2025-10-25 06:30:46The hatch let out a long, metallic groan as it sealed behind me.
Four layers of reinforced steel. One access port. No network feed. Nothing smart. Just dead cables and air that smelled like rusted data. The lab was buried three levels beneath a Helix blacksite I helped decommission five years ago. Back then, it had been a front for a biotech firm doing unauthorized synthetic cognition trials. Helix moved in quietly, stripped the equipment, and buried the place under a false name and three floors of concrete. But I remembered. It wasn’t much. Just fragments. Floorplans. An old clearance code burned into the back of my mind. Enough to get me inside. Enough to buy a few hours of silence. I scanned the interior with a handheld bio-sweep. Nothing alive. No power signatures. Just layered dust and the distant creak of an old world forgetting itself. Good. I didn’t need ghosts. I had enough of those already. The central console still hummed faintly when I booted it with a direct line to my slate. The OS was decades old, analog shell, offline by default, no sync ports. A miracle in this age of surveillance. I ran a cold start, bypassing the retinal security, and loaded my own diagnostic matrix into the core. The goal was simple: cut the thread. I couldn’t risk another bleed. Not out there. Not while the signal was still flaring. I needed to isolate the resonance layer in my implant, filter out the anomalies, and firewall the emotional feedback. Everything else could wait. The first sweep came back stable. No infections. No external hooks. No inbound pings. But the moment I tried to engage the firewall, the system stalled. The console’s screen flickered once. Then twice. And then it spoke. > PROXY GHOST RECOGNIZED. I froze. Two signals appeared on the feed. [SIGNAL A] — Codename: AARON [SIGNAL B] — Codename: Lyra My lungs locked. That name again. Not a hallucination. Not a dream. A system marker. The chip wasn’t malfunctioning. It wasn’t infected. It was responding. Recognizing. Pairing. The resonance wasn’t accidental. It was part of the design. Two chips. Two hosts. I wasn’t just carrying a fragment. I was half of a whole. I ran a secondary probe into the chip’s architecture — bypassing Helix parameters and military overlays. Deep under the surface code, a data structure began to take shape. Organic. Modular. Beautiful in its complexity. Neuroid. Not myth. Not theory. A living system designed to link minds, share memory, pass emotion. And maybe… more. I backed away from the console, heart pounding in my throat. My hands were shaking. A new prompt blinked into view. A voice file. Corrupted. Partial. But intact enough to play. I hesitated. Then hit execute. The speakers crackled. Static. Then a voice. Female. Calm. Not synthetic. > “If you’re hearing this… it means they found you first.” I couldn’t place it. Not exactly. But something in me flinched. The voice wasn’t from a file. It was from a memory. Mine. Or… someone else’s. The chip vibrated beneath my skin. Not pain. Not pressure. Just readiness. Like something waking up. Another pulse hit. No warning. My eyes rolled back… And I saw through someone else. A woman. Mid-thirties. Dark hair. White coat. She was typing something rapidly into a lab console surrounded by blue glass. The air felt sterile. Cold. She paused. Looked up. Not at me. At someone else. Just out of frame. Her pulse quickened. She masked it well, but I could feel it. Fear. Not of being caught. Of being discovered. Her name formed in my chest before my mind could shape it. Lyra. She didn’t know I was watching. She didn’t even know I existed. And yet her pulse matched mine. The bleed broke. My vision snapped back. I was on the floor, chest heaving, every nerve in my body lit like wire. The link wasn’t just stronger. It was stabilizing. And she had no idea. I rose to my feet, shaky, dragging in air. The console dimmed. The data vanished. Not deleted. Just hidden. Waiting. I whispered the name aloud. “Lyra…” It didn’t echo. It didn’t fade. The lab lights flickered once. And in the dark corner of the room, something moved. I wasn’t alone.
