The cold didn’t come from outside. It was inside her. Creeping. Hard. A truth too big to hold-and too quiet to ignore.
She typed a message with shaking fingers.
EMILY: Jax. You online?
JAX: I’m here. What’s up?
EMILY: Unauthorized access. Therapy cache. Mirror flag. No origin.
The reply came within seconds.
JAX: Shit. Don’t click anything. Share your screen. Show the log.
She enabled sharing. The cursor moved, showing Jax what she saw. He wasn’t on camera, but his breath was audible in the headset. And his silence said plenty.
“Beta flag without origin is… unusual,” he said finally. “Nor-mally, mirror sessions have an official counterpart. Super-vision, cross-check, backup. But without a source…”
“Meaning what?”, she asked. Her voice was low.
“Means you’ve got a session that officially doesn’t exist. Copied, undocumented. Somebody set it up on purpose-or hijacked your history.”
“Who can do that?”
“Someone with master access. Clinic. Developer. Or-worst case-someone with a backdoor key.”
“Voigt?”, she whispered.
A hesitation. “In theory. But… I don’t think he has access to your live cache. Only retrospectively.”
She felt something narrow inside her. Not real pain, but pressure. Like someone putting a finger on a thought she wasn’t allowed to think.
“Tell me this is a bug.”
“Emily…”, Jax’s voice was flat. “That’s not a bug. That’s curated perception. You’re being steered. Maybe for weeks.”
She stared at the file ImplantApp_Capture. Opened it. A screen recording. The interface flashed briefly, then flickered. A gray menu appeared-hidden, under five layers. There: Session Class: Mirror / Beta. And right beneath: Therapy
set-ting active: Depotentiated event-block 17-19.
Another log entry lit up.
[AUDIT LOG | APP › MEMORY/TRACE]
Timestamp: 2032-06-14T00:32:19Z
User: CARTER, E.
Anomaly: checksum mismatch (block 17-19)
Jax: “Block 17-19 is exactly the range of your Lang-Hale sessions. Something’s been altered there. Either you… or someone for you.”
Emily closed her eyes for a sec. Counted. One, two, three.
When she opened them again, her gaze was clear. For the moment.
Emily stared at the words on the screen. She had the ine-vitable feeling she was losing ground under her feet. “Media vector relevance”. She could remember the feeling when she first agreed to use KLEIO-it seemed like a harmless offer.
A simple call. She’d never known that the choice she’d made for her own future hadn’t really been hers.
Slowly, the realization sank into her chest. What if she’d never been herself? What if she’d never truly been Emily?
The memory of her father lifting her up when she fell as a little girl was one of the earliest images she had from childhood. But what if that wasn’t even true? What if she’d never really fallen, never shared that moment with him?
The system could’ve planted it. And maybe it had always been like that-small edits to her memories, little tweaks she never questioned.
…
What my first reader say:
When will Volume III be released?
The third and final installment of the KLEIO Trilogy by Elias Crowl is currently in its final production phase. The release is expected between late May and early June 2026. With this concluding volume, the technoir-driven story of KLEIO reaches its gripping finale — delivering new revelations, higher stakes, and long-awaited answers to the series’ central mysteries.
In the meantime, I’ll be surprising my fans with exclusive updates and excerpts on my blog, so be sure to stay tuned for exciting news and sneak peeks, especially for those who can’t get enough of Emily Carter’s journey.
