Chapter 3: My Frequency

The core sat in the isolation chamber like a tiny star trapped in tempered glass. Jessa had rigged the chamber twenty minutes ago—full Faraday lining, neural-tap isolated on its own power loop, no external network tether. If the data inside was hot, and it was going to be, there was no point advertising that fact to the Bureau's crawlers.

She pulled on the interface gloves, felt the micro-haptics calibrate against her fingertips. The amber light on her left wrist port flickered to steady as the equipment recognized her neural signature. Fourteen months since she'd run a full index on a live core. The procedure hadn't changed: identify the memory architecture, cross-reference the metadata, trace the extraction signature. Straightforward work.

The memory fed in fast and cold and exact.

Jessa initiated the frequency scan first. Every cortical implant broadcasts its own unique signature pattern. It's one of the reasons the Bureau tracks its operatives the way it does. You can't hide a neural implant. You can only mask its source.

The data came back clean and specific. The frequency pattern was 0xA847-F21C, a tight harmonic signature with the Bureau's encryption key embedded in the third quaternary segment. She ran it against her training matrices without thinking about it—the kind of work her hands knew how to do better than her conscious mind.

The frequency locked.

0xA847-F21C. Hers.

Not a signature she'd seen before. Not a frequency she'd been trained to recognize in someone else's data. This was her core pattern, the unique harmonic frequency her own implant had generated since the day Syndicate Medical installed it seven years ago. She pulled up her baseline signature from the secure partition, an archived copy she'd taken the day after that installation. Encrypted, offline, untouched.

The match was absolute.

Jessa stopped moving. That took effort. She made herself breathe through the numbers instead of the silence, because the silence would tell her something too early. The procedure was systematic. The analysis came first.

She ran the extraction timestamp next: 14-12-2084, 03:47:11 UTC, sub-level medical facility designation Delta-7. The timestamp had format precision to the millisecond—Bureau standard. Corporate, sterile, documented with the kind of bureaucratic care that meant this wasn't a black-market hack. Black-market jobs were sloppy. This was official.

The cross-reference came next. Wipe marker first—the cryptographic tag that every extracted core carried like a scar. She ran it through the Bureau's public key registry, the one they published quarterly for compliance audits. The marker decrypted clean.

SILKSCREEN division. Black-budget authorization level. Extraction operative: clearance-flagged, name encrypted.

Fourteen months ago.

She pulled up her own calendar from fourteen months back, the personal logs she kept offline on a secondary partition, inaccessible to any networked system. The date was there. December 12th, 2084. She had records from that day—work assignments, a meeting with Dov at Vapor Club, the shower she took at 04:23 because she couldn't sleep. The shower she took after this extraction was supposed to have happened.

According to the data, her cortical implant had been tapped at 03:47 in the morning. They'd extracted memory directly from her neural architecture. They'd done it with Bureau authorization and SILKSCREEN funding.

And she'd woken up at 04:15 with no missing time, no injection marks, no indication that someone had jacked directly into her skull and pulled data out.

That wasn't possible. Cortical extraction took time. You had to establish a stable connection, map the neural architecture, run the isolation protocols to keep the subject's consciousness separated from the extraction process. It was invasive, technical, dangerous. People usually knew when it happened.

She pulled up the extraction duration logged in the wipe marker.

Six minutes and forty-three seconds.

Six minutes and forty-three seconds was the number the data had been building toward.

Six minutes and forty-three seconds meant advanced equipment. The kind of mobile neural-tap rig that probably cost more than she made in a year. The kind of thing the Bureau didn't deploy for standard extraction jobs. The kind of thing they deployed when the target was unconscious or compliant.

She scrolled through the extraction metadata, looking for sedation flags, consent records, contingency logs. The wipe marker didn't contain that level of detail—wipe markers were designed for administrative accounting, not transparency. What they did contain was enough.

Operative class: Delta-level authorization. Subject: flagged as cooperative.

Cooperative.

She'd been flagged as cooperative.

Jessa checked the timestamp again. December 12th, 2084, 03:47:11 UTC. She'd been asleep in her apartment at sub-level 12, the one with the isolation chamber already built into the wall—the one she'd prepared specifically because she'd known this kind of work would eventually follow her. She'd been asleep with a neural security lock engaged on her wrist port, which meant no one should have been able to access her implant without triggering an alert.