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14 - Frequency Match
An hour later, I was summoned to a part of the facility that didn’t officially exist. No directory panel pointed this way. No access lights blinked. Just a narrow corridor that seemed carved out of silence itself. The air was colder here, different. The usual antiseptic tang of the upper labs gave way to something faintly metallic, almost wet, like the smell of an empty gun barrel. My boots hit the floor in perfectly timed intervals. I counted every step until the corridor ended in a seamless slab of steel. No handle. No keypad. It opened anyway. The room beyond looked nothing like the Helix chambers I knew. No white surfaces. No hum of monitors. Just matte black walls, a single table, and a thin strip of light running across the ceiling like a surgical incision. Harlan Voss was already inside. He didn’t rise when I entered. Men like him never did. They made standing feel like a privilege you hadn’t earned yet. He sat at the far end of the table, hands folded, sleeves crisp enou
13 - Half of a Whole
I came back to the hum. Low. Pulsing. Artificial. A sterile room, the kind designed by people who never had to live in one. Pale grey walls. Steel floor with no echo. The kind of silence that didn’t let you feel alive, just monitored. My wrists weren’t bound. But my body wouldn’t move. Limbs like iron. Skin clammy. The chair beneath me was padded, but no part of me registered comfort. Above, a lattice of soft white lights flickered behind polarized glass. Somewhere beyond, a technician watched through a hundred biofeeds. My chip buzzed faintly under the skin, just enough to remind me I didn’t own it anymore. “Neural diagnostic complete. Subject stable. No breach detected.” Specter’s voice. Always detached. Genderless. A ghost in the grid. I kept my eyes closed. If they thought I was unconscious, good. Let them. But I bled. Not physically. Not the kind of bleeding you can see or stop. But memory, leaking sideways through the fracture lines they tried so hard to wall o
12 - Don’t Blink
The second room was colder. Not colder like temperature. Colder like intention. The walls here were grey instead of white, a matte steel finish that reflected no light. A calculated lack of warmth. The kind of place where you didn't just feel watched, you felt recorded. I stepped through the automatic seal at exactly 1600 hours. Five hours after the first meeting. Helix never deviated. Not by seconds. The chair across from mine was already occupied. Lyra. She looked up this time. Met my gaze the moment I entered. No hesitation. Just a single blink, as if verifying that I was real. I took my seat. Didn’t rush. Matched her posture. Calm. Calculated. My chip vibrated faintly as I sat, a soft background pulse, like the engine hum in a grounded shuttle. The lights above us strobed gently. Imperceptible to most. But I wasn’t most. They were testing blink rate. Disruption pulses. A standard Helix method to prevent sync coherence. Keep minds unsynced by cycling the brain’s visual
11 - Meeting Room 7
The hallways of the Helix had hundreds of contractor meeting rooms, all indistinguishable by design, no clocks, no windows, no screens unless they wanted one. The walls drank sound like dry earth drinks rain, everything vanished, even footsteps. That was by design.. I was led through three checkpoints, each requiring retinal confirmation and chip sync. The last door hissed open on a short corridor that terminated in a seamless black panel. Room 7 was colder than the others. Sterile and engineered. The glass beside the panel shimmered faintly, thin, translucent. Not a mirror. Surveillance screen. They were watching already. I stepped in with the same controlled gait I’d practiced in ops: shoulder aligned, arms loose, expression calculated. The name on the file was Dr. Lyra Thompson, assigned to neural field simulations and predictive resonance modeling. She sat already waiting. I’d seen a hundred flashes of her, through half-bleeds and neural flickers. But this was differen
10 - Double Blind
From the outside, the Helix Tier-2 logistics node looked like any other medtech relay center. Clean. Forgettable. No logos, no guards. Just a long, flat structure with seamless grey paneling and a biometric gate. Inside, it was a different story. I stepped through the access chamber as Kade Rowan. A contractor, neural tracker, cleared under Operation D7. A soft chime registered my chip. > “Welcome, Operator K. Rowan.” The voice was synthetic. Genderless. Helix liked it that way, no accents, no warmth. Just function. The corridor beyond was lined with embedded lights that shifted with motion. Surveillance drones hung silently in the corners like sleeping spiders. I kept my pace steady, my posture relaxed. There were no windows. Just the hum of power beneath the floor. The system guided me to a debriefing cell, plain white walls, one table, four chairs. Three other freelancers were already seated. One had a mechanical jaw. Another wore optic replacements tinted blood-red. No on
9 - Mirror Fragments
The Helix contract system granted me limited blackbox access, just enough to do what they thought a good hunter should. Review archives. Cross-check signals. Track anomalies. Everything sanitized, of course. Nothing personal. But the deeper I crawled into their network, the more familiar the shadows became. Under Specter’s liaison credentials, I embedded a ghost query, an algorithm designed to scrape for any residual mentions of “Aaron,” “Subject Alpha,” or “Echo Root.” Most entries were flagged Level 0 or redacted entirely. But one slipped through. A file buried beneath a batch of corrupted logs. Title: “Aaron-1B: Anchor Instability / Subject Beta Adjacent.” My heart stuttered. It wasn’t just text. There was a video fragment attached. Flickering. Damaged. Still partially playable. I launched it. The feed opened on a grainy room, white walls, metallic chairs, and a diagnostic ring suspended from the ceiling like a surgical halo. A child sat strapped beneath it. Bare ar
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