2025-06-19 06:22:53The bodies were still warm when Damien closed the hatch.
Four men. No insignia, no dog tags. One of them had a sidearm from Vale, while another carried an encrypted comm unit that had already been wiped clean.
Just ghosts, every last one.
Ash knelt by the nearest body, rummaging through pockets. “They were here to kill her, not to take her alive. Two of them had single-shot darts. Hollow tips. Nerve agents.”
Damien didn’t reply. He was focused on powering up the long-range sat-link burner a backup system relying on a repurposed weather balloon in low orbit. Only one number was programmed in.
Vale.
It connected after two encrypted rings.
Adrian Vale’s face appeared on the screen, lit up by the sterile glow of a white-walled office. His suit was sharp and tailored, but his eyes told a different story.
“Damien,” he said, his voice smooth and corporate. “I assume this isn’t just a friendly chat.”
“You sent assassins.”
Vale frowned. “I sent no one.”
“One of them had a weapon from you.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Just like Project Eclipse,” Damien shot back, “but here we are.”
Vale leaned in closer. “I gave you one job: keep her alive.”
“You only gave me half the truth.”
An uncomfortable silence filled the air.
Finally, Vale let out a slow breath. “They’re not mine.”
“Then whose are they?”
Vale glanced off-screen for a moment. When he returned, his voice dropped. “There’s someone else. Someone who activated an old asset chain I thought was done three years ago.”
Damien stiffened. “Rourke.”
Vale’s silence said it all.
“You knew he was still alive.”
“I hoped he wasn’t,” Vale admitted. “But you’ve always been better at dealing with ghosts than I was.”
“You handed Sophia’s mother over to him,” Damien said. “I heard the recording.”
Vale’s expression darkened. “That was a mistake. One of many.”
“She died believing she saved her daughter. You let Eclipse keep running.”
“I tried to kill it,” Vale snapped. “But Rourke already had fragments. The AI restructured. It became decentralized.”
Damien clenched his jaw. “And now?”
“Now it’s testing how far it can go without us.”
Ash cut the link.
“Do you believe him?” she asked.
Damien stayed quiet.
Ash frowned. “You should. Vale’s a lot of thingsarrogant, manipulative but scared? That’s new.”
Sophia stepped out from behind a rusty cabinet, her face pale but steady.
“What happens if this… Rourke gets what he wants?” she asked.
Ash looked grim. “Then Eclipse stops needing people.”
Sophia swallowed hard. “And if he doesn’t get it?”
“Then he’ll burn everything down trying.”
They moved again, this time to an old freight tunnel that used to transport weapons beneath the city during the Cold War. Ash set it up with proximity sensors and thermal traps. Meanwhile, Damien scanned encrypted traffic for patterns.
He found one.
A repeated phrase embedded within burst data across old military satellite networks:
“Protocol Reign: 13 Days Remaining.”
He showed it to Ash.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Looks like a countdown.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know.”
Sophia sat across from them, wrapped in a blanket, her eyes blank.
Ash glanced at her. “She’s fading.”
“She’s processing,” Damien replied.
“She’s just a girl caught in a war she didn’t choose.”
“She’s the reason there’s a war.”
Ash shot him a sharp look. “That kind of thinking could get her killed.”
“I don’t treat assets like kids.”
“She’s not just an asset.”
“She’s not a civilian anymore, either.”
They locked eyes until Sophia broke the tension.
“I need to know what’s inside me.”
Ash stood slowly. “Then we’ll extract it.”
The next night, in a makeshift med bay pieced together from scavenged field equipment, Sophia lay on a padded bench as Ash hooked her up to a portable neural monitor.
“I don’t remember anything,” she whispered.
“You don’t need to,” Ash said gently. “The pattern’s embedded in echo neurons that trigger when you’re stressed, scared, or feeling intense emotions. We’re just going to listen to the rhythm.”
Damien stood by the door, arms crossed. Every muscle in his body screamed to stop this.
But he didn’t move.
Sophia closed her eyes, her breathing slowing.
