System Rebirth: The Rise of Jace Ronan

Chapter 9: Echoes in the Fortress

The Void Chain Syndicate didn't build cities.

They engineered leviathans.

The fortress was called Monarch, and it moved across the wasteland like a god dragged through ash. Its frame stretched half a mile long, its wheels wide enough to crush. Monarch didn't settle. It fed on ruins, on data, on flesh.

Inside its belly were labs older than most nations, prisons with no doors and secrets buried in silicon and blood. And somewhere within that mechanical beast lived a name. Ellen Troth, a neural scape architect. One of the few engineers who helped build the original Ghost Circuit.

Back when it was still theory, still hope. He'd defected years ago, vanished beneath the radar. Some said he sold personality fragments on the black market. Others claimed he went mad, living in a dream he coded for himself.

But I didn't care who he'd become. I needed what he still knew.

Yui crouched beside me beneath a fractured overpass as Monarch groaned past us, slow and seismic. The rain was acidic here, hissing when it struck metal.

Above, the fortress churned black smoke and light through its underbelly.

Yui tapped her slate fingers fast. “South Docking Ridge. There's a breach hatch in one of the old feeder ports. Maintenance override cycles hit every seven minutes. If we time it right…”

“We get in unnoticed,” I said, finishing her thought.

She gave a dry smile. “Or we improvise.”

I nodded.

We were getting good at that.

We boarded in a storm of steam and static. The wind howled through the valley, whipping soot into our eyes as we slipped through the breach. The tunnel stank.

Hot grease.

Ozone.

Something worse.

We crawled through narrow ductwork, slick with residue and echoed with metal whines. Until we dropped into a pressure hatch on Deck 17.

It was colder here.

Sterile.

The corridor stretched ahead like a spinal column, lined with exposed nerves of neural cable, twitching faintly with dead code. The lights buzzed in seizure pulses.

On the walls, digital murals glitched in loops, old experiments frozen mid-frame. People screaming, people dreaming, people being overwritten. The ghosts here weren't metaphor. They were encoded.

Tross's lab was locked behind a triple-tiered seal. Old tech.

Yui cracked it in under a minute, the door hissed open, and we didn't move. Because he wasn't alone. Tross sat in a suspended rig, pale and twitching, his skull laced with data tubes that fed into a central matrix.

He was deep in neural descent, eyes rolled back, body slack like something half-remembered, but beside him stood a figure in fang crimson robes.

She turned, and time slowed.

I knew her.

Not from life.

From the memory shard, the collapsing tower, the whispered voice. The woman wrapped in light. She wasn't a dream. She was standing five feet from me. Alive. And she had my face.

Distorted.

Feminized. Sharper in the jaw, softer in the brow.

A blend of what I was and what they wanted me to be.

“You don't remember me,” she said, voice low and calm. “But I remember all of you.”

I drew my blade. “Who are you?”

She smiled. “I'm what the ghost circuit built when you failed. The version they perfected. The one that didn't break.”

Yui raised her gun. “Clone?”

“Echo,” I said before she could.

The woman tilted her head. “Close enough?”

She moved before I could blink. A flash of steel.

Yui flew sideways, slammed into the crate. Sparks bloomed. I barely blocked her next strike, soul blade shrieking against her curved weapon. Her edge vibrated on contact, burning cold instead of hot.

Not forged steel.

Being engineered.

“You were a vessel,” she hissed. “You were never meant to survive. Only to transmit.”

I twisted, caught her shoulder, spliced fabric and skin. She didn't flinch. She grinned wider, like pain confirmed her purpose.

She wasn't real.

Not fully.

Not human.

But the fury in her blows felt very real.

She fought like memory. Fast. Invasive. Familiar.

Too familiar.

She was me through the filter of what they wanted.

Yui recovered. Fired a pulse. It hit the rig, sent a shockwave through the chamber.

Tross convulsed.

The Echo staggered, one hand clutching her temple as the feedback loop glitched through her code. Her voice fractured into static.

“...Jace…You…failed…us.”

I lunged, drove the override key straight into her chest. It punched through synthetic skin. Lit up white.

She screamed.

Not in pain, but corruption.

Her limbs twisted. Eyes flickered. “You were supposed to accept us.”

The light in her faded. She collapsed like a puppet whose strings were finally cut. Smoke coiled from her spine. Silence returned.

Tross groaned behind us, his eyes fluttered open, half-lucid, blood dripping from his nose.

“You brought them here,” he whispered. “The system will never stop. Not now.”

Yui knelt by his chair. “We need the backup, you promised.”

Tross laughed, wet, broken. “No backup,” he rasped. “You were always the backup.”

I froze. “What?”

“You were printed before the circuit was corrupted, before the final integration. We made you as a failsafe.”

My throat tightened. “That's not possible. I… was just a subject.”

“You were the alpha node,” he said, reaching into his coat. “The exile copy. If the core ever collapsed, your brain was the last clean pattern.” He handed me a shard.

Black.

Warm.

Alive.

“This is what the circuit used to be,” he said. “The code before the war. Before the clans.”

“Why give it to me now?”

He looked me in the eyes. Really looked.

“Because you're not them. Not yet.” Then he smiled.

And died.

Yui stepped back, her face pale. Quiet. “We need to go. This place is waking up.”

I stared at the body of the Echo, then down at the shard.

“I thought I was chasing the truth,” I said. “But I was carrying it the whole time.”

Yui didn't respond.

She didn't need to.

I slid the shard into my coat and turned toward the vent shaft. Alarms began to scream. We escaped through burning corridors and security tunnels, the entire fortress vibrating like an angry god.

Flames erupted from the monarch's engine bay as it disappeared behind us into the horizon, howling its fury into the storm. We didn't stop until the wind swallowed its screams.

That night, we found shelter beneath a broken wind farm. The turbines moaned in the gale. Lightning danced in the clouds above. My fingers trembled as I stared at the shard in my hand. Not because I feared what was on it, but because I feared what it meant.

If I was the backup, then what had I overwritten to survive?

That night, the ghost circuit whispered again, but not in static, not in visions. It spoke in a voice that was mine and not mine.

[The truth isn't what they made you forget—it's what you chose to lose.]

I stared into the dark, eyes burning.

“What did I sacrifice to stay alive?” The circuit didn't answer, but its silence was full of ghosts, and every one of them wore my face.