Jackson Perreira sat in his worn armchair, the city's neon bleeding through the grimy window of his apartment. His gaze drifted to a framed photo on the wall - a street scene from his youth, taken near his family home before everything changed. But now, looking closer, he noticed something odd: one of the storefronts had shifted. Where there used to be a bodega, now stood an unfamiliar shop, its sign unreadable in the faded light.

He rubbed his eyes, thinking it must be a trick of memory. These things happened, after all, as time and age played their tricks on recollection. But when he looked again, the change remained. A detail, once sharp, now blurred into something alien.

It was a faint tremor, not a quake, but enough to make the ground beneath his own past feel unstable. Jackson's hand drifted unconsciously to the locket around his neck - another relic of that distant time before the world had turned harsh and unforgiving. He felt the comforting weight of it between his fingers as he tried to shake off a growing unease.

He'd seen this kind of thing before in his work, not just with people but with things too - objects that somehow changed without anyone quite being able to explain how or why. Identity erosion was what Nomis Lien had called it once during one of their late-night conversations about the unseen wounds of the city and its digital currents.

Jackson reached for his comm device on the side table, thumbing through his contacts until he found Nomis’s name. With a sigh, he hit dial, waiting as it rang several times before going to voicemail. He left a message asking Nomis if they had time for an appointment sometime soon - there were some things he needed help making sense of.

Setting down the comm device again after ending the call, Jackson looked back towards that photo on the wall where pieces of his history hung precariously like shards ready to fall away entirely. He knew better than most how fragile identity could be here in this neon-drenched labyrinth they called home...