JOURNAL ENTRY – PHILIP HARROWFIELD // JULY 27, 2097

 

Journal Entry – July 27, 2097 – Paris

Paris. City of lights, of layers, of contradictions.

Evie, Vanya, and I arrived ahead of the others. We touched down in the inner arrondissements—those heavily curated, half-museum, half-arcology districts where the past is preserved, remixed, and sold at a premium. A half-hour ride in the other direction, and the rest of the metroplex is crumbling, a digital ghost town where glitched AR ads hover above cracked concrete and burned-out cafés.

But I came here for something very specific.

The simsense opera Red Sands, White Profits has been packing houses across Europe—an avant-garde historical hallucination of the First Corporate War told through the resurrected memories of long-dead CEOs. It's vulgar, brilliant, unsettling. Everything modern art ought to be.

Vanya confirmed what I suspected—there's magic in it. Not during the show itself, but in its making. She can't say more. Her talents lie in shaping spells, not in communing with the dead. So I tracked down the maestro: Philippe Foch, genius, fraud, necromancer, artist.

He admitted, after some coaxing and flexing of nuyen, that they had indeed used summoned spirits to inspire the production. Actual echoes of the dead—executives, shareholders, mid-level managers from a war that shattered the world and birthed the corporate age. But the spirits were not channeled during performances. “We do not marionette the dead,” he said. “We listen. We craft. We perform.”

I believe him. But I also see the potential. I want Red Sands signed to Starway Elite. And I want to know what else these souls have to say.

Which leads me to her.

Foch agreed to a séance. We tried to reach Selena Mars—the actress portraying Maya Torres, the character from Phoenix Rising. The séance... failed. Nothing happened. Not in meatspace.

But later, in the Matrix, Wizkid saw her. Not the actress—the character. A full technomantic echo. She had no recollection of ever being anything but Maya Torres. It was her. It is her.

And now I am convinced: Maya’s actor was likely one of the very first technomancers. She played the role of a technomancer, yes—but perhaps she didn’t need to act at all.

The soul, the echo, the self—these things are slippery. Egypt gave me gods. India gave me lifetimes. Samarkand gave me resonance that survives death. And now Paris gives me ghosts.

I’ve seen enough to know: death is only a phase. And art, it seems, is one of the ways we reincarnate.