Episode 5 · Kaiba

Kaiba

A man wakes up in a wrecked room with no memories and a hole punched clean through his chest. The only things he owns are a name, Kaiba, and a locket with a woman's face inside. He doesn't know either of them yet. In this universe memories are physical objects with weight, color, shape. Bodies break, but the self can be pulled out and dropped into a new one, which means the rich buy fresh shells and live forever while the poor sell their own bodies to eat. An electrolytic cloud hangs between the two halves of society, and nobody crosses it. Then Kaiba stumbles into a rotting village of people who have nothing left to sell, and the hunt for whoever he used to be begins. He moves from planet to planet, collecting other people's stories, learning how easily a memory can be bought, stolen, rewritten. Every stranger he meets seems to know a piece of him. So what exactly was he before he woke up, and why does someone want him dead before he remembers?