Fade

In a near future stained by luxury and loss, Ada Veldt is a celebrated architect—not of buildings, but of worlds. Her virtual mausoleums offer the rich and the haunted what money cannot buy: erasure, reinvention, sanctuary from memory itself. Each commission is part confessional, part exorcism, a realm where grief can be rewritten and the past glitches gently to white.

But Ada cannot escape what she sets in motion. As she designs for others the perfect forgetting, fragments of her own history begin to surface within her greatest creation—a virtual palace that unravels both its guest and its maker. With her artificial assistant Luther by her side and her mother’s shadow stitched into every line of code, Ada must confront the question at the heart of all her work: is forgetting a mercy, or the purest ghost of all?

Fade is a novel of memory and recursion, haunted technology and beautiful decay. Here, every echo lingers, and the most dangerous rooms are the ones we build to survive ourselves.

The air in the abandoned taxidermy museum refused to move, pressed flat by the weight of sunlight on dirty glass. Outside, tourists drifted past in summer-white linen, chasing something hopeful, but inside the gloom, Ada traced her finger along the outline where a puma’s paw had left dust on marble. She preferred meetings like this—hushed, difficult, worn—where the conversation would have to fight for every inch of meaning.

Her new client arrived ten minutes late, drifting between exhibits with the confidence of someone who expected the world to greet him as an equal. He looked expensive but pre-owned: silk shirt faded at the collar, scuffs on a platinum watchband. His eyes were hidden by sunglasses that belonged more to a poker table than the Côte d’Azur.

There was a time Ada would have hated him. But hate had costs she no longer bothered to tally. Age had stripped things down to the bone: the impulse to analyze, the taste for morbid grandeur, the way she listened for the unspoken second thought under every request.

He stopped beside a yellowed ostrich, one limp wing propped against a glass rib, and Ada watched him brace himself as if for an impact only he could sense.

“I imagine this place brings back memories,” Ada said quietly, almost to the bird.

He hesitated, then laughed without smiling. “I never had pets, only predators. My father taught me to run before I could walk. He thought prey was an attitude.”

She wondered if everyone who hired her nursed that same original wound: the knowledge that safety would be something paid for, not given.

They sat down at opposite ends of a cracked marble table. Ada, as always, waited for him to speak first.

He cleared his throat, plucked at his cuff, and let the silence stretch. “So. You build minds for people with things to forget?”

Ada stared through him, seeing overlay after overlay of the mausoleums she’d built, the private prisons disguised as elegance. “I build places where forgetting is possible, yes. But they don’t guarantee oblivion. My best work knows how to keep secrets, even from itself.”

He flinched at that—Ada always noticed when truth grazed a nerve.

Memory, for her, had always been architecture. Her mother’s rooms, packed with prosthetics and pale hands; the chill of hospitals after dark; the echo of footsteps in empty chapels as a child, counting cracks in the marble floor and hoping for ghosts. She’d learned early that survival was about arrangement, partitioning pain into shapes you could walk through, maybe even get lost inside.

The client stared at the table, as if trying to read his fate in its veins of calcite.

Ada waited.

Ada watched him let the silence sift through his thoughts—a habit she’d learned from her mother, who once said the best embalming fluid was a pause nobody could fill. It gave her time to let the scene imprint itself in her mind.

A shaft of sunlight fell across the table, pale and almost blue, picking out dust motes and the greasy print of an animal’s last lean against the marble edge. The room, with its missing eyes and shattered glass domes, had become a stage for secrets. It always did, in the end. Ada hadn’t just chosen the place to make him uncomfortable; she needed a space that told the truth even when its occupants could not.

He tapped his fingers on the surface, then met her gaze at last. “Oblivion sounds cleaner than memory, sometimes. My life is crowded. My name, even more so. There’s no room for myself in it anymore. I know you can build… insulation.” He tried to say the word with authority, but it unraveled halfway through.

She let his plea hang in the air, quietly measuring his discomfort. “Most people think insulation is emptiness,” she said. “But too much emptiness amplifies the wrong echoes. My designs don’t erase what haunts you; they just change how it resonates.”

His mouth twisted. “I’m willing to pay for silence. Or rewrite.”

“Those are rarely the same thing,” Ada replied. Her mind flicked to early commissions: the tycoon who wanted a house with no history, only to haunt it with his own absence; the heiress who tried to bury her family’s shame under a garden of ornamental bones. Truth always found the seams, eventually.

He took off his sunglasses. His eyes were surprisingly young, caught somewhere between dread and hope. “What about accidents? What if something survives?”

Now Ada smiled, and he saw for the first time the undertow in it—humor sharpened on the edge of despair. “Accidents are the only part worth trusting. Everything deliberate gets used against you. Besides, a mausoleum that never surprises is simply a vault. I build minds you can outlive, if you’re patient. Ghosts are patient.”

