He tapped his temple, activating the neural link interface in his eyes, and plugged a fiber-optic lead from his wrist directly into the recorder.
He pulled the device out and set it on the scarred metal table. Scrawled across a piece of fading physical tape on the back was a single, cryptic label: 39017.mp4. 39017mp4
Silas froze. She had said his name. He checked the file properties. The creation date was listed as half a century before he was born. He felt a cold sweat break across his neck. He rewound the file a few seconds. He tapped his temple, activating the neural link
The small digital recorder was heavy in Silas’s coat pocket, a piece of ancient aluminum in a world that had long since moved to biological data streams. He sat at a corner table in the back of The Iron Lung, a low-ceilinged tavern on the edge of Sector 4. The air smelled of burnt ozone and synthetic yeast. Silas was a data retriever, a man who hunted down things the new world had decided to forget. Silas froze
The man slowly turned his head. His eyes were wide, the pupils blown out until they were just solid black circles. Blood was trickling from his ears, but he was smiling. It wasn't a normal human smile; it was a rhythmic stretching of the mouth, pulsing to a beat that the camera couldn't fully capture. He began to hum a low, vibrating tone.