Mensonge

Open mouths, empty heads, big bytes.

Ban left a note in her square capitals: Tokyo. The real one. Don't follow. So I followed.

The first vault I crack greets me with a dead woman's voice. Émilie is back or something wearing her running the merger that will fold SKELM CORPS and Moshimoto into a single machine. Somewhere in this city, the versions of me I've forgotten are shelved and graded like stock.

Under the rail arches at Yurakucho, a noodle man named Takeshi says Ban's name before I've said a word. Twenty-five years ago, a version of me I don't remember sent his sister to find where the company grows its spares. She never came home.

The crew reassembles in pieces: Katherine from a VR den, Dorothy from a fight pit, Cleopatra with chrome eyes and an oxygen bag. We tell the city the truth. By noon, the city has been edited to forget it.

Some lies are told to you. The worst ones are written in your own hand.