He stared, uncertain if he was being measured or considered for some darker enterprise.

Ada folded her hands, her thoughts drifting to the mausoleums she’d built and the private jokes she’d hidden in their blueprints—codes only a haunted person would recognize. “Tell me what you remember wanting, just once, before you learned you shouldn’t. That’s where we start.”

He looked down, suddenly young and lost. “I wanted a place where time couldn’t follow me. A room that wouldn’t keep score. Something dead, but not cold.”

Ada nodded. She saw him plainly now: another talented fugitive from his own legend, ready to pay any sum to close the distance between himself and the ache of being seen.

Outside, a bell rang, faraway and almost impossible to place. Inside, Ada prepared to architect his forgetting, stone by patient stone.

The museum’s old pipes ticked, counting down toward another silent hour, as Ada studied the man across from her—this financier whose name commanded entire provinces, yet who looked now as if every echo from childhood had come home to nest inside his ribs. In Ada, he sensed both a threat and an invitation.

She remembered her first blueprint, drawn in hospital light. She had been twelve, her thumb in a splint, her mother arguing with a nurse down the corridor. On the back of an order slip she’d mapped the contours of a silent house. Not a refuge from pain, but a place where pain could arrange itself without audience or denial. Even her childish mind craved structure, not sedation.

She wondered, as the man hesitated, whether he’d ever enjoyed being alone in a room—not lonely, but unseen. She doubted it. Most people came to her precisely because solitude, without purpose, was unbearable.

He cleared his throat, attempting formality but sounding frayed. “Tell me what you need from me. I don’t want to interfere. I just—”
He stopped, as if the rest of the sentence had betrayed him.

Ada was patient. “This process isn’t an audit. It’s a collaboration, but not an equal one. You’ll tell me about your hauntings, yes, but mostly I’ll watch and listen. The space will decide how much of you it keeps.” She paused, considering her words as tools. “You may find the shape of your forgetting is not as you’d hope.”

He seemed to flinch, but then almost smiled. “My whole life’s been curated disappointments. Design me one more. But let it be honest.”

Outside, gulls shrieked, echoing from the harbor. The sound leaked faintly through the mortar. Ada felt it skim the edges of her thoughts, mixing with older memories: her father’s hands, warm and suspiciously clean; her mother, spinning prosthetic legs into table lamps.

She reached for her battered notebook. Pages curled and foxed, bristling with notes in a spidery code not meant for archivists. “I’ll need three interviews, not here. I’ll assign you reading, and music you probably abandoned decades ago. There will be questionnaires—some written, some silent. You’ll spend time inside simulations. You might feel lost, or stretched thin. If you don’t, I’ve failed.”

He accepted the terms with a tired relief—as if expecting violence, he got only difficult therapy. “If it works—what will I remember?”

Ada smiled, something kind fighting through the habit of irony. “You’ll remember what didn’t survive. That’s always the gift.”

He folded his sunglasses, hands trembling. “Will I be happier?”

“That’s not the shape I trade in.” Her reply was gentle, final.

They both let the silence stretch, a pair of rare artifacts waiting for the meaning to settle.

Afternoon slid quietly into the spaces between their words, light smudging the marble and softening the shadows of the empty cases. Ada sat back, her chair gently creaking—an accidental punctuation she welcomed. Across the table, the client had begun to break, not in great, visible ways, but at the seams: the line of his shoulders, the meticulous line of his jaw now slack with a kind of dawning permission. He was no longer performing, just bracing for the strangeness ahead.

Ada, surveying him, felt the old twin pull: compassion stitched to her professional curiosity. She had never decided if she enjoyed watching people shed their personas, or if it only reminded her how little separated her from them. History moves in loops, her mother used to say. Ada, too, circled these patterns.

Outside, another flurry of gulls. The clatter seemed to shake something loose in the room.

“Why taxidermy?” he asked suddenly, perhaps to break the tension or perhaps because he needed distance from his last confession.

Ada considered. “My mother loved dead things. Beauty without demand. She said taxidermy is proof that devotion to form survives even after the thing itself has fled. She filled our flat with glass-eyed creatures and waited for me to accept the difference between stillness and peace.”

He nodded, looking around, trying to see the room from her memory, not his. “Peace isn’t something I ever managed.”

She allowed herself a small smile. “It rarely arrives by design.”

A pause. He ran a finger along the ring on his hand—a signet, heavy and plain. Ada wondered whose history weighed on that band. Heritage is rarely benign.

She finally asked, “Is there anyone you want this mind, this mausoleum, to exclude? Some ghosts you’d rather not share the room with?”

He hesitated, then shook his head, almost apologetic. “If they come, let them. Most only haunt me when I’m afraid I’ll vanish.”

