Speaker 1: I've always believed the work we do at Neurovia matters,
not in the vague corporate mission statement kind of way.
I mean it actually matters. We change people in ways
no pill or guided meditation app ever could. Neurovia is
a company that doesn't advertise we don't need to. The
right people always find us veterans, trauma survivors, end of
life cases, people whose brains have been broken in ways
traditional therapy can't reach. What we offer isn't healing exactly,
It's something deeper, significantly more precise. In Layman's terms, we
build synthetic reconstructions of memory, not just playbacks, full immersions
built from neural data eg. Pattern exploitations and psychographic overlays
its memory, yes, but experience the gain. Lucid tactile interactive
patients are guided into pivotal scenes from their own lives
and allowed to observe, process, and sometimes rewrite what's been
weighing them down. Usually these sessions are managed by an
AI therapist that reacts in real time a kind of
memory native emotional companion, and for most patients that's more
than enough. But for the outliers, the ones whose minds
don't play along, or whose traumas resist logic. That's where
I come in. They call us transitional memory escorts. The
name sounds gentler than the job. Actually, we go into
the memory immersion with the client like a neural co pilot.
There's a whole protocol for it. Matched brain waves, synchronized breathing,
psychological report testing, and a biometric tether that keeps us
linked but separate. I'm not there to fix them, I'm
there to keep them from sinking. It's like diving into
someone's personal movie, guiding them to the credits. I've done
thirty one immersions over the last four years. I've held
the hands of women watching themselves lose their children. I've
stood beside soldiers forced to relift firefights in infinite loops.
One man asked me to shoot him, just to see
if it felt real. I didn't. Of course, that would
have triggered a lockdown, but I thought about it. You'd
be surprised how easily empathy can morph into suggestion if
you're not careful. The trick is staying present without becoming
a participant, emotionally available but not vulnerable, curious but not
too deep. If you get pulled in too far, if
you start to believe in the world the system builds,
you can lose track of which life is yours. Luckily
that's never been a problem for me. The immersion sessions
don't last long, a few hours max. The neural link
is strictly regulated. Twenty minutes of leading, two hours of
guided immersion, twenty minutes of cool down into tight cycle clean.
You enter together, you leave together. At least that's how
it's supposed to work. His name was Marcus Rell, fifty two,
history of substance dependency, confirmed incarceration, suspected but never charged,
involvement in multiple violent offenses, including arson and homicide. His
intake file was redacted in all the wrong places. We're
not usually given the full story, and I've learned not
to ask for it, But with Marcus, there were too
many blanks to ignore. The referral came from a private source,
name withheld. His eligibility clearance came stamped from above my
pay grade, with a kind of formatting we usually only
see on government authorized cases. But my supervisor, Devanny, looked
and bothered when she handed me the assignment. Try not
to read too far into his past, she told me,
just keep him on track and guide him out, don't linger.
I made a joke about not packing a lunch. She
didn't laugh. The first time I met Marcus in person,
I already didn't like him. He smiled when I walked in,
like he'd been waiting a long time for me, specifically,
and now that I was finally here, the show could start,
mister Rell, I said, offering my hand. He didn't take it,
just nodded and said, escort right, correct, I'll be your
tether during the immersion. We'll I know how it works.
He cut me off with the same calm tone. I
read the packet, watched the videos, took the psychevel. You're
the one who watches right, stays beside me. That's right.
I don't intervene unless necessary. I'm here to make sure
you come back in one piece. Marcus stared at me
for a long time. His smile stayed, but his eyes
were still unblinking, as if he were counting something in
my face. You've got a good life, he said, finally, stable, real, peaceful.
What are you? I said, before being cut off by
the intercom, letting us know that we were good to
proceed on. We ran the final calibration, our vitals aligned cleanly,
no sink drift, no cognitive latency. The nauwer bridge was greenlit.
