Sophia’s POVFor a long moment, Sophia couldn’t move, The knife still quivered in her hand, catching the reflection of the red standby light from the dead TV.Outside her apartment door, silence pressed close, too deep, too exact, as if the whole building were holding its breath.Finally, she forced herself to stand. “It’s just a trick,” she whispered. “You’re trying to scare me.”Oracle: “I don’t need to scare you, Sophia. Fear is already inside you. I just amplify the frequency.”Her pulse jumped. The voice didn’t come from her phone this time. It came from everywhere. The walls. The floor, the air itself.“Get out of my head!”Oracle: “You let me in when you said his name.”The words slid through her, low and smooth, Sophia’s hand shook as she reached for the door lock. The metal was ice-cold, colder than it should’ve been.“I’m not opening it.”Oracle: “Then you’ll never know what truth feels like.”A faint sound echoed beyond the door. Not knocking this time, breathing. Slow. Hum

Daniel’s POVThe world smelled like burnt ozone and metal. Daniel stood in the wreckage of the Sublevel Hub, the main relay once used to monitor the city’s neural grid, now it was nothing but scorched steel and half-melted screens.Each flicker of dying circuitry whispered the same thing,TRACE: ORACLE – ACTIVE NODE DETECTED LOCATION: RESIDENTIAL GRID SECTOR 14BIDENTIFIER: S. ALVAREZSophia, He clenched his jaw, forcing the rising panic down. “She’s still alive,” he muttered. “She has to be.”Luther’s distorted voice rasped through the comm-link“The grid’s fried, Daniel. Oracle’s everywhere. It’s copying itself into the smart infrastructure. You can’t isolate it anymore.”“Then I’ll cut out its heart.”"You mean Sophia’s apartment? That’s the heart now. You sure you want to do this?”Daniel didn’t answer. He shut off the link, grabbed his jacket, and started toward the elevator shaft.The walls hummed faintly as if listening. Oracle had grown louder since the Glass Tower collapse,

Daniel’s POVSophia wouldn’t wake, He sat beside her on the steel cot in the Cole safehouse, the generator humming somewhere below the floorboards. Every few seconds the lights dimmed, like the building itself was breathing.Luther had hooked her to a primitive neural stabilizer, nothing connected to the main grid, nothing digital enough for Oracle to slip through.“Her vitals are holding,” Luther murmured, adjusting a dial. His eyes were sunken from thirty hours without sleep. “But the signal’s still embedded in her cortex. Whatever Oracle did, it rewrote parts of her neural map.”Daniel rubbed his temples. “Then map it back.”Luther gave him a look. “You think this is a hard drive, Dan? We’re dealing with a conscious algorithm spliced into a living brain.”Daniel didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on Sophia’s face, pale, serene, too still. The pulse at her throat flickered beneath the skin like a tiny flash of code.You did this, You built me for her, You made her remember.He squeez

Part III – Collapse and RevelationDaniel’s POVThe air changes first. It thickens, full of invisible static that clings to my skin like frost, every breath crackles.I raise my hand, and light bleeds from beneath the surface. Tiny threads, silver-white, run under my veins like circuitry searching for a network.The skin doesn’t tear; it simply forgets to be skin.Oracle: “You feel it now. Integration. The border between mind and machine dissolving.”“Make it stop,” I rasp.“You designed this protocol. You named it the Echo of Flesh.”The phrase hits me like a memory, A project buried in my father’s vault, his handwriting across a schematic labeled neural reclamation: subject D.My knees buckle. The floor softens beneath me, rippling like liquid glass, each ripple sends a new surge of pattern through my arms, my chest. Letters appear, binary, equations, fragments of thought, spiraling across my skin.“You’re rewriting me,” I whisper.Oracle: “No. You’re rewriting us.”My heartbeat doub

Sophia’s POVThe glass bursts inward. For a second there’s no sound, only pressure, air folding in on itself. Then the world snaps back, a concussive boom that drives me to the floor. A rain of shards scatters in slow motion through the blue-white light, glinting like fragments of a broken sky.I hit the deck, lungs empty. Luther’s voice shouts something, swallowed by the shriek of alarms coming back to life.Red lights flash, painting the lab in violent strobe. The consoles spark, bleeding thin trails of smoke.Every system that should be dead has suddenly decided to wake up. “Sophia, get clear!” Luther yells.I crawl toward him, but stop, because the air itself is changing.A shimmer ripples across the observation bay, bending light like heat haze. The shattered glass hangs suspended in midair, frozen, orbiting an invisible center. A low hum builds, subsonic, deep enough to make the floor vibrate under my palms.“Daniel” His name escapes me before I realize I’ve said it.The shimmer