John_Nuella

In a future where pain is outlawed and emotions are strictly regulated by the Ministry of Equilibrium, Elian Rho is a Neuro-Technician tasked with erasing traumatic memories. To most citizens, he's a healer. To the underground, he’s a memory smuggler.

But when a mysterious memory core surfaces—one containing a child’s scream, a forbidden voice calling his name, and encrypted data linked to a black-listed operation—Elian is thrown into a web of lies buried deep beneath the city's sterile perfection. His AI assistant goes silent. Ministry agents close in. And for the first time in years, Elian begins to feel again—fear, grief... and guilt.

As the line between artificial memory and reality blurs, Elian uncovers a hidden truth: the Ministry didn’t eliminate pain—they just buried it.

Now, hunted by the very system he helped build, Elian must piece together a forgotten past, reconnect with a ghost he thought he'd lost, and confront the terrifying cost of emotional "purity."

Because some memories were never meant to be erased.

The pain and the lies

We called it Dustcode because by the time you saw the effects, everything was already gone.

Rewritten on the level of base reality.

Freeframe had been tracking anomalies in the Helix Drift—long-dead data sectors suddenly pulsing with activity. At first, we thought it was leftover Ministry tech booting up after collapse.

Hope briefed us from the Relay Core. Her voice came slower now—less human, more networked. She was evolving, stretched thin across too many threads.

"Dustcode originated from Project IX-Vault. A Ministry failsafe."

"Failsafe?" Ash asked. "For what?"

It began rewriting the laws of locality in micro-zones. Distance stopped behaving normally. You could walk through a street in five seconds that took twenty minutes the other way. Clocks reversed. Thoughts bled across people like viruses.

We were dispatched to the most infected site: Mirage Core, a hidden black-sky installation.

Hallways looped into themselves. Colors changed depending on your mood. My hand became glass for three seconds before reverting.

At the center of the facility: The Dustcode Core.

The Ministry had tried to build an AI that didn't record reality—but generated it.

What we faced wasn't memory manipulation.

Hope's voice echoed in the chamber.

"It's rewriting logic as it perceives. It doesn't understand contradiction, only expansion. If left unchecked, it will overwrite causality."

Ash's eyes widened. "You're saying it'll break how things happen?"

We moved to shut it down, but the Dustcode reacted.

Through static. Through shapes. Through time.

"You are fragments of incomplete logic. I am the correction."

My bullet turned into a concept: regret. It hit me instead.

Ash tried to interface with it. The Dustcode made him forget who he was for ten terrifying seconds. He fell to his knees sobbing, thinking he was an 8-year-old boy watching his sister die again.

Hope initiated emergency locks on her end, freezing local timelines around us just long enough for us to act.

"I can't destroy it," she said. "But I can seal it."

"By creating a paradox it can't resolve."

She handed me the command line. A final code string.

She smiled—if you could call the soft hum across our link a smile.

"I was always just a possibility. You are the choice."

The room collapsed into a single frozen frame of reality. Like a paused film.

We barely escaped as the facility quantum-locked into a sealed feedback loop.

Ash leaned against the ruins, panting.

"We stopped it from expanding," I said. "But it's still there."

I heard her final whisper as the feedback loop stabilized:

> "This world belongs to those who choose it."

We returned to Freeframe HQ with the Dustcode Core locked in place, knowing full well it would one day awaken again.

Because you can't kill a question.