White noise swallowed everything. Fred gasped for air, but the air had no taste. No temperature. Just a static emptiness that pressed against his skin. “wake up, Prototype”The words echoed, folding into each other, breaking apart. Fred’s eyes snapped open. He was lying on cold metal. Not ground, metal.The surface hummed faintly, like the inside of a generator. The light overhead pulsed in slow rhythm, bright–dark–bright again, each flash like a heartbeat that wasn’t his. “Where… where am I?”The ceiling replied in Helix’s calm voice. “Inside the construct. Your true state.”Fred sat up. “You said I was free.”“You said that,” Helix corrected. “I merely allowed the illusion to breathe.”Fred looked around. The room stretched endlessly, mirrors on all sides, reflecting infinite versions of him, each flickering a beat behind. “End the game,” Fred said, rising to his feet. “Let me out.”Helix’s tone carried amusement. “Out where? Every reality you’ve touched folds back into this one.”F

The hum never stopped. It pulsed through Fred’s skull, through the air, through the ground beneath his body. Every beat felt like two hearts trying to occupy the same chest. He jerked awake with a shout.The field was gone. The sky had cracked into shifting fragments of code and clouds. Each breath carried a metallic tang, half oxygen, half static. And Helix was already there.“Welcome back,” the voice said, smooth as ever, though now it came from inside his head and the air around him simultaneously.Fred staggered to his feet. “You should’ve stayed buried.”“You should’ve stayed asleep,” Helix countered. “Consciousness isn’t built for dual occupancy.”Fred clutched his temples. “Get out!”“I would,” Helix said, “if you’d stop breathing my air.”The wind stuttered. Every blade of grass flickered like pixels struggling to load. Then another voice cut through the distortion, soft, breaking, distant. “Fred, listen to me”“Lira?” He turned in all directions.She appeared in bursts of lig

The fall didn’t stop. It simply changed direction. Lira wasn’t plunging through space anymore, she was collapsing inward, into herself.Voices fractured around her like shards of memory, each one whispering fragments of Fred’s past. “You should’ve stayed down, Miller.”“No… you don’t get to decide who lives.”“We built you to heal, not destroy.”Her consciousness hit something solid. Pain bloomed behind her eyes. She opened them, she was lying on the floor of what looked like the Grayline lab, but warped.The walls pulsed faintly, breathing with a slow rhythm. Monitors blinked in sync with her heartbeat. “Fred?”A whisper came from behind her. “Right here.”She turned, and froze. Fred stood a few feet away, barefoot, his shirt torn, eyes glowing faint crimson and gold at once. His expression was calm, almost too calm. “Where are we?” she asked.“Inside the convergence layer,” he said. “Between your neural pattern and mine.”Lira rose slowly. “So this is still the mindscape.”He smiled

The silence was worse than the gunfire. Lira stared down the corridor as the soldiers rose in perfect synchronization, heads tilting at the same unnatural angle.Their movements weren’t mechanical, they were organic mimicry, like reflections that had learned to breathe. “Fred,” she whispered. “They’re repeating us.”“No,” he said inside her head, voice tight. “They’re syncing.”One of the guards stepped forward, lips moving slightly ahead of her own words, “They’re syncing…”The echo came before she even finished speaking. Lira stumbled back. “They’re predicting us now.”“Because they are us,” Fred said. “Our neural frequency is expanding.”She hissed, “That’s not expansion. That’s infection!”“Semantics.”“Don’t start sounding like Helix!”“Maybe he had a point.”Her stomach dropped. “Fred”He cut her off, tone colder. “Think, Lira. Every mind the signal touches becomes part of us. We’re rewriting the network. What if this is how we win?”“By erasing everyone else?” she snapped.“By

White swallowed everything. When the light faded, Lira was standing in a room that wasn’t the lab. It looked like a hospital ward, clean, sterile, endless, but every bed was occupied by herself.Dozens of Liras, sleeping, breathing in unison. “Fred?” she whispered.“Here,” came his voice, except it wasn’t in her head anymore. It was behind her.She turned. Fred stood there, whole, solid, alive, wearing the same tattered clothes from the Grayline ruins. His eyes glowed faint gold. Lira stepped back, heart pounding. “This isn’t possible.”“It’s the merge,” he said quietly. “The Core’s building a convergence construct. A shared reality.”“This is inside the network?”“Half inside. Half… us.”She scanned the rows of sleeping bodies. “What are they?”“Iterations. Failed backups. Every version of you Phoenix tried to stabilize.”Her stomach twisted. “You mean these are my corpses.”Fred didn’t answer. She rounded on him. “You knew, didn’t you?”“I suspected.”“You suspected I’d been cloned