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- Herausgeber: Twist & Tether Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In a city ruled by memory control, Li Chen is a loyal technician in the Ministry’s Memory Integrity Unit—tasked with suppressing anomalies, correcting deviations, and ensuring that the past remains perfectly aligned with the regime’s narrative. His life is predictable, his mind synced, his history clean.
Until a ghost appears.
A flicker of forbidden footage—a girl in red, a forgotten square, and a voice screaming his name—fractures Li’s programmed certainty. As he follows digital breadcrumbs through corrupted archives and forbidden tunnels, a deeper truth begins to emerge: the past wasn’t erased. It was rewritten. And he may not be who he thinks he is.
But uncovering the truth comes at a cost. Surveillance tightens. Identities glitch. Citizens vanish. And the closer Li gets to the origin of the lie, the more dangerous remembering becomes. Because some ghosts don’t just haunt the system—they built it.
Can a man who helped erase the truth survive remembering it?
Or will he vanish again—this time, for good?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Ghosts of the Square
The Protest Was Silenced. But the AI Never Forgot.
VERIWARP: The Truth Wasn’t Lost. It Was Engineered.
Lena Grace Holloway
Copyright © 2025 by Lena Grace Holloway
All rights reserved. This book, including all individual stories and original content, is protected under international copyright law. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the author, except for brief excerpts used in reviews or academic commentary, which must be properly credited.
Fiction Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Cover Image Notice:
The cover artwork for this book was created using licensed generative AI tools under commercial-use terms. It is an original, symbolic composition created specifically for this title. Any characters depicted are fictional and do not represent real individuals.
AI Tools Acknowledgement:
The cover image and/or illustrations were created using generative AI technology under appropriate commercial-use licensing. All visual elements are original compositions intended solely for this publication.
Thank you for reading this special collection. I hope you enjoy every story inside.
Table of Contents
[Story Name]
Description
Chapter 1: A Meeting of Two Worlds
Chapter 2: A New Beginning
Chapter 3: Conflict
Chapter 4: Resolution
Chapter 5: Epilogue
Ghosts of the Square
Description
In a city ruled by memory control, Li Chen is a loyal technician in the Ministry’s Memory Integrity Unit—tasked with suppressing anomalies, correcting deviations, and ensuring that the past remains perfectly aligned with the regime’s narrative. His life is predictable, his mind synced, his history clean.
Until a ghost appears.
A flicker of forbidden footage—a girl in red, a forgotten square, and a voice screaming his name—fractures Li’s programmed certainty. As he follows digital breadcrumbs through corrupted archives and forbidden tunnels, a deeper truth begins to emerge: the past wasn’t erased. It was rewritten. And he may not be who he thinks he is.
But uncovering the truth comes at a cost. Surveillance tightens. Identities glitch. Citizens vanish. And the closer Li gets to the origin of the lie, the more dangerous remembering becomes. Because some ghosts don’t just haunt the system—they built it.
Can a man who helped erase the truth survive remembering it?
Or will he vanish again—this time, for good?
Prologue: Echoes in the Feed
Li Chen
The footage was corrupted.
Not just glitched—fractured. Broken at the seams like a mirror smashed in silence, its fragments looping in stuttering gasps.
Inside Archive Room Delta-9, the only light came from rows of humming server spires and the pale glow of the suspended feed, flickering in midair. An endless cube of data fragments rotated slowly between two unmanned terminals.
The clip played again.
Frame 1: A crowd. Gray signs bobbed above a mass of faces—blurry, angry, chanting words with no sound.
Frame 17: The drone’s auto-iris flickered. A splash of red in the monochrome haze—a girl waving.
Frame 38: The crowd’s movement slowed unnaturally, jittering like a scratched loop. The girl froze mid-gesture. Her mouth opened—mid-scream.
Frame 41: White flash.
Frame 44: Static.
A slow pan backward revealed the observer: a boy of thirteen, seated alone in the corner of the archive. His face glowed blue from the screen. His expression was still, unreadable—too still. The silence pressed inward, like the feed was whispering directly into his eyes.
Behind him, a door hissed open. Boots echoed across the floor.
“Wipe complete,” a man said from the threshold. His voice held no urgency. Just confirmation. “No loose ends.”
The boy didn’t blink.
He watched the white flash again.
***
Forty years later, Li Chen stood before the same data vault. His ID tag blinked green against the scanner, and the magnetic seal released with a click. The archive door slid open, exhaling cold, sterile air.
He paused in the threshold, his breath visible—a phantom mist in the refrigerated chamber. Something tugged behind his eyes—like déjà vu smothered under cotton.
He stepped inside.
His tablet buzzed. A flagged anomaly report scrolled across the screen:
> Archive Sector 33
> Retrieval ping: UNKNOWN MEDIA
> Timestamp: REDACTED
> Thread ID: Invalid
> Sync Status: ERROR
Li narrowed his eyes. Thousands of flagged fragments surfaced every week—dead bytes from corrupted feeds, malformed ID logs, packet echoes. But this one had come through five layers of encryption before pinging his terminal.
That was new.
He rotated the virtual feed, dragging his gloved finger through the air. The cube disassembled, revealing a single thumbnail. It pulsed—static-ridden and half-loaded.
Why is it still alive?
He tapped.
The clip opened.
Crowd.
Signs.
The girl in red.
White flash.
He jerked his hand back like it burned. The frame froze—on her eyes. Wide. Pleading. Her hand was raised not to wave, but to warn.
His breath hitched.
A voice broke the silence behind him.
“Still digging up ghosts, Li?”
He turned. Zhao, his unit partner, leaned against the doorframe with his usual half-smirk. A coffee bulb hovered lazily in his hand.
“Sector 33 threw up something old. Full of gaps,” Li muttered. “Timestamp’s redacted.”
Zhao shrugged. “Then it’s a ghost file. Just drop it.”
Li turned back to the footage. The timestamp had resolved—barely. A flicker in the upper-right corner: 0406.88.
That can’t be right.
“0406. That’s the old protest index,” Li said quietly. “The Square Event.”
Zhao’s smirk faded.
“There is no Square Event,” he said flatly. “System scrubbed that decades ago. You know this.”
Li didn’t reply. His fingers danced through the feed again.
But the frames were gone.
The cube collapsed into static.
***
He sat on the rooftop edge of Sector Eighteen’s Ministry tower later that night, watching the light grid below flicker in time with the scheduled pulse sync. Millions of homes blinked once—brief and synchronous—as data packets refreshed every citizen’s Memory Integrity Net.
Li tapped a command into his wrist tablet, requesting deeper access.
He was met with a recursive loop:
> Access denied. Logic barrier engaged.
> Would you like to request override clearance?
> \[Y/N]
He didn’t answer.
Just stared into the skyline.
From above, a ministry drone passed overhead. Its lens rotated, scanning.
Li didn’t look up.
What the hell was that clip?
And why did her face feel like an old wound?
He blinked. For half a second, in the shadows between buildings, he saw something move—a red dress fluttering.
But when he turned, there was nothing there.
Just static on the edge of vision.
Chapter 1: Routine Noise
The floor of the Memory Integrity Unit vibrated faintly beneath Li Chen’s boots. A low, omnipresent hum pulsed up through the building’s carbon composite ribs, syncing with the rhythmic breath of the city outside. Even forty stories up, he could feel it—like the heartbeat of something vast and buried.
He passed through the retinal scanner with a flicker of green. A second pulse check verified his implant’s sync rate. The security door shhht-ed open, releasing him into the corridor.
