Threading the Code - Something Slipped Between the Lines of the Firewall. #898252

In a future where memory can be edited, overwritten, and erased by code, freelance hacker Kara Lin has always sworn she’d never cross the line between self and system. But when a hidden file named ETHOS.PATCH.null quietly embeds itself in her neural rig, Kara finds herself unraveling—time, identity, and reality slipping through her fingers like corrupted data.
What begins as a breach investigation becomes something far more personal as fragments of her past resurface in voices, mirrors, and forgotten logs. She's drawn to a ghost of a sister she may have chosen to forget and hunted by a program that might have once been her.
As the lines blur between memory and manipulation, Kara realizes that the patch isn’t just rewriting code—it’s rewriting her. Each choice she makes could be a restoration... or a recursion.
In a city that thrives on manufactured truth and programmable guilt, what happens when the hacker becomes the hacked?
And when everything she believes about herself is revealed to be a version—what remains of the person who remembers it all?