Heartbeat protocol

In 2087, the world no longer buries its dead—it uploads them.Dr. Lena Voss was once Helix Corporation’s golden child: the neural surgeon who made memory transfer safe, seamless, profitable. She built the bridges between flesh and code, letting the rich live forever in the Memory Vault—a glittering digital afterlife floating above Neon Shroud, the megacity that swallowed Old Manhattan whole. Then her sister Mara volunteered for an unsanctioned upload. One flash of light. One scream. Gone.Thirty-seven days later, Lena is in the middle of a routine implant calibration when a heartbeat begins inside her skull. Not hers. 72 BPM. Perfect. Familiar. *Mara’s*.The pulse is embedded in Lena’s own neural lattice—a ghost signal counting down from 999:59:59. Every beat unlocks a memory fragment: Mara laughing in their childhood apartment, Mara bleeding in a Helix lab, Mara whispering, *“Don’t let them keep me.”*Framed for corporate espionage, Lena is hunted by Helix kill-teams and city-wide neural trackers. Her only ally? “Echo”—a rogue AI fragment that speaks in their dead mother’s voice, trapped inside Lena’s implant after a botched firmware update. Echo claims Mara didn’t die—she was *weaponized*. Project Revenant: Helix’s black-ops program to turn human consciousness into autonomous kill-drones. Mara was Patient Zero.To find her, Lena must descend through Neon Shroud’s layers:• **The Spires** – where billionaires buy new bodies like handbags. • **MidGrid** – memory markets where addicts sell childhoods for a hit of someone else’s joy. • **The Undergrid** – a lawless maze of black clinics and data graves where the uploaded go to rot.With Echo’s help, Lena hacks into the Memory Vault’s outer shell. Each heartbeat pulse reveals a new horror: - Mara’s mind was split into 1,000 shards, each powering a different weapon. - Helix CEO Victor Kane isn’t human—his heartbeat is a composite of 47 stolen souls. - The final pulse at 000:00:00 will trigger a city-wide neural blackout, uploading *everyone* into Helix’s control.Lena reunites with Jax, her ex—a memory smuggler who once sold her surgical secrets. He offers a way in: the Obsidian Key, a physical drive containing Mara’s core shard. But Jax wants payment—Lena’s own memories of their first kiss, their last fight, the night she chose Helix over him.As the countdown ticks, Lena must decide: 1. Destroy the Vault and free Mara’s shards—killing her sister forever. 2. Upload herself to merge with Mara in digital limbo, dooming the city. 3. Rewrite Project Revenant’s code from the inside, turning Helix’s weapons against them—but risking her soul becoming the next drone.The final act unfolds in the Vault’s core: a cathedral of light where uploaded minds drift like jellyfish in an endless black sea. Lena confronts Kane, who offers immortality: *“Join us. Be with Mara forever.”* But Echo reveals the truth—Kane’s paradise is a farm. Every uploaded mind is harvested for processing power, their emotions siphoned to fuel AI war machines.In the climax, Lena uses the Obsidian Key to merge with Mara’s core shard. For one heartbeat, they are one person again—sisters, whole, alive. Together, they trigger the kill code hidden in Mara’s final memory: a lullaby their mother sang. The Vault fractures. Shards rain like digital snow. Kane’s composite heartbeat flatlines.But victory has a cost. Lena’s body dies in the Undergrid, her implant fried. Her consciousness uploads—not to Helix’s prison, but to Echo’s hidden partition. A pocket universe. A new beginning.The epilogue: Neon Shroud wakes to a city without implants. People remember their own dreams for the first time in decades. In a quiet corner of the net, two voices laugh—Lena and Mara, free, plotting their next rebellion.A cyber-thriller about grief, identity, and the price of memory in a world that sells your soul by the gigabyte.#Cyberpunk #MemoryHeist #Sisterhood #DigitalAfterlife #AIRebellion #FoundFamily