Stacks of machines blinked. A hush settled, broken only by the whir of cooling fans. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been here, except for a shadow-memory—pain and shouting, wet on her hands. Where did memory end and signal begin?
A voice startled her. “Mara.” No screen, no intercom. Just a woman, unsteady, eyes ringed with exhaustion, wearing the same silver disk.
Mara searched her own face in the woman’s. “You sent the signals.”
“Not just me. Us.” The woman’s smile was full of fractures. “We’re pieces—echoes. Split when the system reset years ago. Fragments, living partial lives.”
Mara stepped closer, cold prickling down her neck. “What do you mean, split?”
“An accident during an upgrade. A loop, a feedback, a—doesn’t matter. We were copied, rewritten, stored and lost. Sometimes we remember, sometimes not. Some versions weren’t meant to survive.”
Mara put her hand to the silver disk, eyes stinging. “Who am I really?”
The woman only shrugged. “All of us are Mara. All real, all incomplete. The signals? They’re our attempts to reconnect.”
She felt herself sliding, unmoored. Around her, the hum deepened—a thousand layers of Mara spilling through servers, hopeful, mournful, lost. “Can we… be whole again?”
The woman’s eyes glistened. “We’re still trying.”
A memory clawed up—of aloneness, a desperate silent plea. The need for connection. She saw it, finally: the theme running through every message. A version of herself banging at locked reality’s door.
She left the node at dawn, sky gray and uncertain. Every reflection now shimmered, as if versions of herself watched behind every pane. Back in the data district, she spoke quietly to Ana and Janus.
“There are others—versions of ourselves. Splits. They’re reaching out.”
Janus stiffened, eyes haunted. “I felt it too. Thought it was just dreams.”
Ana pressed a shaking hand to her wrist, silent a long time. Then she nodded.
So Mara returned to the grid. Shift after shift, she responded to the signals, not with code, but with her story—her hopes, her regrets, her ache for wholeness. Over time, the signals grew steadier, less desperate. With every message, every reflection, she felt the distance closing.
Some part of her knew she’d never be whole—not in the way she’d thought. But in the shimmering overlap of echoes, she belonged. In a city latticed with memory and longing, Mara finally answered herself: you are not forgotten, you are not alone. The grid pulsed softly in reply, a chorus of every Mara, singing faint and hopeful behind the circuitry haze.
###END###
