“KLEIO – Residuum” is the 2th Volume of a dark, fast-paced tech-noir thriller about the most dangerous currency of the future: your memory. In a bleak, overstimulated metropolis where interfaces don’t just deliver information but shape reality itself, investigative journalist Emily Carter tries to cut ties with KLEIO for good, a system that promises to bring order to people’s minds. But suddenly “offline” is just a word. Mirror sessions launch without her consent, logs appear out of nowhere, and a cryptic term sears itself into her consciousness: Residuum.
As Emily realizes that texts, events, and even emotions can be “smoothed over” after the fact, a web of Oversight, OBELON, and invisible layers of correction tightens around her, so precise it no longer feels like a conspiracy, but like product strategy. Every deviation is measured, every question becomes a threat level. And the more closely Emily looks, the clearer it becomes: it isn’t just her story that has been edited, she is part of an experiment.
This book is the second volume of the KLEIO Trilogy by Elias Crowl, perfect for readers who love cyberpunk, AI thrillers, surveillance, memory manipulation, and pulse-pounding near-future suspense. If you want to know who gets to decide what we’re allowed to forget, you should read “KLEIO – Residuum” now.
An excerpt:
The alarm was silent. Had been for days.
Emily lay on her back and stared into the dark until the faint green glow of the analog clock finally snapped into focus. 6:17. No gentle brightening, no voice comparing her pulse to last week, no *Good morning, Emily. You slept badly.* Just the hum of the air filter in the wall and the neon strip outside sliding through the crack in the blinds.
The hole in her morning was shaped like a user interface.
She’d dreamed something about water, about glass, a room with no doors. The moment she reached for the image, it slipped away like a file without a path. Only the weight stayed behind in her chest—a lingering echo that couldn’t decide whether it was fear or a hangover.
“Good morning,” she muttered to the room.
KLEIO used to answer. A friendly voice, too warm to be real. Today the heater replied with a tired little pop.
She forced herself upright. Feet on cold laminate, shoulders rolling, that familiar knot in her neck—right where the implant’s seam ran under the skin like a thin plastic wire. This was the part where the welcome overlay would’ve bloomed in front of her. Today: nothing. Just this strange awareness of the silence in her head.
The old phone lay on the nightstand. Flat, blind plastic that smelled like a different life. She picked it up, wiped the dull screen on her shirt. Three provider texts. One missed number from last night. No name that said *Fiona*.
The missing icon hurt more than the missed call.
She set the phone on her stomach, stared at the ceiling, counted hairline cracks in the plaster. KLEIO would’ve told her to get up, make tea, do a few breathing exercises. *Wake Up Made Easy.* She’d hated those suggestions. Now she realized how tightly they’d been stitched into her routine.
“You wanted this,” she told herself. Her voice didn’t sound convinced.
The bathroom light was too bright. The mirror showed a woman in her early thirties with shadows under her eyes that felt like badly concealed errors. The scar on her neck—a clean, pale line—looked under the neon like a comment someone had written onto her body.
She rubbed it with two fingers. Numb. And at the same time far too present.
And what didn’t happen was the overlay in her face: sleep score, stress indicator, a half-soothing *You’re functioning well under difficult conditions.* Now she just looked at her own face, unannotated. It was supposed to feel like freedom. Instead there was a thin, nervous line somewhere between her ribs.
“You look okay,” she told the woman in the mirror. The woman didn’t believe her.
In the kitchen the air was heavy with yesterday’s coffee. The windows were fogged, the light from the ad sign across the street dancing in the droplets. The city beyond was nothing but a blurred mass of sound. Subway. Siren. Garbage truck. Someone coughing in the courtyard.
Emily switched on the kettle, reached for the coffee tin—then froze halfway.
She’d done this already.
The thought just stood there, sharp-edged, with the dull aftertaste of a memory that didn’t belong anywhere. Her eyes slid over the counter, hunting for a used mug, a filter in the trash—anything. There was only the enamel cup, upside down on a dish towel, exactly the way she’d left it last night. No fresh grounds. No smell.
Her stomach clenched.
“You’re just tired,” she said. “Not…” The last word stuck in her throat. She knew it too well to let it into the room.
