AIDEN
The city stretched out endlessly, its lights scattered like distant stars that never warmed the sky. Each window glowed with someone else’s life, someone else’s laughter, while the streets echoed only with the hollow rhythm of footsteps that weren’t yours. The night air was sharp, almost indifferent, carrying the faint scent of smoke and rain. In that vastness, the city didn’t feel alive—it felt like a giant made of stone and glass, watching but never speaking. Aiden, a tailor, was in his shop cleaning up and sorting through spools of fabric as he always did before closing the shop. Today was no different until he finds a spool of shimmering thread that didn’t match any of the previous orders.
The thread glowed faintly like it was alive. He took it in his hand and almost immediately, flashes of unfamiliar memories pulse through his mind: a man laughing, running through the rain with their hands intertwined
The thread glowed faintly like it was alive. He took it in his hand and almost immediately, flashes of unfamiliar memories pulse through his mind: a man laughing, running through the rain with their hands intertwined, a voice saying“Don’t forget me”.
The face of the man was blur and Aiden didn’t really see him clearly but he only saw a glimpse of a man with a fair structured face and perfectly aligned teeth through his laugh. Aiden then snaps back to reality brushing off what just happened thinking it might just be that he is exhausted.
Aiden then sits on his tailor’s chair to stitch a jacket from the unfinished pile. He didn’t remember falling asleep. One moment he was guiding the same same thread through the machine. The next, he was standing in the middle of a very crowded alley which didn’t look familiar to him. People brushed past him with their faces blurred and their voices were muffled.
And then-he saw him.
A man across the street, Tall, sharp-eyed, his black hair damp from the rain, his coat whipping from the wind. This time the face of the man wasn’t blur unlike the others. His eyes-striking, clear, alive- met Aiden’s eyes as if he was waiting for this moment.
At the glance of the man, Aiden’s chest faltered, as though his heart had forgotten its rhythm. The light caught in the stranger’s eyes, turning them into something almost unearthly, and for a moment he seemed breathless—struck not by the beauty of the world, but by the beauty of being seen within it. The crowd then shifted, a tram roared past, and the man was gone.
He woke with a start, slumped against the sewing table. His heart thundered as he dragged a hand across his face. Just a dream. Just a dream, he told himself. Yet when he looked down, the jacket glowed faintly under the lamplight, the seam stitched with something that didn’t look entirely real.
The news broadcast murmured from the small screen mounted on the wall. A uniformed government official addressed the public in clipped tones: “Unauthorized memories pose a risk to collective stability. Citizens are reminded that tampering with restricted data, or harboring erased identities, is a crime punishable by immediate correction.”
Aiden’s gaze shifted to the spool again which was nearly empty yet he had not stitched that much.
The shop bell jingled.
Aiden jumped, knocking his coffee cup off the table. Midnight customers were so rare, and at this time, the streets should have been nearly empty. Wiping his hands quickly with a rag, he glanced at the door.
A man stood in the doorway. His hood cast a shadow over his face, his coat damp from the drizzle outside. For a moment, Aiden thought it was just another client. But then the stranger lifted his head.
And Aiden froze.
The eyes. The same eyes from his dream.
They locked onto him, steady, unblinking, as if he were the one who wasn’t supposed to exist.
“I found you,” the man said softly.