The alert logs in the wipe marker showed no breach flags. No intrusion. No forced access.

That meant someone had obtained her security credentials. Someone had acquired the override codes to unlock her neural port remotely. Someone had walked—or sent a drone, most likely—into her private space and jacked into her cortical implant without her knowledge or consent, flagged her as compliant in the official record, extracted data that was hers and hers alone, and written it all down in bureaucratic cipher.

All of it while she slept.

Jessa ran the extraction data through a deeper analysis matrix, the kind of work that took sustained focus. She parsed through the memory signature itself, the neural topology of whatever they'd pulled out. The Bureau didn't waste resources on random cortical jacks. They didn't deploy SILKSCREEN operatives and Delta-level authorization for casual reconnaissance.

The extracted memory was indexed by timestamp: November 3rd, 2084, 14:22 UTC. Fourteen days before the extraction. A nine-minute window of continuous neural recording, compressed and flagged for retention.

She pulled the memory fragment up in the isolation chamber, let it feed through her neural-tap port in partial-resolution mode. It would be dangerous to load the full memory—dangerous to experience something someone else had stolen from her conscious mind. But she could read the signature, the metadata, the ghost-print of what had been there.

The memory was her. Every component of the neural topology was hers. The cortical patterns matched her baseline. The memory fragment was something she'd lived through, something that had happened to her, something her brain had recorded and stored in the encrypted regions of her own implant.

What she couldn't understand was why anyone would waste resources pulling it out.

She ran the memory fragment through a content analysis, a careful external scan that wouldn't trigger the full neural load. The system read back: civilian encounter, outdoor location (weather patterns indicate New Meridian Zone, altitude estimate 40th floor or higher), human subjects (count: two, identities encrypted), duration nine minutes, emotional content: elevated, conversational format, non-compliance event.

Non-compliance.

Jessa stared at the wipe marker. The metadata didn't specify what non-compliance. They'd just flagged the memory, extracted it, and buried the whole job under SILKSCREEN authorization and black-budget coding.

She pulled up her own records from November 3rd again, the second timestamp, the date when the memory had been recorded inside her own cortical implant. She'd been active that day—work assignments, a transit route through the upper levels that she'd logged for security purposes, a meeting in the commercial district.

And then nothing. The log stopped. There was no record of a nine-minute window, no notation of any "non-compliance event."

Which meant the Bureau had also edited her personal records. They'd taken the extraction timestamp and made it disappear from the official logs. They'd flagged her as cooperative and pulled data she didn't even know she'd lost.

Jessa disconnected the neural-tap interface with precise movements, each gesture measured and controlled. The amber light on her wrist port blinked out. The isolation chamber went dark.

She sat in the silence of sub-level 12, in the secured room that she'd built into the bedrock beneath New Meridian with her own money and her own careful planning, and she read the data one more time with her eyes instead of her implant.

Extraction date: December 12th, 2084, 03:47:11 UTC. Subject: Jessa Kade. Status: flagged as cooperative. Authorization: SILKSCREEN division, Bureau. Memory duration: nine minutes, November 3rd, 2084, 14:22 UTC.

She'd been awake on November 3rd. She'd been conscious and present and living her life, and something worth extracting had happened to her. Something that the Bureau had decided required removal. Something that had been deemed non-compliant enough to warrant a covert midnight tap into her cortical implant, a theft conducted while she slept, erased from her own memory and her own records.

She'd consented to nothing.

The fury was clean and cold and precise, like reading a code that had been written specifically for her comprehension. It didn't shake her hands or tighten her throat. It just settled into the spaces where her logic lived and made itself at home.

Jessa reached for the core, held it up to the fractured light that bled through the reinforced window of her chamber. The tiny neural substrate gleamed like something alive.

She'd spent fourteen months since the extraction without knowing what had been taken. Fourteen months thinking the core she'd purchased from Dov was a routine acquisition, a fence job, a piece of data without significance.

Now she held the evidence of her own violation in the palm of her hand.

And she had a question that needed answering.