Limbus RE:CODE

Forgotten, Not Gone (1)

The world forgets, but the body aches still.

Swan knows he's fading when he catches his reflection in a campus security monitor and sees static where his face should be.

It's three in the morning, and he's wandering the Engineering Complex's lower levels—the maintenance corridors where pipes sweat condensation and fluorescent lights flicker with the rhythm of failing ballasts. He stopped here because exhaustion finally overwhelmed survival instinct, because his legs threatened to give out, because even ghosts need to rest sometimes.

The security monitor is old, probably forgotten by whatever automated system maintains the Institute's surveillance grid. Its screen is clouded with dust, colors bleeding at the edges, displaying a feed of the corridor Swan currently occupies.

He sees the hallway. Sees the pipes. Sees the flickering lights casting unstable shadows.

But where he should be standing, there's only a vague humanoid blur. A suggestion of presence. Like a photograph that's been corrupted, overwritten, half-deleted. His outline stutters—visible for one frame, absent for the next, phasing in and out of observable reality.

Swan raises his hand. Watches the monitor. His reflection does the same, but the movement is laggy, imprecise. Like the camera can't quite commit to rendering him. Can't decide if he's worth the processing power.

"I'm disappearing," he whispers to the empty corridor. "Not just from records. From reality."

His voice echoes wrong. The acoustics don't match the space. Sound waves passing through a presence the world is increasingly uncertain about.

Footsteps approach from behind—careful, measured, accompanied by the soft wheeze of someone pushing their cardiovascular system past sustainable limits. Swan doesn't turn around. Doesn't need to. He recognizes the pattern of movement, the specific rhythm of exhaustion.

"You're not supposed to be down here," says a voice he almost recognizes. Male, young, carrying the particular strain of someone who's lived on the margins too long. "Maintenance says this section isn't safe. Structural integrity issues. Could collapse any—"

The voice stops abruptly.

Swan turns.

The student standing three meters away is thin, Asian, wearing the kind of clothes that speak of scholarship budgets and careful rationing. His student ID badge hangs from a lanyard around his neck, but the photo is corrupted—just a blur where a face should be. The name field reads: "****Chen - Unranked Status."

Swan recognizes him. Or recognizes the shape of him. Memories surface like drowning things breaking the water's surface, desperate for air.

Marcus Chen. Not the Marcus who tried to fight him—different person, same first name. This Marcus was in Swan's study group sophomore year. They pulled all-nighters together, shared notes, complained about Professor Zhao's impossible exams. Swan helped him pass Advanced Systems Architecture. Marcus brought him coffee when he couldn't afford the meal plan charges.

They were friends.

"Marcus?" Swan says carefully. "It's me. Swan."

Marcus's eyes slide past him. Through him. Like Swan is a transparent overlay that vision passes through without registering.

"Hello?" Marcus calls out to the empty corridor. "Is someone there? I heard—"

He stops. Frowns. Touches his temple like he's trying to remember something important that keeps slipping away.

"Weird," Marcus mutters. "Could've sworn I heard..." He trails off, already turning back the way he came. "I need more sleep. Hearing things."

"Marcus, wait. Please. You helped me. I helped you. We studied together. You remember, you have to remember—"

But Marcus is walking away, his footsteps fading into the complex's ambient noise. And Swan realizes with horrible certainty that Marcus came down here specifically to thank him. Some fragment of memory, some ghost of gratitude, pulled him to this location at this hour because his subconscious remembered Swan needed help.

But when he arrived, there was nothing to thank. No one to see. Just an empty corridor and a voice that might have been imagination.

Swan slides down the wall until he's sitting on cold concrete. His hands are shaking. Not from fear or exhaustion anymore, but from something deeper. Existential tremor. The physical manifestation of watching yourself be edited out of reality one person at a time.

He looks at his hands in the flickering light. They seem solid enough. Flesh and bone and fingerprints. But when he holds them up to the security monitor's view, they stutter in and out of existence like a corrupted video file.

His phone buzzes. A message from Elara: Where are you?

Maintenance level. East wing. Subsection C.

Stay there. I'm coming.

You should be sleeping.

Can't sleep. Too many contradictions. Brain won't compile. Might as well be useful.

Swan waits. The minutes stretch. The fluorescent lights flicker their arrhythmic pattern. Somewhere in the pipes, water flows with the sound of whispered conversations. The building settles, groans, exists.

Elara appears fifteen minutes later, and Swan's heart clenches at the sight of her.

She looks like she's aged a decade in the past week. Her skin is pale, almost translucent under the harsh lighting. Dark circles beneath her eyes suggest sleep is a theoretical concept she's vaguely aware of but no longer practices. Her nose has been bleeding again—dried blood crusted at her nostrils, staining the collar of her shirt. She's wearing more bracelets than ever, both arms completely covered from wrist to elbow in silver reminders of truths she refuses to forget.