Ada nodded, jotting something down that she’d never show him. “Every mausoleum is an invitation, in the end. Even to parts of yourself you thought you’d evicted.”

He drew a careful breath, steadier now. “How long will it take?”

She didn’t bother with numbers. “It ends when the space is honest. When I believe the residue is real.”

He almost laughed—almost. “That could take forever.”

“Some lives deserve it.” Her tone had softened. It surprised them both.

A deeper silence fell. Ada felt, as she always did at moments like these, a weightless dread. Building these enclosures for other people’s shame and longing had never lessened the load of her own. But if her memorials failed to bring peace, there was honesty in the attempt—a devotion to form, even after hope had fled.

They stood, finally, the meeting a strange ritual neither could quite name. The client extended a hand, studied the faint tremor in his fingers, then clasped hers with surprising warmth.

“I trust you’ll do what’s necessary,” he said.

Ada did not offer comfort. Instead, she offered something better—a promise to remember what needed forgetting, and build around it.

In the failing light, they parted—two odd relics, each carrying away a new shadow, and the room, always just itself, settling back into the calm of after.

The commission that changed Ada Veldt’s life arrived with the silence of a confession. The message had no name, no signature, only a sentence that repeated in her mind for days: Can you build a world that forgets me as I forget myself?

She waited before replying. Some requests announced themselves with violence, begging to be diagnosed and excised, but this one whispered, burrowing under her skin. The sender—she learned, eventually, to think of him as the Director—had once been notorious for conjuring nightmares on film, orchestrating fear with the flick of a shadow, a flood of whispering static, a gesture held one moment too long. The world, once eager to be haunted by him, had grown cruel, then cold. Now he wanted not oblivion, but an architecture that would allow his regrets to evaporate gently, with artistry and ache.

She agreed and in doing so became both architect and confessor, a keeper of wounds and their impossible silences. For months she gathered what others might call data, but she named residue. His emails, unsent, gathered dust in encrypted archives; old scripts, abandoned halfway through, lingered in the humid ghost of cloud storage. He sent voice memos in the dead hours of morning, sometimes lucent with memory, sometimes dense, indecipherable, as if he were speaking through water. She listened to them all, mapping the topography of his longing and loss. She came to believe that every haunted mind invents its own mausoleum—his would merely be built with more precision.

She designed a world, not a house: a VR realm with boundaries as uncertain as islands glimpsed through fog. There was an entrance that offered no promise of return, a foyer lined with mirrors that refracted not the self, but moments unremembered. Corridors wound themselves into knots, tightening or dissolving as his focus wavered. In place of windows, there were shifting projections of childhood skies, never quite blue, always trembling on the edge of rain.

In this world, Ada embedded artificial hauntings—ghosts of lost actors, fragments of laughter in empty stairwells, the persistent presence of Luther, sometimes observer, sometimes adversary. Every gesture she coded, every sequence of forgetting and remembering, bore her handwriting, inflected by her own inheritance of sorrow. When the Director stepped into the world for the first time, sensors mapped not only his neural patterns, but the hesitancies of his breath, the microdoses of restraint and yearning that made up his interior weather.

The mausoleum was never meant to be stable. Books faded to blank spines each time his memory recoiled. Gardens unfurled petals in monochrome, blooming then dissolving at the faintest quiver of unease. Soundtrack choices changed hour to hour—sometimes the faint melody of a lullaby Ada’s mother had sung her, other times only static, thick as wool, suffocating narrative and comfort alike.

Ada obsessed over the decay algorithm—what survived, what slipped away when it was barely touched. She wrote code that learned to excise pain differently each time: a confession, once spoken, might echo, fracture, or simply dissolve. The Director wandered through this shifting reality, sometimes hunting for the places he’d hidden guilt or delight, sometimes losing himself, grateful for every erasure. The sessions lengthened. Reports from the outside trickled and then stopped.

In quiet moments, Ada would check the logs, sometimes finding glitches she hadn’t planned: a corridor spelled out in her mother’s voice, a scene in the chapel that seemed to shudder with the weather of Ada’s own nightmares, not his. She called them errors at first, then accepted them as tribute—as a sign that hers was the hand shaping the world’s forgetting as much as the client’s. Even her refusal became structure.

No critics would ever tour these rooms, but the ripples spread fast and wide. The wealthy, the wounded, the infamous all came knocking, eager to buy their own erasure. Ada, praised as revolutionary, pooled her reputation and her guilt in equal proportion, knowing that the more these mausoleums succeeded in forgetting, the more fully they remembered her. Now, in sleepless hours between commissions, she dreamed of a palace built for her own slow unraveling. Each corridor no longer held the Director’s regrets, but her own—a world folding in on itself, dimming pixel by pixel in perfect, recursive sorrow.