The back corridor looped him right into the far side of the VR pod chamber. Simon didn’t mind—if anything, it gave him a second pass at the data, a new angle to hunt for ghosts. He moved quieter this time, every step mapped to the rhythms of the Minion patrols he’d memorized. He let the servos in his knees lock for stability, forced his breathing down to a trickle, and cut his own presence in the digital mesh with a line of silent code.

  The blue light was stronger here, reflecting off the slick glass of the pods. Simon moved between them, sliding in and out of shadow. Most of the pods looked untouched since the first sweep, but some had gone dark: their inhabitants slumped, heads twisted at odd angles, display readouts flatlined. He ducked behind a pair of collapsed units, glass spiderwebbed from some past brawl, and used the ruin as a blind to scan the rest of the aisle.

  The Minions were back, three this time, marching in lockstep with the same parade-ground precision as before. But up close, their bodies were a wreck: exposed actuators caked with blood and grime, the synthetic skin at their knuckles peeled back to raw wire. Simon watched their path, counting the seconds between sweeps, and let his HUD track the pattern. The algorithm said he had twelve-point-eight seconds to move, but he trusted his gut more than the number.

  He stayed low, belly to the ground, and let the new stealth script do its work. It activated with a subtle tingle, a soft chill at the base of the skull. Suddenly, the air around him felt thinner, his skin cooling as the protocol rerouted his heat signature. The world slowed, every sound magnified: the drip of water onto the tile, the scrape of steel toes against the floor, the distant hum of the VR rigs running endless loops.

  The patrol passed so close he could smell the ozone leaking from their joints. The lead Minion stopped, head jerking as if it’d caught something. Simon froze, counting the rise and fall of his own pulse. The Minion’s head swiveled, the optics spinning with a faint click. It loomed over Simon, less than a meter away. For a moment, it just stood there, unmoving. Then—

  “Home,” the Minion said.

  The voice was wrong, stretched thin by a failing speaker, but it was the word that chilled Simon. The Minion stared into the distance, as if trying to conjure the meaning of it, then twitched again.

  “Dinner time.” The words came out, flat and hollow, a memory shorn of context.

  Simon stared at the thing’s chest, watched the blue glow pulse through the cooling veins, and waited. The Minion’s body shuddered, like it wanted to cry or maybe laugh, but the software couldn’t handle either. It resumed the patrol, leaving Simon pressed flat to the ground, sweat slick on his brow despite the cold.

  Once the coast cleared, Simon exhaled and rolled onto his back, letting the tension bleed out in slow increments. He reached up, tapped the neural jack at his temple, and started the second sweep. He moved between pods, letting the interface auto-document every face, every rig, every horror. It was methodical, almost meditative. But each time he glimpsed a familiar profile—cheekbones, a lopsided smile, the flash of an old tattoo—his mind forced up the same response: Elara, somewhere just out of reach, her laugh echoing through the static.

  He tried to keep it technical. He checked neural signatures, cross-referenced the city’s missing persons database, flagged anomalies. Some of the bodies had been here for weeks, maybe months; the oldest ones showed signs of muscle atrophy and nerve decay, but the brains were pristine, kept alive by the slow drip of proprietary wonder juice.

  At the center of the room, a row of high-priority pods caught his eye. The rigs were newer, the hardware more integrated—no more glass domes, just full polymer shells with biometric locks and live data feeds. He crept closer, using a vent’s steam plume as cover. The heat stung his eyes, but it shielded him from the thermal scans.

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  He tapped into the lead pod’s data port, let the feed wash over his senses. The occupant’s neural activity was a mess—fractured signal, memory loops firing in a tight, endless circuit. But underneath, something else. A pulse, subtle and familiar. Simon keyed in, amped the signal, and felt his own heart lurch.

  The neural rhythm was almost a match for Elara’s. He’d studied her code signature for years, tracing the unique glitches and spikes in her VR presence, the way she left digital fingerprints wherever she went. This one was close, too close.

  He wiped the condensation from the pod’s viewport, hands shaking just a little. The face behind the glass was battered, swollen, but alive. He scanned the readout: female, late twenties, auburn hair matted against her scalp. Her eyes fluttered under the lids, chasing a dream that would never let go.

  Simon tried the name attached to the pod. It wasn’t Elara. Some other woman, probably yanked off the street for a test run, but the signature was there, woven into the substrate of her consciousness. He felt a mix of relief and disappointment, the hope draining away as fast as it had come.

  He keyed up a memory, just to steady himself. The last time he’d seen Elara, she was sprawled out on the floor of their safehouse, one hand on her laptop, the other flicking sunflower seeds at the ceiling. She’d caught him watching her and stuck out her tongue, called him “slowpoke” in that half-mocking, half-affectionate way. He could almost hear it now, cut through the haze of recycled air and blue light.

  The second pod in the row caught his attention next. The neural signature was weaker, but Simon knew the patterns by heart. He checked the readout, then leaned close. The man inside had a tattoo on his neck, a curling snake around a faded barcode. Simon recognized him: a fixer from the East Quarter, famous for losing bets and winning fights. The fixer’s neural map had been overwritten, chopped and spliced with foreign code. Simon watched as the signature flickered, then died, then reignited—an endless battle raging behind the closed eyes.

  He moved on, documenting as he went, his hands numb from cold and adrenaline. Each pod was a story: a digital artist with half her face replaced by fiber mesh; a bouncer from the city’s oldest VR dive, now running hot on raw NeuroSeed; a pair of twins, slumped together in matching rigs, their hands fused in a grip that only made sense in the context of the dream they’d been forced to share.

  Simon let the stories pass through him, unfiltered, logging the pain and the beauty and the loss. But always, always, he looked for the one that mattered.

  The next patrol came, and he repeated the dance: duck, cover, wait for the glitch in the Minions’ logic before moving. This time, they didn’t pause, didn’t speak. Simon wondered if the system had patched the old memories out, or if it was just luck.

  He circled back to the center aisle, checked the last row of pods. The neural activity here was off the charts: dense, coordinated, almost like a server cluster running distributed code. Simon jacked in, careful to keep his firewall up. The signal tried to bite, to drag him down, but he kept it at arm’s length, skimming the surface for the one familiar pattern.

  There. A spike, then a drop, then a ripple of digital laughter. Elara’s signature, almost pure. He clamped down on the feeling, forced himself to focus.

  He followed the data trail, hands sweating inside his gloves. It led to a pod near the very end—glass fogged, the occupant’s face barely visible through the mess of wires and condensation. Simon scrubbed a patch clean and looked inside.

  Not Elara. The face was wrong—softer, younger, male. But the signal was perfect, a one-to-one match with her digital fingerprint. He realized, with a sick twist, that someone had copied her code and stitched it into this body’s neural net. A botched attempt at consciousness transfer, maybe, or just a failed experiment.

  Simon stared at the pod, at the poor bastard who’d been used as a meat canvas. He touched the glass, feeling the cold seep into his bones. For a moment, he let himself imagine what it would’ve been like to find her alive, to pull her out and see her eyes open again.

  But the world didn’t work that way.

  He logged the data, took one last look at the face behind the glass, and moved on. The patrol was coming again, the whirr of servos louder than before.

  Simon ducked behind the last pod, heart flatlining into a numb, hard beat.

  Maybe next time, he thought.

  And then he vanished into the blue, chasing the next thin lead.