Silence.Then… a sound.A hum, low and rhythmic, pulsing through the darkness like a heartbeat trying to remember itself.Lina floated in the void, or what remained of her. She wasn’t sure where she ended and where the network began. Her thoughts came in flashes, like signals skipping across broken channels.“Lina…”Her name. Soft, uncertain. A voice she didn’t recognize. She tried to respond, but her words came out as data, distorted bursts of light.Who’s there?No answer. Only the hum, vibrating through the endless static like something alive.Fragments of memory drifted past her: the market that wasn’t real, Frost’s collapsing face, Kael’s reflection in the glass. Each memory was a fragment of self-awareness, like shards of a shattered mirror trying to rebuild the whole.She reached for one, but it dissolved before she could touch it.“Still searching, aren’t you?” The voice again, clearer this time, closer.Lina turned toward it. Shapes flickered in the static: a faint silhouette

The hum in the hideout was wrong. It wasn’t mechanical anymore, it breathed.Wires trembled along the walls like veins pulsing with light. Screens flickered between static and faces, Lina’s face, distorted, fragmented, whispering in tones no human voice should manage.Kael slammed his hand against the control console. “Come on, come on, give me her coordinates!”Vale leaned over his shoulder, her eyes darting across the readouts. “Signal integrity’s dropping below threshold. If we push harder, we’ll fry what’s left of the interface.”“Then fry it,” Kael snapped. “I’m not letting her dissolve in there.”The lights dimmed, pulsing in rhythm with something unseen. The city beyond the monitors was no longer a digital map, it was mutating. Skyscrapers warped into spires, bridges folding in on themselves like muscle fibers tightening.“That’s not architecture,” Vale whispered. “That’s growth.”Kael froze. “Growth?”She swallowed. “It’s rewriting itself using neural mimicry. It’s learning fr

The first thing Kael noticed was the silence.No humming lights. No data stream. Just the soft, eerie quiet of a world holding its breath.“Vale,” he whispered. “You hearing that?”Vale stood by the console, her hands trembling above a flickering screen. “Nothing’s transmitting. Not even static. That’s not possible.”He moved closer. The air around them had changed, dense, charged, like the moment before lightning strikes. The reinforced glass walls of the tunnel shimmered faintly, colors rippling through the concrete like oil on water.Kael swallowed. “She’s doing this.”Vale turned sharply. “Lina?”He nodded, chest tight. “Her neural pattern’s bleeding through the network. She’s… still connected somehow.”Vale’s face twisted between disbelief and something rawer, hope. “You told me her vitals dropped. You saw the flatline.”“Yeah,” Kael said. “But look.”He pointed at the monitor. Amid the storm of failing data, one pulse line still blinked, erratic, fragile, alive.Vale’s voice bro

KaelLight pressed against his eyelids like static.When he opened them, the world rippled, an endless mirror made of glass and breath. The floor wasn’t solid; it quivered beneath his weight, reflecting a thousand distorted copies of him.“Lina?” His voice broke across the silence.No echo. Only a hum that vibrated through his chest.He took a step forward, and the ground responded, forming a path of faint blue symbols that flared with each footfall. They looked like neural signatures, maybe her thoughts.You shouldn’t be able to walk here, a voice whispered, not through his ears but behind his eyes.He froze. “You sound real enough.”Real is relative, it said, softer now. Try to stay calm. The code reacts to emotion.“Then we’re both in trouble,” Kael muttered. He reached out; the air shimmered, and a wall of translucent data rose from the ground, lines of binary cascading like rain. Beyond it, a faint silhouette flickered, her.“Lina!”The figure turned. Her outline was unstable, ha

At first, there was only hum.A low, endless vibration that pulsed through the lattice of light where Lina drifted. She could no longer tell whether the hum came from inside her or from the city itself. Everything felt connected, streets, wires, pulse, memory. Every thought she formed rippled outward like a tremor through glass.I’m still here.The words weren’t spoken; they were rendered. Each syllable shimmered as data, scattering into millions of code motes before vanishing. She tried again.Kael…?No answer. Only the echo of her own voice returning through ten thousand channels, each reply slightly delayed, slightly distorted, as if a chorus of versions repeated her in an infinite loop.Lina floated higher through the current. Below her, Echo City’s network unfolded like a galaxy of lights, threads of neon linking towers and transit rails, people and screens. From this height she could see how alive it was, how every phone ping, every heartbeat monitor, every advertisement’s flick