^{created with Nightcafe}

Hey guys!

This is my fictional story for a little contest. You can read about it here: Flash Fiction Prompt: Dive Into the Flood

The Memory Reservoir

They say no one comes back the same from the Flood.
They say memory has weight in that place — that for every truth you fish from its depths, it takes something from you in return.

Kael didn’t care. He had come for his brother.

He stood now at the edge of the reservoir, hidden beneath the rusted arteries of the Old City. A single sign blinked in sickly blue neon: “REMEMBER AT YOUR OWN RISK.”

He nervously zipped up his neural wetsuit. There was no one else here.

Kael clenched his jaw, checked the memory tether clipped to the back of his skull, and dove.

It hit him like ice — a rush of cold, then nothing at all.

Inside the Flood, time lost meaning. The water wasn’t wet. It was thought, thick and pulsing with emotions not his own. Shapes shifted in the murk — fragments of lives, half-formed faces, voices that belonged to mothers, strangers, lovers. Each memory passed like a dream barely recalled.

He focused.

"Find Elias."

His brother's name echoed in his skull, the tether translating will into search.

The water pulsed.
A whisper: Why do you remember him?

Kael’s breath caught in his chest. The voice wasn’t his own.

“Because he was real,” he said, though doubt flickered.

Are you sure? the Flood asked.

Then it came: a scene. Clearer than the rest. A boy laughing on a rooftop. The sun was setting. Kael watched himself hand Elias a tiny drone, just repaired. “You’re the only family I have left,” he heard himself say.

And yet… he didn’t remember that happening. Not truly. Not until now.

He reached for the memory.

Pain bloomed behind his eyes — sharp and sudden, like a nail driven into thought. His name cracked slightly in his mind.

Later he came to, floating deeper in the Flood. More scenes unfolded. Elias, older, shouting at someone in a lab. Elias crying in an alley, soaked in rain. Elias dying.

“Why show me this?” Kael asked.

Because you asked.

The Flood’s voice felt closer now, inside him.

“Was it real?”

Does it matter?

“Yes. I need to know who he was to me.”

The water stilled. The world went dark. Then came the final memory — too vivid to be anything but truth.

A lab, years ago. A room filled with tanks like this one. Kael, younger, standing before a control panel. A technician’s badge. On-screen: a test subject marked "E.L.I.A.S — Emotional Learning Inter-Assimilation Sequence."

A synthetic memory construct.

You created him, the Flood whispered. To simulate grief. You built the pain of losing a brother you never had. It made you human.

Kael screamed into the depths, and the water swallowed it whole.

When he emerged, gasping on the stone platform, he was alone.

He tried to remember why he came.

Nothing.

Only a name echoing in his brain: Elias.

He stared at the blinking sign above the water. The neon had changed.

“REMEMBER WHAT YOU PAID.”

---

Thanks for reading.

^{[email protected]}


Images and screenshots are from me or created with nightcafe

Posted Using INLEO