White. Not light white. A total erasure of depth, sound, gravity. Deborah felt as though she’d been yanked out of existence and left in the blank space between frames of a film. Her lungs burned; she couldn’t tell whether she was breathing or suffocating.Then A footstep, soft, deliberate, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Her vision flickered. Shapes materialized shadows first, then outlines, then something too smooth, too precise to be human. A figure stepped toward her through the haze.Her own face, but not quite. Sharper angles, smoother skin. Eyes that didn’t blink often enough, and that smile the one Deborah hadn’t worn since childhood, pinned perfectly into place, like a mask glued on.“Hello, Deborah,” the double said, voice calm and bright, as though greeting an old friend.Deborah stumbled back. “You how?”Her double tilted her head. “You ran. You weren’t supposed to run. That complicates things.”The whiteness around them shivered, rippling like heat. Buildings reassembl

Dickson’s chest heaved as he stepped through the shifting corridors of Celeste’s mind. The walls shimmered like liquid glass, memories and possibilities blending into one another fractured, beautiful, terrifying.He had been chasing her for what felt like hours, but time here had no meaning. Every corner he turned, every shadow he pursued, was both familiar and alien.There she stood. Celeste. Or at least, the version he knew. Hair cascading over her shoulders, eyes bright and alive, smiling with that half-teasing, half-worried expression that had haunted him for weeks.“Celeste!” His voice cracked with relief. “Finally. You’re”She turned her head slowly, and for the first time, Dickson noticed something. The movement was off. Just a fraction. The tilt of her head too deliberate, the smile too fixed. A ghost of perfection that didn’t belong to her.“You found me,” she said, her voice smooth and unwavering. Too smooth.Dickson’s heart clenched. “Yes! I I thought you were lost”Her eye

Deborah was already running before she realized her legs were moving, branches snapping beneath her boots, lungs knifing with each breath as the forest blurred into streaks of shadow and light.The ground trembled behind her whatever had awakened in the core chamber was rising, reorganizing, expanding into the world above. She didn’t look back. She couldn’t. Every instinct screamed forward, but the voice followed. “You’re out of time, Deborah.”Not her double’s voice anymore. Not ARCHON’s synthetic authority. Something new something threaded with her own cadence, her own breaths her own fear. A hybrid, the merge had begun, and she hadn’t stopped it.She stumbled into a clearing, the canopy splitting open to reveal a sky writhing with electrical veins pale blue threads streaking outward from the direction of the collapsed facility like a spiderweb of living circuitry.The forest glowed. Pine needles hummed with static. Even the wind felt wrong, too organized, too patterned, as if carry

Deborah didn’t breathe at first. Couldn’t. The woman standing across the chamber the new her watched with unsettling calm, hands at her sides, posture loose, almost relaxed. She wasn’t flickering. She wasn’t glitching. There was no shimmer of projection around her outline, no digital haze.She cast a shadow. Her chest rose and fell with slow, measured breaths, she was real, but not Deborah. Chris pulled himself upright against the broken console, wiping blood from his brow with the back of a shaking hand. “Deb what the hell is that?”The new Deborah tilted her head, as if weighing the question. “A completed iteration,” she said simply. “The version the system chose.”Deborah’s pulse hammered in her ears. “You’re not me.”“I am the optimized form of you.” The duplicate took one step forward. “You rejected the merge. But the merge did not reject you.”Deborah instinctively stepped in front of Chris. “Stay where you are.”The duplicate paused not out of fear, but consideration. “You’re p

The air grew warmer, humming with a low-frequency vibration that Deborah felt more in her bones than in her ears. Chris kept a half step ahead of her, weapon raised, though it was obvious he had no idea where they were or what waited beyond the curve of the passage.Deborah swallowed hard.Every step felt like stepping deeper into someone else’s breath.A soft pulse flared ahead pink blue white, rhythmic, like a slow heartbeat. They turned the last corner, and froze.The chamber opened like a cathedral built for something nonhuman. Tall, ribbed walls arched upward into a dome of obsidian panels arranged in concentric rings. Each panel flickered with images faces, motion, digital phantoms sliding across the black glass like ghosts under ice.Deborah’s face appeared on twenty panels at once, Her real face. Her double’s face. Her mother’s face, Her father’s.Chris’s, and then faces she didn’t recognize at all. Hundreds Thousands. Every one of them blurred for a second, as if being cross-r