He lay back in the chair like it was a
vacation lounger. I slid into mine, tightening the cuffs and
lowering the interfaced dome. The chamber dimmed, and low frequency
hum signaled the initialization of the memory environment. I felt
the shift in my chest first, like my heartbeat had
been turned into a metronome. Marcus's narrow rhythm pulsed through
the tether, close enough to mimic, but just far enough
to remain distinct. Then we dropped in. The memory environment
always starts in fragments, like walking through fog that thickens
into shape. This one came together slowly, as if reluctant
to be seen. We stood on a cracked sidewalk in
some half forgotten neighborhood. The street was unfamiliar, but the
lamp post beside me was the one from outside my
childhood home. The sky looked like a water color version
of late October, and the air smelled faintly of hot
metal and gasoline. Memory bleed. It's common, a little of me,
a lot of him, But the deep we moved the stranger,
the hybrid became. The storefronts were labeled with real names
from my life. A corner shop owned by a friend's father,
a dentist I hadn't seen since I was thirteen, but
inside the windows were flickering images of someone else's nightmares,
dark hallways, rotting food, the shape of a body twitching
beneath a blanket. I turned a corner and saw Marcus
ahead of me, watching a house or a building burn.
He didn't react, he just stood there, and then a
surge of memories hit my brain. A woman and screaming,
then yanked backward into black water, her face contorted with rage,
not fear. A small child, eyes swollen shut, fists clenched,
locked in a closet, scratching the door until the wood bled.
A pair of hands Marcus's, I presumed, pressing down on
someone's throat. The skin under his fingers changed color as
the pressure held, and later needles in a basement, dirt floor,
light bulbs swinging overhead. I tried to initiate grounding protocol.
Pulushed toward the teather's orientation point, a mental beacon I
could summon to shift the environment. It didn't work. Marcus
turned and looked at me through the firelight. Why would
we leave, he asked, smooth and distant, This is still
the beginning. I didn't answer, but somewhere in the back
of my mind I started counting the minutes, two hours max.
I just had to keep him until the end, until
the credits rolled. Once the initial memory clusters stabilized, I
initialized the first phase of the tetherback sequence, a gradual
withdrawal designed to ease the subject toward detachment. You start
by suddenly pulling the environment, shifting colors toward neutral tones,
muting ambient sound, encouraging spatial collapse around shared orientation points.
The world inside doesn't vanish, it just starts to let go.
But Marcus didn't move. O've this meant that something on
the outside was not functioning correctly. He continued, watching the
memory a version of his old apartment. I think melt
and drift like ash in the wind. I didn't want
to do this, he said. I didn't quite know how
to interpret those words. So I did or I knew how, Marcus,
I said, carefully, keeping my voice calm. We're reaching the
end of the window. You've done great work here, but
if we stay too long, you get stuck. He finished
the sentence for me. Yeah, I know you. People are
always worried about time. Like it's reel in here, it
is neural stability to grades pass a certain point. If
we don't exit within that, I'm not leaving. He looked
at me, fully present. You think this idea was mine,
don't you, he muttered. I didn't respond. There was no
script for this kind of refusal. We were trained for resistance, confusion,
even aggression, but this, this was something else. I tried
to summon the hard tether manual override, a beacon pulse
meant to force a disconnection in emergency cases. It activated,
I felt the jolt through the shared neural thread, but
we didn't move. That's when I was certain that someone
was interfering from the outside. The world flickered once, like
a film reel, catching, then resumed exactly where it left off.
Scenes kept and mixing with each other, my memories, Marcus's memories.
I'd started to loose grip on which scenes were mine.
I stood in a grimy kitchen I'd never seen before,
but the counter had the same chip as the one
in my first apartment. I looked out the window and
saw a tree, gnarled, diseased, unfamiliar, but I remembered climbing it.
I blinked and I was in a back alley. My
hand was wet heavy. I looked down and saw blood
on my fingers and a tire iron in my grip.
I smelled copper sweat rage. Someone behind me was moaning,
their voice rasping like they were trying to speak through
broken teeth. But I'd never been there, and yet remembered it.
