Ephemeral Echoes

In a near-future world where memories can be recorded and retrieved, Ara, a talented memory artist, has the ability to recreate vivid experiences for others. People from all over the city visit her to have their memories recorded and stored in a rectangular prism-shaped safe drive. These drives with memories are distinguished by colorful glittering, while empty drives lack any sparkle.

Ara is a young and lonely girl who inherited the memory lab from her late father. She deeply misses him and often finds herself lost in thoughts about him. Her mother passed away when she was an infant, leaving Ara with a profound longing for a family connection. Although Ara is not the only memory artist, she is one of the best, equipped with top-of-the-line gadgets for capturing and storing memories. The process, while not arduous, is expensive. In the memory lab, there is a chair with an intricate wiring system where clients can relax while a soothing background sound plays before the memory capture process begins. The capturing helmet, made of glass and equipped with radio frequency and light impulses, captures memories based on the set time frame. Some people visit Ara to store their entire lifetimes for their families and children, while others upload expensive knowledge from highly qualified professionals, although such memory drives are only affordable to the wealthy.

When a person uploads someone else's memory, they gain access to the memories and experiences of that individual. They can recognize things they never encountered in real life, making it a difficult decision to let someone else's memories into one's own head.

Struggling with loneliness, Ara stumbles upon a locket that once belonged to her late mother. Inside the locket, she finds a tiny piece of paper with a four-digit number and the text "for Ara." Intrigued, Ara tries to decipher the meaning of the number, considering various possibilities such as a street number, telephone number, or coordinates. After exhausting all ideas, she memorizes the number, understanding that it is the only thing her mother left behind. Little does she know that this four-digit number will change her life forever.

Some time later, Ara discovers a mysterious and classic-looking safe in the storage area of the lab. Paying no initial attention to it, she eventually notices a keypad that requires a four-digit PIN to open. Remembering the four-digit number from her mother's locket, Ara decides to try it on the safe. To her surprise, the safe opens, revealing a mysterious memory drive that captivates her attention. The drive bears a label that reads "Most Confidential Information for You," intensifying Ara's curiosity. Although she had promised herself never to upload any memory drive into her own mind, her desire to uncover the secret contained within this drive becomes her priority.

Unable to resist, Ara sits in the lab chair, places the memory drive into the machine, and sets the timer for the upload. Within a minute, she loses consciousness as the memory is completely uploaded. Now possessing confidential information that could be of great significance, Ara realizes that her mother was part of a secret organization called the Ephemeral. Formed by the government to combat the rise of robotics, alien invasion, and artificial intelligence, the Ephemeral was initially intended as a temporary organization but has endured due to the challenges faced in saving the world from an organized artificial intelligent entity sent from space, known as the Blottoom code.