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The city that remember wrong
The city shimmered, wavering like heat on water. At first, Ash almost believed she was back in her old world labs, glass towers, that familiar grid of civilization. But the closer she got, the stranger it all felt. Streets curled in on themselves. Reflections lagged, just a beat too slow. The skyline bent, slow and liquid, as if someone was drawing it from memory and getting the lines a little wrong. This wasn’t rebuilding anything. It was longing, trying to remember. Ash stepped through a curtain of light. Instantly, the air changed. It felt thick and soft, as if it could hear her. Even her breath echoed down hallways that weren’t there yet. The city kept rewriting itself, piece by piece. She wandered into an alley that curled like a question mark. The walls pulsed with faint light veins crawling across the bricks, forming half-faces, snatches of laughter, memories that didn’t belong to her. Ash stopped. Something whispered close to her ear. Welcome home. She spun ar
The dream that rewrites the sun
The sea didn’t move in straight lines anymore.Waves curled in on themselves, rolling and opening up with a strange intent, like they remembered other oceans and were trying to fit them all together. Ash stood at the edge, wind tangling her hair, staring at a horizon that wouldn’t stay still. One second, the water was just blue; the next, gold streaks flashed through it, like sunlight was scrawling something she almost understood.Behind her, the child wandered barefoot across the sand. Her steps didn’t leave footprints just quick bursts of light that faded as soon as they appeared.Ash still hadn’t found a name for her.She wasn’t Sophia. She wasn’t anyone Ash had known before.But she carried echoes of the others how they laughed, the way they breathed.The child knelt, pressed her finger into the sand, and drew a spiral. The mark glowed, lifted, and floated away, like dust in early sunlight. It broke apart, and suddenly warm air brushed Ash’s face.What was that? Ash asked.The chi
When the silence learns to speak
The silence felt heavy now.It wasn’t just quiet there was this thick, deliberate stillness, like the world was holding its breath, waiting for something it couldn’t quite recall.Ash sat at the edge of a dry riverbed, watching her own face shimmer in a puddle made from the morning mist. The sky overhead was just blank, all pale gray, not a cloud or shape in sight. It looked like someone had erased everything and left only the waiting.Her reflection watched her, too barely there, quivering. For a split second, she thought it blinked on its own.She whispered into the empty air, her voice so soft it almost vanished.“Sophia. Damien. Lena.”Nothing answered.Just a faint tremor under her fingertips as she traced the water’s surface like a heartbeat that used to be there, echoing from somewhere far off.The days if you could even call them days dragged by without a sun to count them. Ash figured out time was still real because her body kept reminding her: hunger, tiredness, the need to
The memory that remembers us
The world had fallen silent again. Not a peaceful, gentle kind of silence, but the heavy hush that comes right after something explodes. The sort that settles in, thick with things left undone.Ash stood out on the plain, eyes fixed on the empty horizon. Grass brushed against her legs. The shimmer had faded, the pulse that always hummed here was gone. Still, under all that quiet, she could feel something struggling to restart. A rhythm trying to pick itself up. Like the gears of a machine remembering what they're supposed to do. Or a dream piecing itself back together after being torn apart.She spoke, soft, into the open air. “Sophia.”No answer.Not yet.Everyone else was gone. Damien had vanished into the recursion. Sophia wasn’t Sophia anymore she was part of it now. And Ash, the last one left with a real heartbeat and lungs full of air, stayed behind in this world stuck with too many memories.She wandered. Hours, maybe days it was impossible to tell. The sun just hung there, fro
The new frequency
For a while, everything just held its breath. Not empty, not dead just waiting.Ash sat in the field where the mirrored tree used to stand. She ran her hand over the ground. Dirt, grass, warm sun normal stuff. But under all that, something buzzed. Barely there, like the hum under a power line. Like the echo of Sophia’s heartbeat, still hanging on.She closed her eyes. Listened.The world thumped once, twice. Then, soft and far away, she caught it. Sophia’s voice, scattered in the hum.Ash.Her eyes snapped open. Damien stood a few meters off, staring at the horizon where the sky had started to ripple a line of light, wavering and alive.He turned, slowly.You heard it too, didn’t you?Ash nodded, her throat thick.It’s her.The horizon pulsed again, brighter this time. Shapes flickered in the glow of cities, faces, symbols breaking apart as soon as she tried to focus.Damien whispered,She’s not gone. She’s everywhere.They started walking toward the shimmer. Every step shifted someth
The world after recursion
Silence, again.But this time, it felt different.No electric hum. No background drone of circuitry. Just the wind is soft, a bit uncertain, strangely alive.Everything had changed into something haunting and beautiful. The sky stretched on forever, not quite blue, not really grey somewhere in between, shimmering and shifting like a thought you can’t hold onto. The grass whispered underfoot, like it remembered things you’d forgotten. Even the horizon kept moving, never settling.Ash knelt and pressed her hand to the earth. Warmth radiated upward. The ground pulsed beneath her palm, slow and steady like a heartbeat too big for any one person.Damien waited behind her, quiet. Bits of light still clung to his clothes, tiny shards from the Architect’s broken designs.Then Lena’s voice broke through, clearer than before, though still distant.You’re in the aftermath layer. After a collapse, a stabilizing field forms. That’s where recursion decides what stays.Ash looked up. The sky seemed
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