SEQUENT: Memory Hunter — 001: “Echoes and Triggers”

The rain made Cascade City look half-melted. The buildings leaned like they'd given up resisting gravity, sheathed in biotech membranes that glistened like slugskin. Street lamps blinked out of sync, leaking purple mist. Advertisements sputtered through corrupted loops—faces half-rendered, slogans stammering mid-word.

“Sequent Systems,” said one, jittering across a damp wall like a mosquito with epilepsy. “New Memories. New Yo—Your—You.”

Echo didn’t look up. Her hood was up, boots soaked, and mood sour enough to warp local weather if it weren’t already doing a great job of that on its own. She passed a broken surveillance drone embedded in moss. It tracked her halfheartedly, then gave up and died with a soft whirr.

Ahead, a steel door pulsed with slow, diseased light. Its surface writhed faintly, synthetic moss grafted over retrofitted tech. When the scanner pinged, she didn’t flinch. Just blinked once and stared until the door opened like it had something to apologize for.

Inside, the memory den breathed. It was the kind of place that didn’t have rooms, exactly. Just damp, pulsing transitions. The walls were soft. Not metaphorically. Actually soft. Coated in a wet hum that smelled like sugar and antiseptic grief. Bodies slumped in chairs, cortex jacks plugged into spines like old rituals. Some of them cried. Others laughed in loops. Some did both at the same time.

“Echo,” said Glen. Late forties, under-rested, wearing the same shirt for three days. “You’re late.”

“Time’s a blur,” she said, unbothered.

He scratched at the implant behind his ear. “You sure about this one? Tier-4. Raw pull. Corporate source. Could be spiked, could be corrupted. Probably both.”

Echo shrugged off her coat, revealing the wrist-mounted sequencer stitched into her arm like a designer parasite. “Then I’ll tread soft.”

Glen produced the bead from a lined case with the tenderness of someone handling unexploded ordinance. It was no bigger than a marble—iridescent, shifting inside like fireflies flitting through smoke. Even through the casing, it pulsed.

“Pulled it off Sequent’s eastern relay. Didn’t think it’d survive the chain.”

“Still warm,” Echo said. “Means it wants to be remembered.”

He nodded once, as if agreeing with a priest. “It’s... twitchy. Like it knows it’s stolen.”

Echo laid out her trigger kit: a frayed red cloth, a chipped plastic horse no larger than a thumb, and a scent capsule she cracked open with two fingers. Smooth, practiced. 

Cinnamon and static hit the air.

The bead, slotted into her sequencer.

Threads of faint light laced between the memory and the artifacts. Her breath slowed. Her eyes closed.

The world blinked.

Then bent.

The memory was fractured before it began—one half a child’s bedroom lit by soft glow-globes, the other half a Sequent R&D lab drowning in sterile fluorescence. The walls didn’t agree with themselves. Posters peeled into DNA strands, then spread and frayed like neurons. Toys flickered into and out of existence. The floor warped with the slow tension of something dreaming itself back into shape.

Echo stood still.

In dreams, you usually start walking before you realize you're in one. This wasn’t a dream. It was worse. It was curated.

“Katya?” said a voice.

Small. Female. From behind. But which behind?

Echo froze.

Her pulse didn’t spike. Her breath didn’t change. But somewhere under her ribs, something old, something deeper sat up.

That name. It had gravity.

She moved forward. The toy horse rocked by itself, creaking. A wall screen spasmed static, resolving just long enough to show a broken Sequent logo before it cracked down the middle. The scent in the room had changed—burnt ozone, cinnamon.

She knelt beside a memory node, resting fingers on its surface like testing the heat of a stove.

The child’s face rippled into view, warped by the memory node’s stainless steel bezel.

It shifted, fuzzed, stuttered—then, for one impossible second, it stabilized.

Claire.

Or not Claire. But wearing her shape. Her face. Her mask.

Or… Claire.

Echo didn’t breathe. Couldn’t. The air was too thick with recognition.

Behind her, the light changed.

She didn’t turn. She didn’t need to.

Someone else was here. Late to the dive. Static crawled along the base of her skull. Her sequencer whined with interference.

Not enough time. The walls folded in like origami. The floor dropped away in slices. The air tore sideways.

Echo darted for the exit. The world fought her like it wanted her to stay.

She gasped back into reality.

Glen grabbed the bead from her sequencer. The bead cracked in Glen’s hand with a soft, pitiful snap. He let it fall to the counter.

She sat bolt upright, blood trailing from one nostril, fingers twitching.

“You okay?” Glen asked, already knowing it was a dumb question.

“Define okay,” Echo muttered. She wiped the blood with the back of her hand. It smeared. She didn’t care.

As Glen turned to log the fragment, Echo reached into her coat and pulled out three small items:

A coin from their last job.

A stick of data-gum, half-chewed. Berry flavored.

A single red thread from Glen’s sleeve.

Echo laid them out with surgical precision and shark-swift speed.

The sequencer lit up—quiet threads unfurling like spider silk, connecting to each object.

She stood. Moved behind him.

She slotted a blank bead into her sequencer.

Touched the base of his neck with two fingers.

His pupils pulsed once. Then again. Then settled. Fifteen minutes, gone.

Rain slicked her face as she stepped out of the alley. Her hood was up again.

She didn’t walk fast. She didn’t walk slow. Just forward.

The just-blank bead, now buzzing with deceit, slipped from her palm into her satchel. It nestled among others, all faintly glowing like an oil slick.

Inside the den, Glen blinked. Looked around.

He rubbed the side of his head. “I thought... I called someone. Had a—” He opened his log window. Blank. Checked the cam feeds. Just him behind the counter.

“Guess it wasn’t worth remembering,” he muttered, adding a fresh piece of berry flavored data-gum to his mouth.

Behind a screen of mist and neon rot, someone watched Echo disappear into the city. She didn’t look back. He didn’t pursue. Just watched. Waiting.

The sequencer on her wrist glowed softly, like it was remembering her better than she ever had herself. She told herself it didn’t mean anything. But her chest ached like it did. The name still echoed behind her eyes. 

Katya. Like a bruise you forget until something presses on it. She adjusted her coat. Blinked against the rain.

“I don’t know who that is,” she told herself.

And then again, quieter, “I don’t know who that is.”