Foudre

Open mouths, empty heads, big bytes.

I founded SKELM CORPS a few centuries and a few hundred hostile takeovers ago, with a forged seal and a good ledger. Now it sells my name on the rain outside my girlfriend's window, and I work for one of its subsidiaries as an analyst nobody can read.

Then I find the closet. Sixteen memory chips, labeled in Émilie's shopping-list handwriting. Seven months of my mind, harvested while I slept, routed upstairs to a buyer called PARENT and billed back to my own company as a license fee.

I haven't aged since I climbed out of a plague pit in 1347. Time can't touch me. It turns out a lab can.

Now I'm running with Ban, a scarred courier with an antique revolver who knew versions of me I've forgotten, and a crew of people my company threw away. To fight back I'll have to spend the only currency I have left: my memories, one at a time. Including the last thing I have of my mother.

Keep her face, or keep her voice. Pick one.