Four hours earlier.
Patrick had walked through the marble halls of Library & Archives Canada, eyes scanning microfiche records. Below the building, preserved in Lead Vault Sector S7, he found the manuscript—a decrypted Redacted Memoir of P. Leclair, 1960s parliament janitor turned unwitting anti-cybernetic resistor. Hidden in poetic stanzas was the code for the Remnant Sequence. It only worked if spoken aloud, in both official languages, by someone who remembered snow before the programs edited the weather.
Now.
In a subterranean vault beneath the statue of Champlain, Patrick stood before a retrofitted console powered by thermoelectric energy drawn from the frozen canal itself. He inserted the capsule.
“Écoutez,” he whispered. “Il reste encore le cœur.”
His voice cracked. The city above flickered. A momentary darkness spread across sensors, and for ten seconds, every humanoid AI—known as Guardians—paused, disoriented. Memories they didn’t realize were installed flickered behind their optic sensors: laughter, French folk songs, snowball fights on ice unscanned by satellites.
Above, a child on the canal giggled and pointed at a shimmering ripple in the air—like heat haze made of pixels—before it vanished under the bells ringing from the Peace Tower.
Deep in the vault, Patrick slumped, vision blurring as neural injectors calibrated his cerebrum back into the city’s cradle. Ottawa wouldn’t escape its cyber-analytical destiny. But for now, for one perfectly imperfect moment, it remembered being human.
Outside, winter retook Parliament Hill, unfiltered. The Rideau sang its old song again—of ice, memory, and rebellion beneath the snow.
Genre: Magical Realism / Dystopian Sci-Fi Thriller
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: What is Ottawa most known for
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