Patch 1.0 — Memory lane

Walking down a street she had walked a thousand times before, Mia felt as though it were her first. The drones hummed low overhead, scanning the crowd for movement and intent. Each pulse of light made the rain glitter like circuitry.

This version of herself was still new — reborn, she liked to think — since the day she’d turned her back on Ardent Corp and the machine she had helped to build.

The rain came in threads, light but unrelenting, each droplet hissing as it struck the humming vents and cracked neon casings along the avenue. Glimmers of broken light danced over the puddles, distorted advertisements flickering from holo-panels that had long since fallen into disrepair. Someone had scrawled graffiti across one: THE SYSTEM FEEDS, THE EARTH BLEEDS.

She turned down a service alley, where cables drooped from rooftops like dead vines. Electric rain hissed on cracked neon and patched fibre lines. The walls pulsed faintly with old adverts that refused to die, selling obsolete tech and brighter tomorrows.

Mia had once believed in those tomorrows.

Top of her class at the Echelon Institute of Computational Sciences, she’d been recruited straight into Ardent’s infrastructure division — designing adaptive neural grids that governed everything from traffic to emotion regulation. Her signature was written into the very architecture of the system she now condemned.

That irony wasn’t lost on her.

She paused beneath a canopy of cables, the rain pattering softly above her. Somewhere deeper in the alley, an old vending machine sputtered to life and died again. The screen flashed REBOOTING…, then went dark.

A memory surfaced: the sound of her old mood-tracking watch, alerting her whenever her stress levels peaked. She could almost feel its faint vibration ghosting against her wrist. Phantom tech, she thought. Even after she’d smashed it, part of her still listened for its hum.

They said amputees felt their missing limbs. She supposed it was no different — her severed connection to the system, still aching in the dark.

She exhaled, the breath fogging in the cool air. Today was not a day for ghosts. She needed to focus. A burst of static flickered across a nearby wall-screen, and suddenly the masked face of E filled the alley — sharp-eyed, defiant, the words WANTED FOR CYBER-TERRORISM scrolling beneath.

Mia’s heart lurched. Even grainy and distorted, his voice seemed to echo in her memory — passionate, relentless, convinced they could still save what was left.

It seemed like only yesterday that she had stumbled across the encrypted manifestos that began appearing on the underground channels: part technical blueprint, part sermon. They spoke of reclaiming humanity from the code, of tearing down the Dome. No one knew who E was. Some said Elias Varin, Ardent’s vanished chief engineer.

Whoever — or whatever — E was, the writings had cracked something open in her.

She’d surrendered her clearance, smashed her devices, walked out of Ardent’s shimmering towers into the rust and rain of the lower city.

Now, five years later, she was walking toward the largest rally the movement had ever gathered.

Rumour said E might appear.

If that were true, today could change everything.

She pulled her hood tight and pressed on through the storm.