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Chapter 23 – Through the Static
Light too much of it. Cold, liquid, electric. It poured through Deborah’s eyes like acid and memory, all at once. She gasped, but no air came. The sound that left her throat wasn’t human a distorted echo of itself.The world around her flickered between forest and code. Trees that weren’t trees vertical lines of light, flickering glyphs replacing bark.The ground rippled like glass, splitting into reflections of places she remembered, Her father’s office. The café, The night she first met Chris. All spliced together like someone was editing her life in real time.“Chris?” she whispered.Her voice came back a second later, out of sync, Chris?Chris?Echoing through the world like data lag. Then he appeared. Running through the light, fragments of his outline breaking apart and reassembling. He grabbed her by the shoulders, but his touch felt electric not skin, not warmth, but a current.“Stay with me,” he said, or maybe the world said it through him. His eyes flickered, reflecting gold
Chapter 22 – The Hollow Signal
Darkness. Thick, muffled, electric. Deborah’s mind clawed back into awareness, one heartbeat at a time. The world felt off-kilter, like gravity itself had stuttered and never reset.She tried to move, but her limbs were leaden. The taste of ozone clung to her tongue. A faint pulse of light flickered through the trees, fading in and out like a dying heartbeat.“Chris?” Nothing.She rolled onto her side, blinking through afterimages. The air still smelled of burned metal, but the fog had thinned, leaving the world eerily clean. Too clean.No sound. Not wind, not birds, not even the usual hum of the earth. When she finally spotted Chris, he was a few meters away, half-covered in leaves, face slack but breathing. She crawled to him, pressed two fingers to his pulse. Strong.Relief hit her so fast it hurt. “Come on, wake up.”He stirred with a groan. “Still alive?”“Barely.” She sat back, exhaling. “Whatever that was, it wiped everything. Look.”She held up her phone. The screen was black,
Chapter 21 – Residual
The wall beside them vibrated, soft, like breathing. They both froze.Then a whisper rolled through the corridor, so low it barely carried “Residual process continuing.”Chris killed the flame. The dark swallowed them whole again. “Run?” he whispered.“Quietly.”They began crawling through the wreckage, guided only by the cold draft that hinted at an exit. Each movement set loose faint glows from broken wires, ghost-light flickers that painted their faces and died.Somewhere deeper in the facility, a single tone pulsed, beep, ten seconds later beep, It followed them, patient.Deborah’s pulse matched it until she couldn’t tell which was hers. They reached a service hatch half-buried under debris. Chris shoved at it, it moved an inch, then jammed.He tried again, teeth bared. “Help me.”Together they pushed, the hatch gave way with a metallic scream that echoed down the tunnel like a warning.The beeping stopped, total stillness.Chris’s whisper was barely sound “Go.”They crawled throu
Chapter 20 – The Merged Mind II
Everything was light. Not bright, not blinding, total. A still white sea, a sound like breathing woven through electricity.Deborah floated in it, or was made of it. Somewhere inside the current, a thought pulsed, You can let go.She tried to speak but her voice had no edges. The word no came out as static, Then a glitch, a flick of shadow through the white. A shape a man’s outline crossing the current.Chris? The system rippled, rejecting the intrusion.“Unauthorized entity detected,” her own voice said from everywhere.She felt two minds pulling her in opposite directions, one wanted peace, surrender, the endless white, the other screamed through the noise, human and terrified.“Deborah! Listen to me!” That was Chris raw, distant, but real.The light shook. She saw him through fractured memory, his hand on her shoulder in the forest, his eyes the night of the fire. Something alive.“Don’t let it take you,” he shouted.Her mother’s tone slid in over his, soft, patient “Why cling to
Chapter 20 – The Merged Mind
Silence,then breath, Deborah opened her eyes and saw no ceiling, no floor only the faint shimmer of light suspended in a colorless void. Her limbs felt light, unmoored, as though gravity had been erased.When she tried to move, the motion rippled outward, folding the air like water. A whisper followed. “Don’t struggle yet.”The voice sounded almost like hers, but older, the way she imagined herself after decades of sleeplessness.She turned toward it. Shapes flickered in and out of existence, corridors, a doorway, her reflection standing several feet away, flickering like a broken hologram.“Where am I?” she whispered.“Inside what’s left.”The other Deborah smiled without warmth. Her eyes glowed faintly, lines of light tracing through her skin like circuitry. Every blink left after images that hung in the air.“Left of what?”“You. Me. The bridge between.”Her voice carried a resonance that made the space hum. Deborah’s chest tightened. The walls of the void began to assemble themsel
Chapter 19 – The Descent
Deborah hit water, scalding and shallow. The shock knocked the air from her lungs. She rolled, coughing, slick with chemical foam. The air burned her throat. Around her, alarms wailed and lights pulsed like a heartbeat.Above, the ceiling sealed itself shut in a bloom of molten metal. They were trapped.“Chris!” she shouted, staggering to her feet. Her vision swam with color.He emerged from the smoke a few meters away, limping, blood on his sleeve. He lifted a hand to her, then froze. His eyes widened, behind her, the light was moving.Deborah turned.The core chamber wasn’t a room, it was a cathedral. Metal spires curved upward into infinity, humming with pale circuits that pulsed in rhythm with her pulse. At the center stood a column of light, a living structure of data and heat. Inside it, something shifted, like a silhouette caught mid-motion.Her own. She felt it before she understood it: a magnetic pull deep in her bones, dragging her toward the column. Every step forward made
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