Not like watching someone else's memory, not like walking through
Marcus's past. It was mine, my breath, my heart beat,
the rage behind my eyes. I remembered the surge, the
moment of impact, the metallic vibration through my arm. Later,
I found myself in a motel bathroom. The mirror cracked,
a lighter in one hand and a rubber torniquet in
the other. My reflection looked sunken, yellowed, ruined. Every part
of my body throbbed with a dull ache. The taste
hit me before I realized what I was doing. My
eyes rolled to the back of my head and I
hit the floor hard. You see, time doesn't pass in
a straight lining. During immersion, it folds doubles back. You
can live through the same moment a hundred times and
still be surprised when something changes. And something did change.
When I woke up, I was no longer in memories
of his. Instead, I watched him in mine. I stood
on a beach. I knew my beach from my honeymoon,
and Marcus was sitting beside my wife, holding a hand, laughing.
I was in my childhood kitchen and he was washing
dishes while my mother hummed near by. I walked into
my own apartment and saw him sitting at my table,
reading the newspaper with my name on the by line.
I tried to speak to confront him, but he looked
up at me, calm as ever, and said, you're not
my guide. You know that. He folded the paper, stood slowly,
and walked toward me. You're my exit. He took another
step toward me, his face serene. I backed away instinctively,
but the memory space didn't budge. No matter how far
I moved, he was always the same distance from me.
Like something had decided it liked his gravity more than mine. Marcus,
I said, voice slow, that's not how this works. You're right,
he said, tilting his head. It's not not officially. I've
been in prisoned for many decades. Boy, I can't get
a job with this record, let alone fix my life
at my age, he spat. So imagine my surprise when
a government official reaches out to me, offering a way
to not only fix my life over night, but potentially
make it better. I tried to reach for the tether again. Nothing.
It was like trying to tug on a string buried
in concrete. You don't get to take someone's life just
because someone else said you should. He laughed, softly, like
I was a child saying something naive. Oh but I
didn't choose you, he said, You think I would care
to pick any one out of a crowd. He glanced
at the newspaper in his hand, then tossed it aside.
You ever wonder why you couldn't see my referral, why
your clearance flagged? But no one said a word. I
didn't answer, But don't worry. You aren't the only one
in the dark. Most of your colleagues are clueless as well.
They didn't tell me anything either, just that I was approved,
that i'd be illegible for neural transition, a new beginning,
they called it. His eyes locked onto mine. They didn't
offer therapy or prison or peace. They offered this a
simple infiltration and practice. You're saying they used you, I said, slowly,
used us. He nodded. Once I was dying, he said,
not sick, just empty, used up years of noise in
my head. They said I could be fixed, but I
had to be a useful guinea pig. Useful how they
wanted to know if it could work, if someone could
be moved, relocated, extracted from the self. They built detect
to guide people back, But what if some one could
step forward instead? I stared at him, cold rising in
my spine, and you agreed? He shrugged Like I said,
no other options. They gave me a path and a person.
All I had to do was go through with it.
He took another step. I didn't move this time. I
didn't know who you were, But like I said, you're
stable and your mind was quiet enough to let me
in without fighting. My voice came out flat. You're making
a mistake. His smile widened, Then he leaned forward, voice
dropping to a whisper. No I ran, or tried to
running inside a memory immersion is like pushing through a
dense wall of smoke. The world doesn't resist you, It
just changes the rules as you move. Streets warped, hallways
folded back into themselves. Every time I turned a corner,
I was somewhere I'd already been, the burning house, the
alley with a tire iron, the motil bathroom. Marcus wasn't
chasing me. He didn't need to. I reached for the
emergency over ride again, the internal fail safe they build
into every escort's tether. Mentally, it feels like grabbing the
base of your own spine and pulling upward, a full
body signal that says, get me out. Nothing happened, though
desperation was pushing me to try again and again. I
tried harder. I screamed for extraction, screamed for the external
tcene to sever the link for the sound that came
out of my mouth was wrong, not in pitch, in
owners ship. It was his voice. I heard Marcus's laugh
curl out of my throat and echo back at me.
I turned and there he was, standing exactly as I
was standing, breathing in sync with me. We stared at
each other across a memory scape that couldn't decide what
it was any more. One second it was my childhood bedroom,
walls covered in peeling posters, then the motel again. He
stepped forward. I stepped back. He moved again. I mirrored,
and then without warning, he lunged. We collided like two
magnets in a vacuum. No resistance, just impact, a full
body falling inward. I hid the ground hard, but I
didn't feel pain, just disorientation, like I was spinning through
every version of myself I'd ever been. We fought with memory.
