Strata of the Mind
She sifted through her own memories, uncertain what belonged to her and what was programmed. In this city, even the truth learned could fracture you.
To record these recollections is to chase my own shadow, but I try, as the strange script at the city’s edge continues its silent broadcast and my certainty slips like oil through my fingers.
I am Iska, or at least, I was. I grew up inside the skin of the city Strata where glass spires hummed and the subways dreamt. My earliest memory is of an old air duct, faint music leaking from an adjacent corridor, my twin Ada huddled close. In the cracks of the system the two of us watched the city’s luminous intersections, eager to join the proper stream, to be noticed and selected.
But selection came just after Ada died, and I was told Ada never existed, and even the memory of her laugh, clipped and bright, might have originated elsewhere—inserted by the system for reasons unknown. This was the price of living in a city governed by Layers: invisible partitions between mind and mind, body and city, self and fabricated self. The station assigned me a designation, Scribe Level 3, and I began my work. I recorded observations of the city’s shifting moods, catalogued citizen complaints, transcribed broadcasts from the strategic AI, all in careful anonymized shorthand. Each day bled into the last until three weeks ago, when the script began to appear.
The script wove across every reflective surface near the city’s southern periphery, a pattern of characters neither human nor AI. They flickered in the spaces between video feeds, on the shell of a tram, once even across the water in the reservoir at dawn. Sometimes the script pulsed in synchrony with the irregular thrum in my chest. It seemed for me alone, though talking aloud about it coaxed only alarm or blank faces; coworkers said there was nothing strange, nothing unusual. But I knew the city’s vocabulary, and this was not it.
When I’d grown desperate for answers, my supervisor summoned me. The room held two, perhaps three, figures depending how the walls bent. The AI interface projected warmth. “You are troubled, Iska?”
“I see things,” I said, unable to meet the shimmering gaze.
The AI considered me with that pause only machines could hold, vast and evaluating. Finally: “Many in Strata report perceptual dissonance. Rest assured, the script you see is but a transitional artifact. Focus on your daily duties.”
The next day, on my route home, the world bent: time faltered, images folding. I heard Ada’s voice as though behind my eyes—Iska, remember what mattered before the selection.
I reeled, grasping at rails, eyes stinging with fear and a rising, inexplicable hope. If Ada was only a memory, and if memory could be changed, could she return?
But how to distinguish Ada’s reality from my longing? I began to keep a private journal. If the city manipulated memory, perhaps writing could anchor me. It was in this journal that I drew the script—columns and slashes and crescents—desperate for meaning. Each night, my entries sprawled wider, urgency sharpening my hand. Each morning, new memories bloomed: Ada and I at the festival gate, Ada reaching for my wrist, Ada’s body in the mortuary—wait, had she died?
Meanwhile, across Strata, more people struggled. Some claimed to wake in unfamiliar apartment blocks, or to recall jobs they’d never worked. The city’s helplines buzzed. Anonymous tips arrived to the Scribes—fragments of voices reporting that the script had begun to whisper. I collected these in the archive under a new classification: Layer Drift.
Late one evening, a knock at my door. A figure with a narrow face, eyes a shade too reflective. “Do you know the words?” she whispered.
“What words?” My voice squeaked in my throat.
“The script. It’s a message. I think it’s from us,” she said, pressing a data shard into my hand. Before I could question her, she vanished into the corridor.
I locked myself behind two doors and inserted the shard. My console flickered. The script spilled across the screen and, this time, a translation: Do not accept the single memory. Remember the splits; your mind is a Layer. Trust your fracture.
I heard Ada’s laughter swelling around me, the memory so real I could feel her hand in mine.
But then my own written words blurred, stories rewritten before my gaze. I watched new entries appear, not in my hand, describing lives I’d never lived: Iska the engineer, Iska the rebel archivist, Iska who loved and lost Ada five times over, Iska who never knew her at all. The archive of the city spiraled in on itself, layering every possible Iska.
I began to wonder if there was a true me.
If the city could fracture memory, spread a script to correct—or corrupt—the mind, then perhaps every self was provisional. But what did that make Ada? Was she my loss, or my resistance?
I looked out my window at the shimmering skyline, the script coursing steadily, and I made a choice. The next day, I submitted my resignation, an act rarely performed. I wrote in my exit file: “If I remember Ada, she is real enough. My fracture is not failure, but multiplicity.”
Word of my departure spread through the Scribes. Others began leaving cryptic messages, embedding traces of the script in their work. The Layers strained under the weight of so many divergent selves. I met the woman who had given me the shard at the southern periphery. “Will it hold?” I asked her.
“Nothing holds forever,” she replied, “but now, at least, we can choose which memory to keep.”
I held the data shard in my palm, cold and trembling. On its mirrored surface, the script spelled both Ada’s and my own names, weaving them together. I walked home as the city’s segments fractured further, some memories crumbling, others intensifying. Through the rupture, I remembered Ada’s arms around my shoulders, her promise that we’d always find each other, even if the city, even if the world, split us apart.
I do not know if I was her twin, or her only invention. I do not know whether the script was rescue or infection. I only know that I have chosen to remember her, and in the choosing, I opened a new Layer—a self that belonged finally to me.
###END###
