2025-10-25 20:04:30There’s a kind of silence only a dead system knows.
No ambient hum. No passive radiation. No wireless handshakes between idle machines. Just raw, airless hush, like the world before electricity. That’s the silence I had to build, layer by layer, inside the buried lab. I didn’t trust even the old shielding. Whatever resonance my implant had emitted, whatever pulses I’d shared with her… Lyra, it had been strong enough to attract non-civilian surveillance. Maybe Helix, maybe not. Either way, the next flare could burn my last safe point. So I fortified. Electromagnetic dampeners over every exposed circuit. Optical scatter foil over the access hatch. I looped a thermal decoy upstairs to mimic a low-grade bioform in sleep, a burner dummy wrapped in synth-flesh, breathing shallow to fool airborne heat scans. The rest of the lab I buried under counter-intrusion fail-safes. No direct network feeds. Just corded systems hard-lined to analog switchboards. If it didn’t exist twenty years ago, it didn’t enter this space. Only then did I sit down. Only then did I let the silence touch me. And that’s when I pulled the trigger. I opened the ghosting suite. Military-grade. Cracked deep. The kind of tool you only use once, because afterward, there’s no going back. It didn’t just erase traces, it nuked them. IDs, metadata, movement logs, neural touchpoints. Anything that linked me to the city, to Helix, to Kael, to Aaron. Gone. One by one, I watched them fall away. My first contract. My enlistment file. Medical stubs. Disciplinary flags. Surveillance crosslinks. Then something unexpected. A gap. Not an erasure, a void. My earliest record? A public school enrollment form. Age 9. No previous files. No medical history. No birth record. Just a first entry. > Kael — Age 5 — Recovered: Sector Delta 3 — Status: Foundling Nothing before. Nothing. Not even a foster transfer. It wasn’t that someone had scrubbed my past. There was nothing to scrub. I wasn’t hidden. I was never recorded. My stomach turned, but I didn’t let myself stop. I wiped everything else. Then turned to the lab systems. There was one more thing. Deep in the back end of the diagnostics module was a locked file I hadn’t touched during the resonance bleed. I opened it now, slowly. The encryption was crude. Old-school. Hand-built. It cracked like a brittle bone. PROJECT: ECHO ROOT I didn’t breathe. Inside: field notes. Neural schematics. Development logs. Most were damaged, missing headers. But some entries remained. Enough to form shape. The project was built around cognitive pairing, two minds operating on a linked thread of memory and emotional data. Not a copy. Not a clone. A split. Two hosts. Two threads. One system. The logs referred to them only as: > SUBJECT A – Codename: Aaron > SUBJECT B – Codename: Lyra I froze. There it was again. Lyra. Not a hallucination. Not a misfire. Her name was part of the system. Codenamed. Designated. My counterpart. The file mentioned resonance failsafes, something called “Emotive Drift Containment,” and a final line that sent ice through my spine: > “Third subject terminated. No viable shell.” Subject C. Failed. No name. Just failure. I backed away from the terminal, breath shallow. If Lyra and I were Subjects A and B… who was C? A sibling? A prototype? I didn’t know. And I didn’t want to yet. Not until I was safe. That’s when it happened. A ping. Soft. Buried deep in the noise. Not hostile. Not military. Civilian. The lab’s outer diagnostic buffer lit with a soft white trace. A resonance echo bleeding across multiple frequencies, scanning. Weak. Searching. Not coded. Her. Lyra. She was trying to find me. Not consciously, the signal wasn’t refined. But her chip was syncing outward, just like mine had before. I didn’t respond. Couldn’t. It would only expose us both. But the moment shook me. She wasn’t gone. She wasn’t erased. And she wasn’t dreaming. She was awake. Alive. And closer than the system should allow. I closed the console. Finished the last task. My burner IDs flickered onscreen — a row of fake names, fabricated bios, carefully layered backstories. But one by one, I deleted them all. No aliases. No fronts. I didn’t need to disappear. I needed to become something new. Someone clean. Someone Helix would hire. I created the file with precision. Name: Kade Rowan. Background: Retired signal analyst. No criminal record. Specialist in memory anomaly cases. Partial Helix contract history. All fake. All perfect. He wasn’t a ghost. He was a solution. The last thing I saw on the console before powering down was the Echo Root log. It blinked once. Then listed three lines: > SUBJECT A — Proxy Active > SUBJECT B — Drift Detected > SUBJECT C — STATUS: FAILED I stared at the third. Failed didn’t mean dead. It meant dormant. Or buried. Or something worse. I whispered, “They can’t hunt what doesn’t exist.” And began walking toward the surface.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
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
You may also like
