Surrounded by spirals of industrial synth echoing through the alley, Elias Vane felt the vanishing point of gravity loosen. His boots hit the slick cobblestone, a blend of oil and neon rain forming puddles between his feet. Ottawa in 2149 was a different beast than history remembered. The skyline was cluttered with floating walkways and climate-controlled terraces hovering between the government towers, and the old clock faces of Parliament now projected AI-generated constellations. Above it all, ByWard Verti-Market shimmered like a pulsar—a thousand clubs stacked atop one another in kilometer-high scaffolds, pulsing purple and gold like veins in the city’s cybernetic heart.
He straightened the collar of his midnight-blue trench coat, its hue flickering with embedded LED threads, and made his way toward the lift shaft that led to rooftop tier 99. He needed to find her. Again. This time, maybe she’d talk before she disappeared.
Two nights ago, she’d spilled out of a bar called Carbon Singularity Lounge—an upscale haunt known for cocktails spliced with nano-emotive tech. They shared something Elias hadn’t felt since the Desaturation Campaigns: laughter that wasn't manufactured by algorithms. She wore an antique black velvet dress with a solar-reactive corset, decades out of style but alive on her. Her name was Lira Ash. Or, at least, that’s what the microchip on her hand claimed before it deactivated.
He wasn’t a romantic. Not anymore. Not since the Ottawa U Proxy Riots left half the city in symmetrical ruin and made war heroes out of philosophers, coders out of DJs. Elias had been one of them—optics and infiltration during the United City Split. That’s how he recognized the code planted in her fragmented smile. It wasn’t just charm. It was a call sign.
As the lift zipped upward past cybernetic gardens and oxygen kiosks, memories or something darker pulled at his mind—the night years ago when the first iteration of Lira died during an unauthorized upload in Zone Theta. His squad had gone dark, betrayal coded into their neurons by tidemark hackers. He remembered her—her original—telling him to run moments before her consciousness melted into the digital ether.
Rooftop 99 pulsed with fever-light. Music carved geometry into the night. Skyscrapers danced in holographic sync with the beat from a DJ that looked less human than the disco ball. He spotted her—or this version of her—on the lounge balcony, lit by projection fireflies coded to mimic insects from extinct biomes.
“You followed the signal,” she said before he could speak. Her eyes flickered jade, then anti-blinking—a telltale trait of synthetic replicas.
Elias exhaled. “You lost time.”
“I bought time,” she answered, gazing out across the black glass of the Rideau River now flickering with nightlife drones dumping ad spores. “You ever think a city could remember who it was?”
Behind them, turbines screamed. The sky fractured. A drone blimp overhead ignited softly, a jazz tone playing as it combusted—terror in slow motion. Panic hadn’t hit yet. Ottawa was used to spectacle hysteria.
“They're wiping node-jumpers.” Lira turned to him, face calm. “Anyone with buried memory code is being purged tonight. Birthday of the new regime.”
“A cleansing,” Elias growled. “Again.”
She tapped two fingers against her temple. “Inside me—your squad's last mission. It's not stored. It’s nested in paradox loops, only retrievable in person. I kept the echo inside to stop the war's truth from becoming propaganda.”
Sirens were arriving. Elevator routes died red across their surfaces. They were trapped in the flux of urban deconstruction. Rooftop clubs began vanishing below them, transforming into defense units. The party had expired. The memory war resumed.
“Then we run,” he said.
“No,” she whispered. “We dance first.”
And for one surreal second on a collapsing rooftop above a city that wore history like digital makeup, Elias did. Spinning her across a sonic field as the skyline ruptured, he remembered who he once was, before codes, before missions, before the city rewrote him. Joy had lived here once. Maybe it could again.
Elias Vane—the reluctant archivist of a forgotten war—pulled Lira toward the lift tether that led down into the older levels of the city, where analog was still breathing, where memories had weight. The real party, he realized, was memory… and tonight, Ottawa would remember everything.
Genre: Dystopian Sci-Fi Thriller with Romantic Undertones
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: Is Ottawa a party city?
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