But her eyes, when they find him, are clear. Focused. Seeing him when the rest of the world can't.

"There you are," she says, and the relief in her voice nearly breaks him. "You flickered out of my awareness twice on the way here. Had to check my notebook to remember where I was going."

She sits beside him, close enough that their shoulders touch. The contact is an anchor, grounding them both in shared existence. From her bag she produces her blood-stained notebook, her portable audio recorder, and a thermos that smells like coffee and optimism.

"Drink," she orders, pressing the thermos into his hands. "You need calories. Your physical form is getting harder to maintain. I can see—" She stops, choosing her words carefully. "—you're becoming translucent around the edges. Like you're fading into the substrate layer."

Swan drinks. The coffee is sweet, heavily doctored with sugar and cream. Physical sustenance for a body that's increasingly theoretical.

"Marcus Chen was here," he says quietly. "My friend from sophomore year. He came looking for something, but when he saw me, there was nothing to see. Just empty space where I should have been."

Elara opens her notebook. Flips to a section bookmarked with a dried bloodstain. "Marcus Chen. Unranked student. You helped him pass Advanced Systems Architecture. He brought you coffee on Thursdays. You both hated Professor Zhao's teaching style but respected his knowledge. You—"

"Stop." Swan's voice cracks. "How do you know all that? I barely remember it myself."

"Because I documented it." Elara touches one of her bracelets—this one engraved with "MARCUS - COFFEE - THURSDAYS." "Before you forget entirely, I record everything. Every story you tell me. Every memory you share. Every detail that makes you you. And when your own memory fails, I give them back to you."

She flips through pages, and Swan sees his life written in her careful handwriting. Events he's forgotten. People whose names have dissolved. Moments that have been systematically erased from consensus reality but preserved in ink and paper and desperate love.

"Here," Elara says, pointing to an entry. "October 3rd, last year. You and Marcus pulled an all-nighter in the library. You were stressed about your scholarship review. He made you laugh by doing impressions of the adjudicator AI. You felt, and I quote, 'like maybe I wasn't alone in this.' End quote."

The memory surfaces as she reads. Hazy, uncertain, but there. Like finding a photograph in a drawer you'd forgotten existed.

"I don't know how much longer I can hold onto these," Swan admits. "The erasure is accelerating. I looked at my reflection today and saw static. I'm not just being deleted from records anymore. I'm being deleted from physics."

"Then we anchor you deeper." Elara pulls out her audio recorder. "Talk to me. Tell me something you're afraid to forget. Something the system can't touch because it's too small, too personal, too yours."

Swan thinks. His mind feels like a hard drive that's been fragmented, important files scattered across corrupted sectors.

"I used to have a scar," he says slowly. "On my left knee. From when I was eight years old, trying to skateboard, fell and needed six stitches. My mom was so worried, and my dad tried to make me laugh in the emergency room by—"

He stops. Looks down at his left knee. Through his jeans, he can see skin. Unmarked, unblemished. No scar.

"It's gone," he whispers. "The scar is gone. It was always there, I remember it being there, but now—"

"The system is rewriting your physical history." Elara's pen flies across the page, documenting in real-time. "Retroactive changes to your biological timeline. Jesus, Swan, you're not just being erased, you're being un-created. Edited out of causality itself."

She grabs his face with both hands, forces him to meet her eyes.

"Listen to me. This is important. You are real. You exist. I see you. I remember you. Whatever the system is doing, it can't take that away unless it erases me too. And I won't let it. Do you understand? I won't let it."

Her conviction is fierce, absolute. But Swan can see the cost written in every exhausted line of her face. The nosebleeds. The trembling hands. The flickering in her eyes that's worse today than yesterday, worse yesterday than the day before.

She's burning herself out to keep him anchored. Destroying herself to preserve his existence.

"You're dying," Swan says quietly.

"We're all dying." Elara's smile is fragile. "I'm just doing it more dramatically than most."

"Lilith said six months."

"Lilith says a lot of things." Elara releases his face, but her hand finds his. "Most of them are true. Technically. But the truth can be manipulated just like anything else. Maybe I have six months. Maybe I have six days. Maybe I have sixty years if I stop fighting the contradictions and let consensus reality win."

"Then stop fighting. Please. Save yourself."

"And let you fade?" Elara shakes her head. "Not an option. You don't get to erase yourself just to spare me pain. That's not how this works."

Swan wants to argue, wants to tell her she matters more than his impossible existence. But before he can speak, a new presence announces itself—the click of heels on concrete, deliberate and unmistakable.

And Swan knows that whatever fragile peace they've found in this forgotten corridor is about to shatter.