THE RECLAMATION PROTOCOL

In Neo-Veridian, your darkest memories don't just disappear. They get sold. Elias Thorne is a Level 3 Memory Reclamation Specialist. His job is simple: extract traumatic memories from paying clients, scrub the data, and recycle the emotional bandwidth for the Lethe Corporation. It is a quiet, bleak existence—until a restricted Black-Tier government drive accidentally lands on his desk. When a corrupted firewall forces a manual override, Elias plunges into the neural data and witnesses the unredacted memory of a brutal political assassination. The shooter isn't a street-level enforcer; it is Chancellor Sterling, the most powerful man in the city. The system instantly flags the breach. With a corporate cleanup team dispatched to his lab and his biometric trail locked down, Elias has exactly four minutes to disappear. Forced off the grid into the smog-choked lower sectors, Elias must forge an alliance with a black-market data broker to survive. Hunted by heavily armed operatives and racing against a ticking clock, he has one night to hijack the city's network and broadcast the unedited truth to millions. But in a world where history can be rewritten with a single keystroke, how do you prove a crime that the system has already erased?