The memory was a ghost that didn't need a summons. It arrived with the sterile, official lettering of the offer pulsing on his cracked data-slate. The sight of the Temporal Audit Commission’s seal, even fractured, was enough to dissolve the grime of the dead cafe around him. The smell of dust and rot faded, replaced by the clean, cold scent of recycled air and the faint tang of ozone from humming temporal machinery. A scent he once associated with purpose. Now, it was the smell of the grave.
Five years ago, the room had been white. Everything was white. The walls, the floor, the long, curved bench where the three arbiters sat. It was a sterile void designed to strip away context, to leave nothing but the data. Kaelen had loved it. He stood at the presenter’s lectern, the cool metal a comfort under his hands. He was twenty-five, a rising star in the investigative division, and this case was his masterpiece. His T-Minus was a healthy, vibrant amber, a testament to a life of careful, correct choices.
He presented his findings with the flawless, clipped precision that had earned him his reputation. Holographic charts bloomed in the air above the lectern, glowing lines of code and cascading numbers that painted a damning picture. He had found a ghost in the ledgers, a subtle, parasitic drain on a district’s collective lifespan, and he had traced it to its source.
— The data is unequivocal, — Kaelen said, his voice calm and certain. He felt no doubt. Doubt was a human failing, a smudge on the clean glass of logic. — The recursive siphon loop originates from the temporal signature of the workshop. The bleed is 1.7 seconds per minute, aggregated over three years.
He gestured, and the holographic display shifted, showing a small, unassuming building. A weaver’s shop.
The accused sat alone in a containment field to Kaelen’s left. He was a man in his fifties, with hands calloused from a lifetime of working a loom. His face was a mask of utter confusion. He didn’t look like a criminal mastermind. He looked like a man who had wandered into the wrong room and was too polite to leave. Kaelen registered the man’s fear as a data point, an expected emotional response to TAC proceedings, and dismissed it.
The head arbiter, a woman whose face was as impassive as the white wall behind her, addressed the weaver. Her voice was a flat, synthetic monotone, scrubbed of all inflection.
— The charge is temporal fraud on a systemic level. The evidence presented by Auditor Rook is conclusive. How do you plead?
The weaver looked from the arbiter to Kaelen, his eyes wide with a desperate, uncomprehending panic.
— I don’t understand, — the man stammered. His voice was rough, unused to the dead, sound-dampened air of the tribunal. — I’m a weaver. I work my loom. I pay my tithes. I don’t even know what a… a recursive siphon is.
Kaelen felt a flicker of irritation. The man’s ignorance was irrelevant. The data was the only witness that mattered, the only testimony that could not lie. He had built his case on a new analytical model, cross-referencing thousands of transactions to find a pattern no one else had seen. His ambition was a bright, hot engine inside him. This verdict would secure his promotion.
The arbiter made a small notation on her slate. The system had processed the weaver’s plea. It had been weighed against the data and found wanting. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, an output determined by the inputs Kaelen himself had so carefully arranged.
— The plea is noted, — the arbiter said. — Based on the presented data, the tribunal finds you guilty.
The words hung in the sterile air. The weaver started to speak again, to protest, but no sound came out. The containment field around him shimmered, its low hum rising in pitch. This was the moment of sentencing. The system was preparing to balance the ledger.
— The sentence is the reclamation of all stolen time, plus penalties, — the arbiter announced, her voice unchanged. — The total comes to sixty-seven years, four months, and nine days.
The weaver’s own T-Minus, visible above his wrist, was just over forty years. The math was simple. The sentence was death.
Kaelen watched, his posture perfect, his expression neutral. This was justice. This was the system working as intended, clean and efficient. He had done his job. He had trusted a source, a disgruntled apprentice who had brought him the initial tip, and he had validated that human whisper with the divine certainty of mathematics.
Then the machinery engaged.
A high-pitched whine filled the room, a sound that vibrated in Kaelen’s teeth. The air around the weaver grew thick, shimmering like heat haze. The man’s T-Minus began to flicker, the numbers dropping so fast they became a blur of amber light.
Kaelen had seen records of temporal repossession. He had studied the theory. He was not prepared for the reality.
The man’s skin tightened first, pulling taut against the bones of his face. His hair, thick and dark, flashed to grey, then to white, then vanished like ash in the wind. His eyes, wide with a terror that had no time to form a scream, sank into the deepening sockets of his skull. He aged a decade, then two, then five, in the space of a single, drawn-out second.
His clothes, the simple tunic of a district weaver, began to fray and unravel, the threads turning brittle and dark. The man’s body slumped, folding in on itself as the moisture was boiled out of his cells, his flesh turning to leather, then to parchment, then to something as dry and fragile as a dead leaf.
Kaelen’s breath caught in his throat. His heart hammered against his ribs. This wasn’t a clean balancing of a ledger. This was a violation. A brutal, high-speed erasure. The man didn’t scream, didn’t cry out. There wasn’t time. He simply came apart, molecule by molecule, undone by Kaelen’s perfect data.
And then he was gone.
Where a man had been sitting a moment before, there was only a small pile of fine, grey powder on the white floor. It settled slowly in the still air. The high-pitched whine of the machinery faded, leaving a silence that was louder than any sound Kaelen had ever heard. The smell of ancient dust, of something old beyond its years, filled the room.
The head arbiter made another note on her slate.
— Case closed, — she said.
Kaelen stood frozen at the lectern. The cold metal felt slick under his suddenly sweating palms. He looked at his own hands, clean and steady, and felt a profound, soul-cracking horror. He had just watched a man turn to dust because of a chart he had made. The pride he had felt moments before curdled into a cold, sick dread.
The investigation that followed was quiet and internal. His data was re-examined. His model was praised for its elegance. But his source, the disgruntled apprentice, was found to have been a plant, a paid agent of a rival guild. The initial tip had been a lie. The data Kaelen had found was a ghost, a phantom anomaly created by the apprentice’s own tampering, designed to frame an innocent man.
Kaelen’s perfect data had been built on a foundation of human deceit. He had trusted a person, and that trust had made him a murderer.
The memory faded, the sterile white walls of the tribunal room bleeding back into the grimy, shadowed interior of the dead cafe. The smell of dust remained, but it was the familiar dust of decay, not the horrifying dust of a life unmade. Kaelen’s hand was clenched into a fist on the table, his knuckles white. He was shaking.
He forced himself to uncurl his fingers, his knuckles white. He pulled his hand away from his pocket, from the useless habit of seeking a tool that wasn’t there.
He looked down at the summons still glowing on his broken slate. The TAC was offering him a way back. A chance to clear his name, to restore the years he had lost in his disgrace. The price, Silas had warned, was to become someone he was not. To trade his logic for their faith. To use the very intuition he had sworn off forever.
The memory of the weaver turning to dust was a physical weight in his gut. The helplessness of that moment, of watching the system he believed in commit an atrocity based on his work, was the defining failure of his life. He had lost control.
He would not lose control again.
His choice was clear. Redemption wasn’t about being right. It was about not being helpless. He would take the TAC’s offer. He would become a fraud, a liar, a creature of the shadows. He would manipulate and deceive. He would do it all, because the alternative was to be a spectator again, to stand by and watch while the world burned based on someone else’s flawed data. He would pay the price of his own identity to regain control.
He would become a weapon to prevent a memory from becoming a prophecy.
