The first thing he noticed was the silence.

   Not the absence of sound, but the kind of silence that hums—like a vacuum sealed around your skull. Then came the smell: antiseptic, plastic, and something faintly metallic. He opened his eyes.

   White ceiling. Fluorescent lights. A slow drip from an IV bag.

   He tried to sit up. His body didn’t respond.

   “Easy,” said a voice. A woman leaned over him, her face haloed by the overhead light. Her badge read: NURSE A. KOVACS.

   “You’ve been in a coma,” she said. “For nine years.”

   His throat rasped, “Name?”

   “Yours?” she asked. “You’re listed as Ben Venice. But that’s... complicated.”

   He blinked, “Why?”

   She hesitated, “Because Ben Venice died in 2030. You woke up in 2039.”

   He stared at her, “Then who the hell am I?”

   She didn’t answer.

   They ran that night.

   Kovacs wheeled him out under the cover of a fire alarm. The hospital was a shell—half-automated, half-abandoned.

   Outside, the city was a ruin of neon scaffolds and flickering ad-drones. He could feel it all—like a pressure behind his eyes. Thoughts. Emotions. Static.

   “Why are you helping me?” he asked, as they ducked into a mag-tram tunnel.

   “Because I saw your brain scans,” she said. “You’re not just awake. You’re... broadcasting.”

   He touched his temple. “I can hear people.”

   “Not just hear,” she said. “You’re leaking into them. You’re rewriting.”

   They hid in a derelict data-center beneath the old city. Kovacs patched his spine with a neural brace and fed him protein paste. He devoured it like a starving animal.

   “Tell me everything,” he said.

   She pulled up a cracked tablet. “You were part of Project Mnemosyne. A DARPA offshoot. Psychic cognition, memory manipulation, predictive modeling. You were their prototype.”

   He frowned. “I don’t remember any of that.”

   “Exactly,” she said. “They erased you. But something went wrong. You didn’t just forget—you fragmented. You started remembering things that hadn’t happened yet.”

   “Precognition?”

   “More like... retrocausality. You remember tomorrow. And it’s killing the present.”

   The dreams started on the third night.

   He saw cities burning. Oceans boiling. A tower of glass and bone rising from the ruins. And always, at the center, a machine—pulsing, humming, alive.

   He woke screaming. Kovacs held him down.

   “It’s the Echo Engine,” she said. “They built it from your mind. It runs on psychic feedback loops. It predicts global behavior and nudges it. Subtly. Constantly.”

   He stared at her, “It’s rewriting reality.”

   She nodded, “And it’s going critical.”

   They traveled east, through the dead zones—places where the Engine’s influence had collapsed. People there were feral, unmoored from time. Some spoke in reverse. Others aged backward. One man claimed to be Ben Venice.

   “You’re me,” the Ben said, grinning with rotted teeth. “Or I’m you. Depends on the loop.”

   Kovacs shot him in the leg and they kept moving.

   In a bunker beneath the ruins of Denver, they found the last resistance node: a blind woman named Dr. Imani Rhee. She’d been part of the original Mnemosyne team.

   “You’re the failsafe,” she told him. “Your mind was the seed. Only you can unmake the Engine.”

   “How?”

   “By remembering the original timeline. Before the edits. Before the loops.”

   He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything.”

   “You don’t have to,” she said. “You just have to believe it was real.”

   They reached the Engine on the 21st day.

   It stood in the crater of what had once been Cheyenne Mountain. A tower of obsidian and chrome, humming with thought. Drones circled it like flies. The air shimmered.

   Ben stepped forward. The hum in his skull became a shriek.

   He saw every version of himself—soldier, scientist, killer, god. He saw Kovacs dying in a thousand ways. He saw the world ending in fire, in ice, in silence.

   He grabbed his head and screamed.

   Kovacs grabbed his hand. 

   “You’re not alone,” she said. “Anchor to me.”

   He closed his eyes and remembered.

   He remembered the first loop. The first lie. The first time he agreed to forget. He remembered the world before the Engine—messy, chaotic, real.

   He remembered love. He opened his eyes. The Engine pulsed and then it shattered.

   They woke in a field.

   No tower. No drones. Just wind and grass and sky. 

   Kovacs sat up beside him, “Did it work?”

   He looked around, “I think... we’re back.”

   She smiled, “Then let’s try again. From the beginning.”

   He took her hand.

   And for the first time in nine years, the silence was gone.