The Vault's breath was cold. Metallic. It smelled of dust that had not been disturbed in years, as if the air itself were forbidden. Elara's shoes clicked too loudly against the steel floor as she stepped past the threshold, and she winced at every sound. Behind her, the great door sealed with a hydraulic shudder, cutting off the sterile corridors of the Accord.
For the first time in her life, she was outside its pulse.
The corridor ahead stretched into shadow, lined with forgotten terminals and old security panels coated in grime. This place didn't belong to the polished perfection above. It was older, rawer, untouched by endless calibration.
Her wrist implant throbbed faintly. The forged identity chip was holding, but the deeper she went, the riskier it became. The Vault was designed to catch anomalies. She was an anomaly.
She moved slowly, her breaths shallow, her heartbeat a frantic metronome. Each step forward felt like a betrayal of every law she had upheld, every paper she had signed, every lecture she had given.
And through it all—like a whisper against her skin—his name stirred.
Cade.
The Accord had erased it. Three years ago, his file had been flagged with the crimson seal of unrecoverable collapse. His records deleted, his existence dissolved. Officially, he had never lived.
But Elara remembered. Or rather, pieces of her remembered—fragments sharp enough to cut.
The sound of his laughter, not the Accord's polite, curated chuckle but something rough, uneven, real.
The warmth of his hand brushing hers as children, before the serum stripped such accidents of meaning.
The night he leaned close, whisper hot against her ear, and breathed the word that had consumed her since.
Skip.
His name should have been gone too, scrubbed from her mind like the Accord promised. And yet, here it was, echoing inside her chest with every step.
The Vault corridor widened into a chamber. A row of old biometric scanners stood dormant along the walls, their lenses cracked, lights long dead.
At the center of the room, a console still hummed faintly, screen flickering with unstable light. It was ancient, pre-standardization, its edges worn, its casing dented.
Elara approached slowly. The screen glowed with fractured text:
VAULT SECTOR 17 – ARCHIVE NODE
Access Restricted
Her hands trembled as she brushed dust from the surface. The terminal pulsed once, then steadied, waiting.
She pulled the forged clearance card from her pocket. Her throat was so dry she could barely swallow as she slid it into the reader.
For a moment, nothing.
Then—
The screen bled to life.
Welcome, Citizen No. 482-91.
Authorization accepted.
Relief nearly buckled her knees. The forgery was holding.
The interface flickered again, offering menu paths:
— Neural Records
— Personality Dissolution Reports
— Erasure Logs
Her breath caught.
Erasure Logs.
Her hand hovered over the selection. She knew what it meant. This was where the Accord buried its dead—not bodies, but minds. People who had been scrubbed, overwritten, dissolved until nothing remained but compliance in their place.
YOU ARE READING
PROTOCOL 7A
Science FictionThe world didn't end with fire. It ended with forgetting. In 2132, pain was outlawed. Memories of grief, trauma, and fear were erased at birth, stored inside the Vault, and replaced with manufactured calm. Humanity became safe. Stable. Empty. But Dr...
