Replay by Azeez Aregbesola
Synopsis
“Thrilling…non-stop action!”– Geek Digest
“Intense pace, intricate plot, complex characters…” – Bookause Reviews
In the future, one corporation controls everything… even your memories.
Meridian’s miracle drug, Replay, lets you relive your happiest moments in perfect detail and delete the ones you’d rather forget. The world calls it freedom. Meridian calls it progress. But every Replay session uploads your memories straight into their servers, giving them the power to rewrite lives… or erase them entirely.
When Meridian deletes the woman he loves, Richard Uche becomes the only person alive who remembers she ever existed. A former engineer with an AI‑boosted 198 IQ, Richard knows exactly how dangerous Replay really is — because he helped build it.
Now Meridian is preparing a global “upgrade” that will overwrite billions of minds in one flawless stroke. If Richard doesn’t stop them, humanity’s past, and future, will belong to a single corporation forever.
To fight back, he must outsmart the system he created, break into the world’s most secure memory vault, and uncover the truth Meridian tried to wipe from existence.
REPLAY is a high‑velocity dystopian techno‑thriller about a world addicted to forgetting, and the one man willing to remember.
1
The sky above the “Basement” level was a jagged, industrial hallucination, a ceiling of interlocking corporate bridges dripping with toxic grease and the constant, electric hum of a billion gigabytes of stolen data. Down in the lightless canyons of the Tier-3 slums, where the sun hadn’t touched the pavement since the world went to hell, the armoured truck tore through the rain-slicked streets like a bat out of a furnace. Its tires, thick, puncture-proof slabs of synthetic rubber, screamed a metallic eulogy against carbon-reinforced asphalt that had been cracked, fused, and scarred by decades of urban warfare.
Behind them, the darkness was punctuated by the predatory, cold-blue glare of two black pursuit vehicles. These were sleek, obsidian nightmares, low-slung and hissing with static discharge as they hovered inches above the wet ground. On their
hoods, twin turrets began to cycle with a high-pitched whine, a sound like a thousand angry hornets, before spitting bolts of superheated violet light into the smog.
The first volley missed the truck’s rear cabin, instead striking a row of derelict vending machines. The impact was absolute chaos. The machines didn’t just explode; they turned into a white-hot spray of liquid metal and sugar-syrup that painted the alleyway in shades of lethal neon. Shards of smart-glass and jagged rebar rained down from the upper tiers as overhead drones, hovering like mechanical carrion birds, dropped heavy tungsten rods that hit the pavement with the force of localized earthquakes.
Each strike sent a bone-shaking shockwave through the truck’s hull, a deafening, rhythmic clatter that vibrated through the floorboards and into the very marrow of the passengers’ bones. The sound was the hammer of a vengeful God striking an anvil of desperate men. Fire roared in the truck’s slipstream as the pursuit rounds ignited the ozone-choked air, creating a corridor of flickering, orange flame that licked at the vehicle’s armoured flanks.
Inside the cabin, it was a pressurized tomb of pure, unadulterated fear. The internal alarm lights strobed a frantic, rhythmic red, casting long, monstrous shadows against the reinforced walls.
The air was a suffocating cocktail of burnt rubber, electrical ozone, and the sour, sharp tang of cold sweat.
The passengers clung to the roll bars, their knuckles white, and their breath coming in shallow, jagged gasps. A young man, his face masked by a dirty scavenger’s scarf, whimpered as he fixed his eyes on the rear-view monitor. He watched the black barrels of the pursuing machines levelling once more, their muzzles glowing with the heat of the next kill. He saw the flash, a strobe of violet death, and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the void. The truck lurched violently as a round clipped the rear bumper, sending a spray of sparks through the cabin’s air vents like a swarm of angry fireflies.
But in the passenger seat, one figure sat unmoved by the encroaching apocalypse.
He was a mountain of broad shoulders and quiet, terrifying defiance. His dark skin, slicked with a fine sheen of rain and sweat, reflected the neon chaos bleeding through the armoured slits of the windows like a living obsidian mirror. He wasn’t just in the truck; he seemed to be the anchor keeping the whole world from spinning into the abyss.
He lazily puffed on a thick, hand-rolled blunt of Nightshade marijuana, the pungent, herbal scent cutting through the chemical stink of the cabin. The cherry glowed like a dying star in the dim, vibrating interior. The sapphire-blue smoke didn’t scatter; it swirled in mesmerizing, heavy patterns around his head, seemingly governed by its own gravity. It defied the violent jolts and the 45-degree swerves as the truck drifted through the ruins of a collapsed subway entrance, tires smoking, engine screaming.
Despite the plasma fire melting the world outside, despite the sirens wailing like banshees in the distance, he leaned back against the headrest and let out a low, melodic laugh. It was a deep, rhythmic sound, a bass-heavy rumble that carried the ancient, unyielding soul of the Lagos mainland. It was the laugh of a man who had seen the end of the world three times and found it lacked flavour.
“O boy, look at them,” he murmured, his voice a rich, gravelly baritone flavoured with a thick, unmistakable Yoruba accent. He exhaled a massive plume of blue smoke that momentarily obscured the carnage in the side mirror, a pursuit vehicle clipping a concrete pylon and spinning into a massive, roiling fireball. “They think they can catch the wind with a net. Small boys playing big man game. They have forgotten that the ground down here does not belong to the towers. It belongs to the ghosts.”
He turned his head slowly, his eyes bloodshot from the marijuana but piercing with a predatory clarity. He looked at the terrified faces behind him, the scavenger, the wounded woman clutching her side, with a look that was half-pity and half-ferocity. His grin widened, cold and absolute, revealing teeth that seemed too white for such a dark, grime-covered world.
The lead pursuit vehicle accelerated, its nose-cone almost touching the truck’s rear bumper. The driver of the obsidian machine, a masked enforcer with a silver-nitrate face-plate, leaned out of the window, his arm-cannon glowing with the build-up of a terminal charge. The air around the pursuit vehicle began to shimmer and warp with the sheer heat of the build-up.
The man in the passenger seat didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look back. He reached over with his massive, scarred hand and slammed the driver’s foot down onto the accelerator, pinning it through the floorboards.
“Drive, o boy!” he roared, his eyes fixed on the wall of fire ahead. “Drive like the Devil is trying to collect his rent and you are three months behind!”
The truck’s engine, a salvaged hybrid screaming on a mixture of nitro-methane and pure desperation, let out a guttural, prehistoric roar. The twin turbos spooled up with a sound like a jet engine taking flight in a concrete tunnel. The vehicle didn’t just speed up; it lunged. It surged headfirst into a wall of fire and memory, the kinetic energy turning it into a battering ram of pure, unadulterated spite.
The impact with the perimeter gate was a symphony of rending metal and shattered smart-glass. The truck didn’t stop to negotiate; it punched through the carbon-fiber barricade as if it were made of wet tissue paper. Behind them, the pursuit vehicles were caught in the vortex of the explosion, their magnetic stabilizers failing as the debris field choked their intakes and sent them spinning into the dark.
The man took one final, deep pull from the blunt, the blue smoke filling his lungs as they breached the dead-zone of the industrial district. He threw the roach out into the wind, watching it spiral like a falling star into the darkness of the lower wards. He reached down and clicked the safety off a high-powered sidearm with a chillingly mechanical clack. The sound was louder than the gunfire outside, a definitive punctuation mark in the middle of the chaos. He shifted his weight, the leather of his seat groaning under him, and he looked at them with a gaze that had stared down death and made it blink.
“Who needs hope,” he whispered, “when you can bend Faith back over and make her scream.”
