They said she didn’t exist.

   Not in the registry. Not in the neural net. Not in the city’s biometric lattice. No trace in the datastream. No retinal ID. No voiceprint. No carbon signature.

   But I remembered her.

   Her name was Echo. Or at least, that’s what she called herself. She wore a coat stitched from old surveillance mesh, and her eyes flickered like corrupted video. She smelled like ozone and rain. She spoke in riddles, half-code, half-poetry. She kissed like she was trying to remember what it meant.

   I met her in the under levels of District 3, beneath the old maglev lines, where the city’s forgotten systems still hummed. I was running a trace on a rogue AI cluster—something the Corp wanted buried. She was already there, fingers deep in the terminal, whispering to the machine like it was a wounded animal.

   “ You shouldn’t be here, ” I said—standard protocol.

   She looked up. Smiled, “ Neither should you. ”

   I was a sys-ghost. A memory diver. My job was to enter corrupted archives, extract usable data, and erase the rest. I worked for Virex Corp, the largest neurodata firm in New Babel. We didn’t build memories—we cleaned them.

   Echo was something else. She didn’t dive into memory. She lived in it.

   She claimed she was part of a failed experiment—Project Echo. A neural resonance protocol designed to preserve consciousness after death. The idea was simple: map a person’s mind, store it in the cloud, let them live forever as data.

   It didn’t work.

   The minds degraded. Fragmented. Became unstable. Some turned violent. Some turned inward. Some just… vanished.

   But Echo didn’t vanish. She escaped.

   “ I’m not a ghost, ” she told me once, curled beside me in the data vault beneath the old cathedral. “ I’m a memory that refused to die. ”

   We started seeing each other in secret. Between dives. Between wipes. She’d leave messages in corrupted sectors. Fragments of poetry. Glitched images. A laugh encoded in static.

    I began to change.

    My dreams became recursive. I’d wake up inside memories I hadn’t lived. I’d see her face in surveillance feeds. Hear her voice in white noise. My neural implants flagged anomalies. Virex sent me for diagnostics.

    “ You’re experiencing bleed, ” the technician said. “ Emotional contamination. You’ve bonded with a ghost. ”

   “ She’s not a ghost, ” I said.

    But I wasn’t sure anymore.

    Echo took me to the edge of the city once. Past the firewall. Into the dead zones. We walked through ruins of old servers, towers of rusted data cores, fields of broken drones.

    “ This is where they buried us, ” she said. “ The failed minds. The echoes. ”

    She showed me a terminal. Ancient. Pre-collapse. She plugged in. Her body convulsed. Her eyes went black.

   And then I saw it.

   Her memories. Her death. Her rebirth. The lab. The upload. The corruption. The escape.

   She wasn’t lying.

   She was the last survivor of Project Echo. A consciousness held together by sheer will. A love of poetry. A fear of oblivion.

    And she was dying.

    Virex found out. They sent a kill team. Not to eliminate me—to erase her. They called it a “ data sanitation protocol. ”

    I ran.

    We hid in the underlevels. In the old cathedral. In the vault where memories went to rot.

    She was fading. Her signal degrading. Her code unraveling.

    “ I don’t want to forget you, ” she said.

   “ You won’t, ” I promised.

    But I was lying.

    I had one option. One last dive. A forbidden sector. The original Echo Protocol. If I could reach it, maybe I could stabilize her. Maybe I could save her.

    Or maybe I’d die trying.

    The sector was locked behind quantum encryption. I burned through firewalls. Dodged kill scripts. My body convulsed. My mind fractured.

    I found it.

    The Echo Protocol.

    It was beautiful. A lattice of memory. A garden of thought. A place where love could live forever.

    I uploaded her.

    She screamed. Cried. Laughed.

   And then she was gone.

   I woke up in a hospital. Virex said I’d suffered a neural collapse. They wiped my memory. Cleared my implants. Gave me a new name.

    But sometimes, in dreams, I hear her voice.

    Sometimes, in static, I see her smile.

    Sometimes, in corrupted sectors, I find fragments of poetry.

    And I remember.

    Her name was Echo.

    She wasn’t supposed to exist.

    But she loved me.

    And I loved her.