Chapter Two: In the Wake of Fire (Part 2)
1066 Words
The silence in the room was heavier than any noise. Ivy’s pulse throbbed in her ears, echoing louder than the words Anton had just said.
> “I think they rewrote it.”
Her fingers curled around the arm of the chair, grounding herself as if the reality around her might dissolve like smoke.
“What do you mean… rewrote it?” she asked slowly.
Anton tapped the screen again, pulling up a segment of a document recovered from the flash drive. A technical overview of something called the Neurobridge Protocol. It described experimental procedures designed to "implant, overwrite, and stabilize alternative cognitive narratives in trauma patients."
“Alternative cognitive narratives,” Ivy read aloud. “Is that just a fancy way of saying... lies?”
“Engineered memories,” Anton corrected. “They’re not just suppressing trauma. They’re replacing it with something else. Giving patients—subjects—a different story to live by. One that aligns with whatever objective the project’s architects want.”
“And what do they want with me?”
He looked at her. “You were supposed to be dead. That explosion—was the end of Phase Three. You weren’t just collateral, Ivy. You were part of it.”
She stood and paced the small room, her movements tight, clipped. “This doesn’t make sense. I remember everything. The blast. Danika’s call. My work before that—”
Anton clicked a few keys. “What about this memory?” He pulled up a video file. Surveillance footage. Ivy sitting in a lab, hooked up to sensors, her face blank. A date stamp showed it was from six weeks before the explosion.
She stared at the image.
“I’ve never seen that room in my life,” she said. But her voice shook.
“Except, Ivy... it’s you. You were there. According to this log, you checked in under the name Rhea Jensen, part of a long-term psychological trial funded by Vireon Medical.”
The air drained from her lungs.
Rhea Jensen. The name sounded fake. Clinical. But something about it… rang. Not as a memory. As a familiar echo.
“How long?” she asked. “How long was I… inside?”
Anton didn’t answer immediately. “The logs say fourteen days. But if what I’m reading is right, the memories they implanted might’ve covered weeks. Or months.”
Ivy turned toward the cracked mirror on the wall.
“Then who am I now?”
---
Two Days Later – Downtown Baltimore
Ivy wore a dark wig and mirrored sunglasses as she stepped into the modest apartment lobby. The address Anton gave her was real, and the building looked like it hadn’t seen a renovation since 1992. The elevator didn’t work, so she climbed the stairs to the fourth floor.
At the end of the hallway: #4C. Nameplate read H. Calloway.
She knocked.
No answer.
Knocked again.
This time, a voice. “Go away.”
Ivy didn’t. “I know what they did to me,” she said through the door. “I know about Rhea Jensen. And I know you were part of it.”
Silence.
Then, a chain rattled. The door opened a sliver. One bloodshot eye peered out.
“You got five seconds to tell me who sent you.”
“I sent myself,” she said. “I’m Ivy Marlowe.”
The eye widened. The door opened more.
“You’re supposed to be—”
“Yeah, I know. Dead.”
The man—tall, wiry, haunted—stepped back and let her in.
---
Harvey Calloway had been a neuroprogramming assistant for Vireon before he “retired” after a psychotic break. That’s what the records said.
The truth was messier.
“They started testing on trauma survivors,” he said, pouring stale coffee into chipped mugs. “People who’d already lost everything. Easy targets. No one asked questions when they went missing.”
Ivy wrapped her hands around the cup, grateful for the heat. “And you? What did you do?”
“I was the engineer. I designed the digital sequences that triggered emotional detachment while the memory layers were rewritten. I built the lies.”
He sat across from her, rubbing his temples.
“I remember your file. You weren’t part of the original list. But they flagged you—called you a ‘sleeper subject.’”
“A what?”
“Someone with existing trauma deep enough to anchor the memory implants. They said your grief made you ideal. Something about your son.”
Her breath hitched.
Elias.
She hadn’t spoken his name aloud in weeks. Couldn’t risk it.
“They said you’d lost custody. That you were volatile.”
Ivy stood. “I’m not unstable.”
“I believe you,” he said. “But they didn’t care. They were building a way to rewrite guilt. Remove grief. Change the very core of what makes us human. You were just another iteration.”
Ivy's hands trembled at her sides.
“What about Danika?” she asked. “She was involved, wasn’t she?”
“She tried to shut it down. She found out about Icarus.”
“What is Icarus?” Ivy demanded. “I keep seeing it in the logs.”
Harvey leaned forward, his face pale. “It’s the final phase. The memory overwrite wasn’t the end. Icarus was meant to implant false pasts. Full ones. Not just edits—but entire lives. Custom-made identities. Ideal personalities.”
“For soldiers? Spies?”
He shook his head.
“For anyone. CEOs. Politicians. Whistleblowers. Take someone out, replace them with a lookalike, implant a whole different identity—and no one questions a thing. It’s psychological warfare at the genetic level.”
Ivy sat down hard.
“That’s not a science project,” she said. “That’s—”
“Control,” Harvey said. “Pure and simple.”
---
That night, Ivy sat by the window in Anton’s safehouse again, staring at the streets below.
The snow had started falling—soft, innocent flakes that didn’t know the world was burning beneath them.
She thought of Danika’s laugh.
She thought of Elias’ tiny hand in hers, years ago, before the world unraveled.
She thought of her own memories—fractured, rearranged, stolen.
Someone had built a cage inside her mind.
She was going to burn it down.
- Writer