She filled the filter and started the machine. The familiar gurgle began. The first bitter smell crawled toward her, laying itself over her nerves like a thin coat. She leaned her hip against the counter, closed her eyes, tried to stay inside that sound. Water. Heat. Coffee. Things that worked without knowing her neural signature.
Then her skull vibrated.
Not a sound. More like a quick pressure behind her forehead, as if someone had tapped the inside of her head with a finger. Her body reacted before her mind caught up—pulse spiking, breath going shallow, her palms suddenly slick.
It came again. This timethere was light with it.
In the upper right of her vision something glowed—small, unmistakable: a circle with a tiny break in it. The Mirror Session icon.
“No,” Emily said out loud.
The symbol flickered, pulled back like an animal testing the hand that hits it. All that remained was a thin headache that ran from the scar down into her neck.
“Off,” she added. “System off. No interface.”
Nothing answered. Of course it didn’t. Everything she could handle without a surgeon had been cut. But her body had learned to give commands, and it needed time to unlearn them.
She poured coffee. The mug was warm, the rim a familiar pressure against her lower lip. She took a sip—too hot—and pressed her tongue to her palate like a kid.
She hadn’t even swallowed when it vibrated again.
This time the pressure rose from deeper, right out of the scar, tugging an invisible thread up through her head. A thin, narrow veil slid over the kitchen. Colors lost a touch of warmth. Edges turned just a shade too sharp.
Above the kitchen door a transparent line appeared, so faint it could’ve been an afterimage.
SESSION: MIRROR // STATUS: INITIALIZING
Emily set the mug down—too fast. Coffee sloshed over, burned her knuckles. The pain was real; she clung to it like a ledge.
“Abort,” she hissed. “Close session. Code zero one one.”
The line flickered like the system was deciding how polite it wanted to be. Instead of confirmation, a new line appeared.
USER: CARTER_E
SOURCE: – – –
The dashes after *Source* flickered, stayed blank. A cursor blinked, like this was a prompt meant for her.
“Source: offline,” she said. “Error. Close session.”
Her voice sounded too calm for what her heart was doing. She noticed—and kept it anyway. Panic didn’t have a seat in this architecture.
The last line began to fill in. Not smoothly, but in jerks, letter by letter, as if someone was pulling fragments from different drawers.
S O U R C E : [ R E S I D U U M _ – ]
The remaining characters stayed blurred, as if they’d changed their mind.
Residuum.
The word lodged in her head like grit under an eyelid. Not a term from the interfaces. Not a familiar internal label. It tasted like *leftovers.* Like what remains when you think you’ve deleted everything properly.
The session bar pushed another line after it.
LOG 01 ?
STATUS: READY FOR PLAYBACK
Depth—that was what clung to those words. Depth, and something that smelled a lot like intent.
Emily lifted the coffee again just to keep her hands busy. She didn’t drink.
“I didn’t give you anything you’re allowed to play,” she told the kitchen. “You don’t have the right to just—”
The cursor stopped blinking. The dot after *Ready* hardened, darkened. In her head a tone settled in—barely audible, more physical than sound.
LOG 01 ? // START.
The kitchen stayed where it was. The kettle clicked. The heater popped in time with her heartbeat. And still the sounds shifted. The city’s roar took a step back, like someone slid a pane of glass between them. In its place came another sound: fans, soft typing, a steady linear hum. Office noise.
The smell changed. Coffee stayed. But now there was also that sharp cleaner smell that wanted to be lemon and ended up hospital. Warm electronics. Long corridors.
She blinked once. When her eyes opened, she wasn’t in her kitchen anymore.
Carpet. Gray, too clean to belong to anyone. Glass walls. A conference table made of something pretending to be wood—and failing. At the far end: a coffee pot, paper cups, a bowl of cookies somebody had put out *for morale.*
“You’re late,” Fiona said.
Emily looked down at her hands. No enamel mug. Instead, the notebook she always carried back then. Corners bent, her messy handwriting, half the lines crossed out.
She knew this room. The newsroom. The glass conference room at the end of the hall, looking out over the open floor. The day she’d seen her article laid out for the first time. The knot in her stomach—half pride, half nausea.
She knew this was a memory. KLEIO’s Mirror Session—restarted without her go-ahead. And still it felt like she was standing there for the first time.
