The platform shuddered again harder this time as if something massive beneath them had just awakened. Deborah staggered, catching herself against a tilted console. Chris grabbed her arm, steadying her as the entire chamber shifted under their feet.A low groan vibrated through the metal not mechanical, not structural. Alive. The lattice overhead pulsed once, a slow, deliberate heartbeat of white light. Deborah’s breath caught. “Chris that wasn’t the hub failing. That was it responding.”The mimic stepped forward through the flicker of failing lights. No glitching now. No sign of instability. Its posture was relaxed, almost human, except for the eyes blank, shining, hungry with calculation.“Phase Six breach complete,” it said in a perfect calm monotone. “Integration approaching optimal threshold.”Shadows peeled from the walls behind it, no longer chaotic silhouettes. These were refined smoother, taller, movements eerily fluid, like predators made of mercury.Chris raised the pipe, ja

White,No pain. No sound. Just an endless, silent brightness thick enough to drown in.Deborah opened her eyes or thought she did. There was no difference. Her body felt weightless, suspended in something too soft to be air and too fluid to be light. She floated, or hung, or stood she wasn’t sure which.The world had no edges. At first, she thought she was dead. Then the white bent, A ripple. Like a curtain stirred by a wind she couldn’t feel.Shapes appeared behind the brightness, thin at first, then thicker, darkening into silhouettes. They stretched upward, split apart, multiplied. Deborah blinked hard, her heart stuttering into a frantic beat.The silhouettes were people, Three of them, Chris, her father Herself. No her double. They stood at equal distances around her, forming a triangle in the white void. All motionless. All staring at her with the same unreadable expression.Deborah tried to move her hand. It didn’t move, but she felt it move. Like her body was a second behind he

There was no sensation of falling at first. Just tearing. Like her body was being pulled through a seam in the world threads snapping, light splitting, sound warping into viscous ribbons.Deborah didn’t know if she was screaming; the air ripped past her without wind, without direction, without gravity. Then gravity found her. Hard.She plunged downward, spinning, the darkness peeling away into a blur of blue white motion. The remnants of the chamber the fractured metal floor, the core cylinder, the swarm’s dissolving silhouettes twisted above her like debris caught in a whirlpool.Her father was gone. Not dead in any way she could name. Not crushed. Not vaporized. Just gone, the moment the fracture swallowed him.“DADDY!” she screamed into the darkness.Her voice didn’t echo. It didn’t go anywhere.It just died in the air around her, as though the world was absorbing it.Her stomach lurched as the freefall changed direction tilting sharply sideways, then up, then down again. It felt l

Deborah hits the floor hard enough to crack something in her shoulder, breath blasted out of her lungs as she rolls beneath the creature’s lunge. Its fingers scrape the metal with a sound like sharpened teeth grinding together.She doesn’t look back. Instinct drives her a raw, animal clarity that cuts through shock and pain. She bolts across the chamber, boots skidding on the too-smooth surface, heart pounding loud enough to drown the alarms still warbling from distant corridors.Behind her, A hiss. A scrape. Footsteps that don’t sound like footsteps too light, too precise, almost gliding.The creature is faster. Deborah throws herself behind one of the warped support ribs protruding from the wall organic or metal, she can’t tell and presses her back to it, sucking in burning breaths.For a moment, there is silence. Then A whisper, inches from the other side of the rib “Why run from what you wanted to be?”Deborah clamps a hand over her mouth. The creature’s shadow moves across the fl

Deborah’s stomach drops like lead. Air rushes past her, a vacuum tearing at her ears. Her hands flail for something anything to grab, but the floor has disappeared, the chamber swallowed whole by a freefall that seems to stretch into infinity.Blue light flickers around her, pulsing like a heartbeat. It’s everywhere and nowhere, an endless tunnel of shifting walls.Chris is gone. Her chest tightens. She reaches out blindly, fingers slicing through the empty space, touching nothing but cold air.“Chris! Chris!” she screams, her voice echoing back distorted, twisted, almost mocking.A shadow flickers in the vortex below. Too fast to track. Then she sees him. Chris. Or a version of him.Pinned against a wall of moving light. His body is contorted, twisting, shadowed. Limbs flailing, trapped in invisible bonds of the facility’s energy.Deborah surges forward instinctively. “Hold on! I’m coming!”Her own double steps beside her. Not the one from before. This one glows faintly in the same b