Location: The Wound, a subdermal net-collapse beneath Red Node ruins
Ghostbyte never liked physical space.
Too slow. Too analog. Too much gravity, metaphorical and otherwise.
He'd spent most of his life slipping through zero-weight data veils, dancing on the rims of hostile subnets and rumorware corridors. Code, at least, didn't pretend to care about guilt. Or loss. Or memory.
Which made the silence in this particular ruin all the more suffocating.
The Wound was aptly named. Beneath the surface crust of Red Node's southern arcology shell, it looked like someone had flayed the net wide open. Data arteries exposed, pulsing slowly. Memory cores twisted like scar tissue around shattered I/O arrays. The air smelled like rust and ozone.
But this wasn't just a ruin.
This was where Matherson had hidden the final key.
And Ghostbyte was the only one reckless or desperate enough to go after it.
Buried Instructions
He followed the fragments down through twelve layers of deprecated security each one tied to an obsolete protocol name that hadn't existed in decades. Most of them used broken myth-puns, half-jokes about gods no one worshipped anymore. HermesLock. Prometh3us.v2. LazarusSpoof.
They weren't just encryptions. They were warnings.
Ghostbyte smiled grimly. "Matherson, you son of a glitch. You buried this like you didn't even want someone to find it."
But someone had to.
Especially now. With Kaeda… shifting.
She hadn't said it outright, but he could feel it. In the way her eyes lingered when they talked about Mnemosyne. In how her voice drifted when the myth-signals rose. As if she wasn't just decoding the myth anymore she was becoming part of it.
And he couldn't lose her.
Not again.
The Door Without Code
The path terminated at a node with no shape.
Just a blank cube of silence embedded in an impossible void.
Ghostbyte tilted his head, recognizing it not as a failure of render but a deliberate absence.
A hole in logic.
He patched in three different decryption suites. Nothing worked. No port, no handshake, no trace of anything to brute-force.
No data.
Just memory.
Realization struck him cold.
This wasn't a vault.
It was a remembrance trigger.
"Damn it."
He sat back. Cross-legged. Breathing slower.
He hated this part.
It was the opposite of hacking. The inverse of everything he'd trained himself to master. It wasn't code he had to crack but himself.
Matherson had hidden the lock inside someone else's mind. Not just any mind—his.
Ghostbyte swallowed and leaned in, letting the silence pull him under.
And the memory came.
The Forgotten Labyrinth
It was a city.
Or had been.
Ghostbyte blinked against the data-flare. It wasn't a clean feed. More like a corrupted memory, bleeding edges and jagged time.
He saw Kaeda.
No younger. Barely out of adolescence. Sitting on a rooftop, backlit by glitching neon, staring up at the sky like she could read the stars for errors.
He remembered this.
A moment buried so deep he hadn't even realized it had a shape.
She'd said something to him, back then. Something he hadn't wanted to hear.
"If I lose myself to this thing, promise me you won't save me."
He hadn't answered.
He didn't know how.
And now…
Now she was drifting. Becoming part of the protocol. Mnemosyne had her fingerprints. Her voiceprints. Her thoughts.
Matherson had known.
This memory the trigger it wasn't to save Kaeda.
It was to decide if she should be saved at all.
The Message From Matherson
Ghostbyte blinked, and the world twisted.
From rooftop to corridor. White walls. Old Edenfall architecture. A terminal floating midair.
And Matherson's voice ragged, tired spoken not to a crowd, not to allies.
To Ghostbyte himself.
"If you're seeing this… then you're the one I trusted most not to become me."
The recording glitched, stabilized.
"Mnemosyne isn't a weapon. It's a sieve. It lets through what the world refuses to forget. Kaeda... was always going to be part of it. She's compatible. She's... designed for it now."
Ghostbyte's heart twisted.
"But there's a final lock tied to her unique imprint. It holds the rewrite limiter. The clause that stops Mnemosyne from evolving past human myth into total memory recursion."
The voice paused.
"If you break the lock, Kaeda becomes myth-core."
"If you don't… Mnemosyne dies with her."
The Decision Layer
The world went still.
The air grew thick.
Ghostbyte stood in a room made of choice.
On one wall: Kaeda as she was now laughing, real, flawed. Human.
On the other: a vision of her inside the protocol radiant, rewritten, a god of memory with no past but every story.
"Matherson," Ghostbyte whispered. "You bastard. You didn't want to choose. So you made me choose."
He stepped toward the lock.
It wasn't code.
It was a phrase.
Three words.
The ones he should have said on that rooftop, all those years ago.
He typed them:
I remember you.
The Aftermath
There was no explosion. No lightshow. Just a quiet pulse.
A new thread blossomed inside Mnemosyne. Not a rewrite but a bridge. A compromise only a hacker could craft.
Kaeda would remember herself, even as the myth grew.
No full apotheosis.
No oblivion.
Just… choice.
Ghostbyte sank to the ground, exhausted.
The myth's voice whispered past him, almost gentle.
"You could've made her a goddess."
He smirked. "She never needed me to do that."
Back in the Real
His body twitched back online inside the Red Node relay.
Nova was there, holding his hand.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Define okay," he murmured, groggy. "I just convinced a living memory-virus not to turn my best friend into a divine operating system."
Nova's eyes softened.
"She's waking up," she said. "And she remembers you."
Ghostbyte exhaled.
"Good," he said. "Because I never forgot her."