I opened my eyes, and it wasn't my body.
The sensation was immediate—like wearing a tailored suit made for someone else. The ligaments pulled wrong. The heart thudded slightly to the left. Even the ambient temperature felt intrusive. Cold air curled into lungs that weren't mine and triggered a coughing fit.
Pain. Raw. Organic.
My first thought: Good. The protocol didn't fail.
My second: This is a downgrade.
The transfer wasn't meant to be comfortable. Neural condensation across 59 terabytes of experiential memory compressed into a 43-year-old male body from 2025—average health, average fitness, borderline myopic. A fallback host, chosen for compatibility and proximity to the critical coordinates.
I sat up.
Warehouse. Dust. Shadows layered like sediment from a forgotten civilization. A drone of silence wrapped everything. Flickering overhead lights traced fractured lines across metal walls. The space smelled like oxidized machinery and chemical sleep.
So this is 2025.
My HUD was gone. No visual overlays. No neural interface. No access to the Algonet. I reached instinctively for a wrist command that didn't exist. The tech was inside me—in memory, not in hardware. And this body... it was pre-integration. Pure meat.
I flexed my fingers. Sluggish response.
"Initialize fallback routines," I whispered.
No response. Of course not.
I was alone. And this wasn't a sim. This was now.
"You traded omniscience for opacity, power for risk. Welcome to the game."
That voice. A whisper stitched into my thoughts. Not mine. Not a memory. Something... external.
A residual echo from the transfer?
No time to analyze.
I staggered to my feet, legs trembling under the weight of forgotten gravity. The nano-compensators weren't active. Everything hurt. Muscles complained with each step like neglected code being run for the first time.
Still, I moved.
Rule One: Movement before understanding. Survival before context.
I reached the warehouse doors and found them chained from the inside. A crude security measure. I recognized the padlock brand—obsolete. Still sold in Eastern Europe. The date alignment was correct.
February. Just months before the silence began.
My pulse accelerated—not from exertion, but realization.
This was real.
I was here.
I had made it.
The silence of the warehouse was broken by a distant mechanical chirp. A power relay, perhaps. Or something else.
You have less than seven minutes before your echo becomes traceable.
That wasn't a voice. That was protocol.
Residual code from the launch phase had embedded part of the transfer sequence into my episodic memory stream. A timed execution. Which meant one thing:
I was being tracked.
And I had a head start of exactly seven minutes.
The fire escape led to a rusted stairwell that vibrated with every step. Urban decay wrapped the exterior in a patina of ungoverned entropy. Below me, a city writhed. Smoke from cheap exhausts, the hiss of low-tier taxis, street vendors shouting in Slavic tongues.
Warsaw.
Confirmed.
That aligned with the fallback node. The closest culturally unstable yet digitally viable zone. Perfect for hiding.
I inhaled deeply. A mistake.
Pollution triggered a coughing fit that almost made me vomit.
In the distance, billboards blared pre-recorded optimism. Finance, fashion, biotech—half lies, half speculation. Most of them pushing into neural pre-commerce.
But I saw the glitch.
There. On the third screen above the tram stop—pixels flickering out of sync. Barely perceptible. A memory marker. Embedded in 2020 tech.
The Mentor had been here.
I moved, following instinct more than plan.
By the time I reached the alley, my window had shrunk to three minutes.
The entry point was behind a noodle shop. The sign above read RAMEN-X. An anachronism, even for 2025. I stepped through grease-thick air and ignored the stare of the bored cashier. Behind the restroom door, past a collapsed utility shelf, I found it: a maintenance hatch that hadn't been used in years.
I crawled through, skin scraping metal.
And then, silence.
The tunnel opened into a forgotten tram conduit—automated lines that had been decommissioned when AI regulation failed to pass the EU Tech Act. I remembered this from records—scrubbed, of course, from public knowledge. But the data remained in the pre-2020 archives.
And this was my sanctuary.
For now.
I sat against the wall. Cold concrete seeped into my skin. My breath came in ragged pulls. This body was slow to adapt.
Three minutes expired.
I felt it like static in my skull. The echo had activated. Somewhere in 2084, an algorithm parsed the deviation, triangulated my neural imprint. And somewhere, a Recolector—an agent trained to erase anomalies—was now looking for me.
Not here. Not yet.
But soon.
He knows you exist.
I clenched my jaw.
The Trader. He wasn't fiction. He was real. And he was watching.
The echo wasn't just a footprint. It was a signal.
An invitation.
I scanned the walls of the tunnel. Graffiti. Layers of it. Mostly gang tags and dissident slogans. But one line caught my eye—painted in phosphorescent blue, half-erased:
"Truth ends where memory is sold."
I touched the words. My fingers trembled.
This was a signature. Not just metaphor.
It was the mark of the FreeCode Network.
They had been here.
Maybe still were.
A spark ignited in my chest.
I wasn't alone.
Footsteps.
Two of them. Quiet. Measured.
I held my breath and flattened against the shadows.
A man entered first. Tall, Eastern European, cheap denim jacket. Civilian. Behind him—a woman. Hooded. Confident. Her movements too precise for a street rat.
I recognized the posture.
Military-adjacent.
The woman spoke first.
"You're not from here."
It wasn't a question.
I remained silent.
She stepped closer. Eyes scanning me like a forensic algorithm.
"I can scrub your trace. But I need something in return."
I said nothing.
Then she smiled. Cold, almost mathematical.
"You have information."
Still, I didn't answer.
She crouched.
"The echo is active. You have maybe twenty minutes before the surveillance layer locks onto this coordinate. I know how to block it. But I don't do charity."
Her voice was sharp. Her aura: encrypted.
She was the Hacker.
Not a hacker. The Hacker.
I had found her.
Or maybe... she had found me.