The Memory Protocol

# The Hollow Protocol You wake to the sound of copper pipes singing. Not singing, exactly—groaning. The apartment's walls weep condensation in the August heat, and you lie still, letting the moisture settle on your skin like a second breath. Your photographic memory doesn't file away dreams, thankfully. It only catalogs what you've *seen*. But lately, you wonder if that distinction matters anymore. Litany's encrypted message arrives at 3:47 AM. You know the exact time because you always do. *Contract incoming. High-value. They're offering triple your standard rate.* You don't ask who "they" are. Not anymore. The questions stopped mattering around the time you realized the safe houses were never truly safe—just slower ways of being caught. The contract details materialize on your secondary screen, routed through the forgotten network beneath the city. The infrastructure is beautiful in its obsolescence: fiber optic cables laid in the 1990s when everyone believed the future would need endless bandwidth. Most of it's been abandoned, unmapped, left to corrode in utility tunnels and subway walls. You've spent years tracing its phantom veins, installing access points in apartments that smell like other people's failures. This one, in downtown Toronto, tastes like rust when you breathe. The job is simple. Breach the National Security Archive's internal servers. Extract a single classified file designated "Aurora Protocol." You memorize the security architecture in four minutes. One viewing. The schematics bloom in your mind like flowers in time-lapse: firewalls blooming and wilting, encryption protocols unfurling their mathematical petals. It's beautiful and terrible, and you hate that you're capable of seeing it this way. "This feels wrong," Litany says over the encrypted line. You can hear the static between her words, the digital hesitation. She's never been good at hiding her tells. "It always feels wrong," you reply. But you're wrong. This feels *different*. You breach the first layer at midnight. The second by 1 AM. The third takes longer—there's redundancy built in, intentional delays, as if the system itself is reluctant to open. As if it knows you're coming. The file downloads at 1:47 AM. You don't open it immediately. You never do. You let it sit on your encrypted drive like a letter you've been afraid to read for years. Litany's voice crackles through your earpiece, asking if the transfer was clean. You tell her yes. You're lying. The file opens at 2:15 AM. It's not data. It's images. Medical records. A child—you recognize her because you *are* her, though you haven't seen your own face in a mirror that shows the present in nearly a decade. Every mirror in every safe house reflects rooms as they were years ago: younger furniture, different wallpaper, people who no longer exist. The records are dated 1997. You would have been six years old. *Subject demonstrates exceptional cognitive retention. Recommend escalation to Phase Two neural integration protocols.* Your hands aren't shaking. You don't allow your hands to shake. But the air in the apartment has thickened, and you're breathing it like water. There's a video file embedded in the document. You know what it is before you play it. Your photographic memory is already running it, frame by frame, in the dark theatre behind your eyes. The video shows a laboratory. You see the equipment first—scanners, sensory deprivation tanks, screens flickering with patterns designed to imprint themselves permanently on developing neural architecture. Then you see the people in white coats. Then you see *yourself*. She's small. The child version of you is *so small*. They're showing her patterns. Geometric sequences. Code. Security protocols. She's crying, but her eyes are following every line, every shift, every transformation. Her brain is drinking it in, cataloging, archiving. Even then—*especially* then—her memory was perfect. The video ends. You close the laptop. You open it again. The video hasn't changed. You weren't misremembering it. Your memory doesn't work that way. At 2:34 AM, your phone rings. An actual phone call, not encrypted, not routed through the forgotten network. The number is blocked. "Hello, Poline," a woman's voice says. Warm. Familiar in a way that makes your skin crawl. "Thank you for retrieving the file. We've been waiting for someone with your particular capabilities to locate it." You don't respond. "We know you've seen the video," she continues. "We know what you're feeling right now. We designed those feelings, actually. Carefully calibrated emotional responses to specific memory triggers. Thirty years of refinement." "What do you want?" Your voice sounds like it's coming from underwater. "We want you to remember," she says. "The rest of it. The part that's still locked away. You were part of something extraordinary, Poline. You *are* part of it. And we need you to access those memories. The ones we suppressed. The ones we hid from you." The line goes dead. You stand in the apartment for a long time. The walls continue to weep. The pipes continue their groaning song. You look in the mirror—the old mirror that's been in this apartment since 1987, according to the landlord's invoice you memorized—and you see a room from 2003. Younger furniture. Different light. A girl who looks like you, but not quite, staring back. At 3:12 AM, Litany calls. "The contract wasn't real," she says immediately. "I've been trying to trace the source, and there's nothing there. It's a ghost structure. A phantom client. Poline, whoever hired us—they've been planning this." "I know," you say. "There's more. I accessed the network logs for your safe house. Someone's been monitoring your connections for weeks. Feeding you false routing data. The forgotten network—the one you thought was unmapped? They've got full schematics. They know every access point you've installed." The hollow acceptance settles into your chest like sediment. "They've always known," you tell her. And as you say it, you understand. The memories they want you to retrieve—they're not locked away at all. They're threaded through every decision you've made, every safe house you've chosen, every contract you've accepted. They've been guiding you with invisible hands for so long that you've confused their manipulation for your own agency. You were never untethered. You were never skating freely across forgotten digital veins. You were always following a current they'd carved into the bedrock decades ago. At 3:47 AM, the second message arrives. *When you're ready to remember, we'll be waiting. You know where to find us. You've always known.* You look at the mirror again. The room reflected there is from 1997 now. You can see the laboratory in the background. The white coats. The child with your eyes, drinking in patterns that would become the architecture of your mind. She's looking directly at you. You close your eyes and realize that you've never actually been looking at a mirror at all. You've been looking at a window. And on the other side, someone has been looking back, watching you run through apartments across a country, following a path they mapped out before you were old enough to understand what memory means. The forgotten network hums beneath the city. You wonder how much of yourself you've actually forgotten. And you wonder, finally, if there's any difference between being haunted by your past and *being* your past—a ghost that hasn't yet realized it's dead. The rust taste returns. The walls continue weeping. And in the space between the mirrors and the windows, something that isn't quite you, isn't quite them, waits for the day when the last door opens.