Your gloved hand jabs at the emergency pause control while your other activates the facial recognition subroutine. The Archives' database whirs to life, cross-referencing the fleeting clear image of the woman's face against petabytes of corporate records, surveillance footage, and black-market biometric data. The results splash across your retinal display in crimson urgency: NO MATCH FOUND. Not in any official database at least.

The woman's amber eyes seem to stare directly at you through time itself as the memory stabilizes in freeze-frame. Your mnemo-scanner detects an anomaly - the memory shouldn't be this vivid after corporate tampering. The black case in younger Tanaka's hands pulses with that same unnatural rhythm, casting jagged shadows across the alley walls. A warning klaxon sounds as the scanner detects unauthorized encryption layers buried deeper in Tanaka's hippocampus.

Mr. Tanaka's body convulses violently in the chair, his mouth forming silent words that match exactly what his younger self is saying in the memory: 'The Hannya Project...' The case springs open fully now, revealing what looks like a hybrid of circuitry and human tissue forming a perfect sphere. Your scanner identifies it immediately - a forbidden neuro-implant from the AI wars, banned in forty-seven systems.

The woman reaches toward the frozen memory-you with hands that suddenly glitch between five fingers and seven. Your equipment wasn't designed to handle this level of cognitive corruption. The overhead lights in your lab begin flickering in time with the sphere's pulsations as reality itself seems to thin around the edges.