The rain had stopped, but the streets of Neo-Prague still reflected a broken city. Akihiko, Isabella, and Kael walked through silent alleys, carrying the weight of an incomplete truth. The girl with no memory walked beside them, wrapped in a blanket. Her blank gaze focused on nothing, but her steps were firm, as if her body remembered what her mind had forgotten.
"Do you think it was an illusion?" Isabella asked, still staring at the girl. Akihiko shook his head slightly. "It wasn't an illusion... it was a warning. Ezra wanted to show us something, and he did it the only way he knew how: by erasing reality."
Kael interrupted them, showing the screen of his communicator. "I crossed her neural waves with the frequencies of Project MEMORY. There are matches. Clear ones. It was part of the experiment."
Akihiko looked at the young woman.
-What's your name?
She was slow to respond. Her lips trembled as they parted. "...Yume."
An abrupt silence. As if the world had exhaled for a second.
Fragments of the Past
That night, in the makeshift hideout of an abandoned library, Kael hooked Yume up to an ancient memory decoder. Screens began to display fragments. Noise. Shadows. Distorted screams. And then... a sharp image.
A white, windowless laboratory. Bodies floating in capsules. Wires inserted into the base of the skull. And at the center of it all… Ezra, sans suit, in a medical gown. In front of him, a child cried inside a glass capsule. A name etched on the rim: Akihiko-13.
Isabella took a step back, mouth agape.
—Is that… you?
Akihiko didn't respond. His face was stony. But inside him, an old wound was beginning to bleed again.
Kael stopped the projection. "This isn't just a mind-control game. This experiment… created you."
The City That Forgets
Elsewhere in Neo-Prague, Ezra walked through a deserted market. People walked past him without a glance, as if he were just another shadow.
A woman bumped into him. "Excuse me," she said, without even looking him in the eye.
Ezra smiled. "Don't worry. Soon, you won't even remember I existed."
He stopped in front of a government propaganda mural: "Memory is treason. Forgetting is peace." Ezra ran his hand over the mural, and the paint vanished as if it had never been there.
"The world is built on what is remembered," he murmured. "And I was born to destroy that foundation."
Interference
That night, while everyone was asleep in the shelter, Akihiko couldn't close his eyes. The echoes of projected memories wouldn't leave him alone.
Suddenly, his communicator emitted a signal. Interference. And then… a voice.
—Don't fight what you are, Akihiko. It was Ezra.
"What do you want from me?" he whispered, without raising his voice. "I want you to remember what you chose to forget."
The shelter lights flickered. Yume stood abruptly, her eyes rolling back. "The abyss is coming…" she said in a distorted voice. "And the forgotten names will cry out for their existence."
Kael woke up at the sound of her, and Isabella drew her pistol, aiming without thinking.
—What's wrong with him?!
"Don't touch her!" Akihiko ordered. "She's not possessed. She's remembering."
Yume fell to her knees, panting. Her body trembled. "There are others… others like me… trapped… forgotten…"
Kael absorbed the information with horror. "Project MEMORY isn't over. It's active. They're storing human beings… within a network."
Decision
At dawn, Isabella looked out the window, the sun barely breaking through the skyscrapers. "So what's the plan? To save those who don't even know they exist?"
Akihiko looked at his reflection in a broken glass. His face, his story… everything was a construct. But he felt something real in that moment: the need to break the cycle.
"Yes," he finally replied. "We're going to destroy Project MEMORY. We're going to free those of us who were erased. And if that means entering the abyss again... I will."
Visual Epilogue
A final image. Dozens of underground capsules. Some empty. Others with bodies inside, floating, breathing. And in the center, a special capsule.
A sleeping figure. White hair. A tattoo marked on the neck: AKI-0.