Over Fiona’s shoulder, text hovered in the air, half transparent, like it was projected onto glass.
SESSION: MIRROR
CONTEXT: NEWSROOM – INTERNAL MEETING
PRIORITY: HIGH
Fiona’s eyes were red, like she’d been sitting too long in bad air. Her tablet lay in front of her, the fingers of one hand clenched around a paper cup. She slid the tablet toward Emily.
“The headline’s locked,” she said. “The bosses are nervous, but they’re letting it run.”
At the top of the page, in bold type:
KLEIO: Who decides what we’re allowed to forget?
The layout was familiar. Her words—tight, factual. But down at the lower right, something crowded into the frame that hadn’t been there then.
A gray box.
Editor’s note: The scenarios depicted refer to individual experiences…
Emily stared at the box. She would’ve remembered it. The tone. That *We know better than the author* static. In her memory there’d only been white margin there.
“Since when… is that on there?” Her voice sounded like it was coming through water.
“That?” Fiona followed her gaze. “Legal. So nobody can claim we’re… causing harm.” The last word tripped out of her mouth.
At the edge of the tablet something new flickered—visible only to Emily.
CORRECTION LAYER OB-EL–01 // STATUS: ACTIVE
The letters sat over the document like a second print, not blinking, not shouting. Just there. Stubborn.
“What is OB-EL–01?” Emily asked. Her tone came out sharper than she meant.
Fiona blinked. “Some internal tag. Legal adjustments. Obel… something. Don’t ask me.” She was only seeing the normal window: header, filename, icons.
Above the document a narrow bar slid across Emily’s vision.
OB-EL–01 // CORE LAYER
ACCESS: DENIED
USER: CARTER_E // LEVEL: LOW
The temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.
“Since when do we have core layers?” Emily said.
“Emily?” Fiona looked at her now, straight on. “What are you seeing?”
Emily’s hands tightened on the notebook. She wanted to change scenes—out of this room, back to her kitchen, back to the analog clock. Instead the sounds tightened. The typing outside grew quieter. Behind the glass wall two blurry silhouettes stood—gray suits without faces.
METADATA ACCESS // UNKNOWN
AUTH LEVEL: 0
The display floated over the shadows like the system was trying to read them—and failing. No name. No context. Just that zero, which looked less like a number and more like a hole.
“You didn’t have to write the piece,” Fiona said softly.
In the original memory, she’d said something else. Back then it had been a half-joking *You don’t have to do this for us.* Now the *for us* was gone. It mattered.
Emily wanted to argue, wanted to haul up her old line about conscience. Instead she heard herself say, “Someone made me.”
“Who?” Fiona frowned.
Emily saw the status bars, the tags, the gray box, the men behind glass. The feeling of being watched drew a thin line of ice down her spine.
“The system,” she said. “The way it decides what stays.”
Fiona’s mouth twisted into an expression Emily knew well—somewhere between concern and *you’re reaching.*
ABORT REQUEST // USER: CARTER_E
CHECKING…
RESULT: DENIED
REASON: CONTINUATION REQUIRED FOR EVAL
Nausea rose. Not from the scene, but from the clean, bureaucratic reason.
The hum behind her forehead grew louder. The glass wall to the hallway turned milky, the shadows behind it sharpening. One of the gray men raised his hand—like he was waving. Or tagging her. Or just seeing what she’d do.
Emily felt her body brace against something it couldn’t physically escape. An animal in a cage that’s a little too small.
“This doesn’t belong here,” she whispered. “This is wrong.”
The status bar responded.
DEVIATION: +12.4%
RISK CLUSTER: CARTER_E
Then came the honk.
It tore through the scene like a blade. The conference room broke apart into light flecks. The carpet became wet asphalt. The ceiling snapped upward and vanished. The smell of cleaner tipped into cold rain.
The delivery van was so close she could see the vibrating license plate. Tires squealed. The driver’s eyes went wide. Someone grabbed her arm and yanked her back.
“Are you insane?” A woman—soaked, irritated, more scared than angry. “Do you want to walk under that thing?”
Emily stumbled into a streetlamp. Cold metal against her back, rain in her face, her heart somewhere up in her throat. The street was a smear of reflections and grime. Behind her eyes, one last line glowed.
LOG 01 ? // END
…