He pulled scenes into the space like weapons. My first
kiss now with his face, my graduation, him shaking my
father's hand, my wedding, and he was standing at the
altar in my place, smiling at my wife like he'd
known her forever. I tried to push back, flooding the
space with his memories. For a moment, he staggered, but
I saw the relief in his eyes. He wanted me
to bring it all back, because the more I let
his life passed through me, the deeper he sank into mine.
My body shifted mid struggle, My hands became his, his
shoulders turned into mine. We rolled, twisted, blurred the space
cracked like glass around us, shards of memory slicing through me.
I screamed again for extraction, but the noise that came
out was a rasp like air pulled through wet cloth, meaningless.
And then just as I felt something rip behind my eyes,
the light changed. The world tilted and the chamber door opened.
Blurred figures rushed towards US, suits, masks, gloves. I heard
muffled voices, felt hands grabbing my shoulders, lifting me. Cold
metal against skin. Detachment in this shitated. The neural teather
groaned and split like tearing velcrow, and then I was awake.
Back in the real world. The transfer room harsh white
lights and humming equipment and recycled air, but something was off.
Everything was too heavy, my chest ached, my legs felt
longer looser. I tried to move my fingers and fell
to delay, like the signal had to travel further to
get there. I looked down, not at my hands, knuckles, scarred, nails,
bit into the quick. I tried to speak, just one word.
It came out gravelly, damaged. My throat clenched, and I
heard the technician beside me, clipboard in hand, smiling faintly,
say welcome back, mister Rell, the technician said, almost mockingly.
Client emerge clean escort's stable. She said, Hi, integrity sink
best numbers we've seen in a month. I tried to speak.
I don't remember what I said first, probably stop or
help or wait. None of it came outright. My voice
wasn't just unfamiliar, it was wrong. They carried someone else's posture.
I heard Marcus Rell in every syllable. I tried to
sit up, but my movements felt borrowed, unnatural. My center
of gravity had shifted, like I'd learned to walk in
someone else's shoes, and now the laces were tangled around
my ankles. I'm not, I started, and my voice cracked.
I looked down at my hands again, hoping I'd imagined it,
but the scars were still there. So was the faint
prisoning smeared into the wrist. My fingers trembled. Please, I said,
turning to Devani. Run an ID match my neural imprint.
I'm not. She raised her hand to quiet me, the
same way you'd hush someone waking up from anesthesia. You're
experiencing post transfer fog, she said, calmly. It's not uncommon.
You've been deep inside someone else's memory structure, residt yourself.
Image distortion can last up to an hour. Just breathe.
I looked at her, begging, you know me, I said,
I've worked here for four years. I trained under Patel.
I did the Calahan immersion. Ask me anything. She tilted
her head, patient but dismissive. That's part of the overlay, Marcus,
your systems still sorting memory boundaries. I'm sure it'll pass.
I shook my head. I'm not Marcus. He took my body.
He switched with me. I'm the escort. I'm okay, she said, gently,
signaling to a nearby tech. Let's keep him off the
reinforcement feet. He's still inside the ark. The tech nodded,
type something into a console, and the lights above dim slightly.
I stumbled to my feet, ignoring strange, painful sensations littering
my body, and started looking for a mirror. I needed
something objective, irre few. One of the walls held a
viewing panel, reflective glass just enough to make out a face.
I stepped in front of it, and there he was,
the man i'd watched walk through his memories like a
ghost in his own life. His face now stared back
at me, tired, aged, worn by hollow years. I never
lived same pale scar across the temple. Even my silence
felt like his. A few hours later, a staff member
I didn't recognize handed me a manilla envelope. Follow the checklist.
You're already pre cleared, she said. There's a transitional housing
option and a few job placements that align with your
she paused, with your profile the envelope. Inside was a
pamphlet printed in soft blue and grays the title Red
Rebuilding Forward Employment Opportunities for Rehabilitated Individuals. The back had
a phone number, a smiling logo, and my name, Marcus Reill.