The maintenance sled cut through the absolute dark of the under-ice tunnel, its electric motor a low hum against the constant, groaning complaint of the ice sheet miles above. The air was thin and cold, a precise minus 30 degrees Celsius that crystallized his breath in the beam of the sled’s single forward lamp. The coordinates from the relay ship’s protocol had led him here, to a pre-war transit tube bored through the foundation of the world. His objective was simple: traverse it.
He felt them before he saw them. A change in the texture of the dark, a subtle pressure against his Ghost-Sight. He throttled the sled back, its runners scraping against the ice-slicked ferroconcrete floor. Ahead, the tunnel was no longer empty. It was choked with the silent, grey light of Palimpsest Phantoms, dozens of them, anchored in the ice like spectral mines. They weren't drifting; they were waiting. Kosta’s defenses.
Sineus brought the sled to a full stop twenty meters from the first phantom. It was the flickering after-image of a traveler, a man in archaic cold-weather gear, his face a mask of desperation. The phantom was caught in a two-second loop, turning his head to look back down the tunnel, an action repeated for eternity. It was a tripwire. A memetic trap.
He focused on the traveler, letting his sight cut deeper into the memetic structure of the trap. The phantom wasn't designed to trigger an explosion. It was designed to overwrite. Its payload was a single, cancerous idea: futility. To touch its trigger field was to have his own memory of purpose, his drive to reach the Polaris Vault, replaced with the phantom’s looping despair. It was identity death delivered by a ghost. He could not bypass them. The tunnel was a kill-zone for the mind.
A choice presented itself, cold and sharp as a shard of ice. He could not disarm them. He could not go around. Therefore, he had to become immune. He had to make himself a target the traps could not recognize. He opened a small, hardened case on the sled and removed the portable Neurotome, its chrome surface dull in the sled’s weak light.
He keyed in the parameters, his fingers moving with practiced economy. The target was not a trauma, not a piece of intel. The target was the mission itself. He isolated the memory of his objective, the entire causal chain from the Chronos Shard to this tunnel, and tagged it for temporary severance. The price of passage was a piece of his own mind. He pressed the Neurotome’s injector against the port at the base of his skull. The device hissed, a needle-thin probe sliding home with a faint click. A cold sensation, like liquid nitrogen, flooded his neural pathways. His objective, his reason for being in this tunnel, vanished.
The world simplified. He was an operator on a sled in a tunnel. His instruments gave him a destination vector and a velocity. The phantoms ahead were no longer lures. They were just obstacles, data-constructs without context. His Ghost-Sight still registered them, but their looping, desperate motions were meaningless static. He was a ghost to the ghosts, a blank slate moving through a hall of broken mirrors.
He pushed the throttle forward. The sled moved into the minefield, gliding past the silent, flickering shapes. The traveler’s phantom turned its head as he passed, but its memetic hook found no purchase in his partitioned mind. He passed another, a woman huddled over a child that wasn't there. Another, a soldier raising a weapon at an enemy long since erased. They were just grey light, harmless and inert. He was navigating purely on the sled’s instrument readings, a machine guiding a machine.
He cleared the last phantom. The tunnel ahead was clean, a straight line of darkness. He brought the sled to a halt and keyed the release command for the Neurotome partition. The device injected the counter-agent. Memory returned not as a gentle tide, but as a physical blow. A spike of white-hot pain lanced through his skull as the severed data slammed back into place. His vision dissolved into static. He gripped the controls of the sled, his knuckles white, waiting for the system to reboot.
The memory was back, but it was wrong. It felt like a copy, a recording of a memory rather than the memory itself. A psychic scar, smooth and cold, now separated him from his own purpose. He knew the mission, but he no longer felt its weight. The cost was paid. He was through the tunnel.
The air ahead tasted different, cleaner. The groaning of the ice was a distant memory.
