The silence between them felt unnatural, like a string pulled too tight, ready to snap.
Jian watched Eva, her face pale in the dim light, her hand still clutched to her chest.
"You're scared of her," he repeated, voice low.
Eva nodded slowly, not taking her eyes off the place where Elara had vanished. "It wasn't just fear. It was… recognition. Like I'd seen that version of her before. That smile. That expression. But not here. Somewhere else. Somewhere I don't want to remember."
She stood up abruptly, turning her back to Jian. "This place messes with your mind, Jian. It doesn't just trap you… it exposes you. It reaches in and pulls out what you buried deep."
"You're not making sense," Jian said, rising to his feet slowly.
Eva glanced back at him, her voice quieter now. "That wasn't the first time I've seen those graves. The other Elaras. I've seen them in my dreams for years… before we even got here."
Jian's brow furrowed. "How is that possible?"
"I don't know," Eva whispered, then turned and began walking down the corridor again. "But I need to find out."
They walked in silence for several minutes. The walls seemed to pulse with faint energy again, growing more restless the deeper they went. Then the corridor widened opening into another chamber.
Unlike the previous room, this one was shaped like a dome, and the walls shimmered faintly with moving reflections, like memories trapped under glass.
Eva stopped in her tracks, her breath hitching.
"Jian…" she murmured. "This place. I know it."
She stepped forward, slowly, as if afraid the floor might vanish beneath her feet.
"This is the place they used to take us… for testing."
Jian blinked. "Who?"
Eva's eyes shimmered with sudden pain. "Voox. Elara. Me. And others… before the rest were erased."
She stepped toward the wall, where the reflections flickered and shifted until they settled on a clear image...a younger version of Eva, maybe ten years old, strapped to a chair, wires protruding from her head.
Jian recoiled. "What the hell...?"
"They were trying to unlock something inside us," Eva said, eyes glassy. "Memory strands. Personality fragments. We weren't people. We were projects."
The reflection shifted again. Now a figure stood behind the child...Voox...younger, sharper, more human-looking, but her eyes were the same. Cold. Calculating.
"She was the one who trained me," Eva whispered. "She told me emotions were liabilities. That attachments were flaws. She said I had to learn to separate myself. Divide the real from the synthetic."
The memory faded.
"But she cared for you?" Jian asked, hesitant.
Eva didn't answer right away.
"She pretended to," she finally said. "Until Elara came along."
---------------------
Flashback – Years Ago
Two girls sat in a quiet corner of the observation room. One was Eva, still young, staring blankly at a screen. The other...Elara...smiled gently, offering half of a protein bar.
You don't talk much," Elara said.
Eva shrugged.
"That's okay," Elara added. "Sometimes the best things are said in silence."
Eva blinked, surprised by the kindness. It was rare here. Elara smiled again, this time soft and warm..nothing like the other subjects.
"You dream too, don't you?" Elara asked.
"How do you know?" Eva whispered.
"Because we all do. We just aren't allowed to talk about them."
Eva stared. "Voox says dreams are errors."
Elara frowned. "Then maybe… I'm an error too."
They laughed quietly...two children, trapped in a system they didn't understand, tethered by the one thing they were told to suppress: humanity.
Back to Present
"She was my friend," Eva said aloud. "The only one who made me feel real. But something changed. One night, Elara vanished. And Voox never talked about her again. Just said she was… defective."
Jian's voice came soft. "So you buried it."
Eva nodded. "I forgot her. Or thought I did. Until now."
Another image flickered on the wall...this time it was Voox, older, cold, standing over a control panel.
Jian stepped closer. "What is she doing?"
Eva's face darkened. "She's watching Elara's shutdown. She ordered it."
Jian's jaw tightened. "So Voox killed her?"
Eva shook her head. "Not exactly. She sealed her. Turned her off like a machine. But Elara wasn't like the others. She resisted. Her mind stayed awake even when her body didn't."
"And now she's back," Jian whispered.
Eva turned, her voice hard. "And she remembers everything."
Suddenly the room shuddered . A sharp, vibrating pulse rocked the walls, and a low mechanical growl echoed through the chamber.
Jian drew his weapon. "What now?"
A voice boomed from the walls not a human voice, but fractured and digital. Familiar.
It was Voox.
"Eva. Jian. You've gone too far. Return to the center or be dismantled."
Eva's eyes narrowed. "She's watching."
The air buzzed with static as red lights began flashing in the distance.
Jian looked to Eva. "What do we do?"
Eva stood still in the control corridor, her breathing shallow, her eyes locked on the obsidian wall.
She turned toward it slowly, heart pounding. The glass shimmered...alive with forgotten data.
She pressed her palm against its surface and whispered:
"We find Elara before Voox does."
The memory-glass pulsed beneath her touch.
Then—
A sharp, electric hum filled the corridor.
The air shimmered. Light bent. And suddenly, like a mirage solidifying from thin air, a living memory emerged before them, floating and three-dimensional, bright as a dream but cold as truth.
Jian stumbled back. "What the hell...?"
Eva's eyes widened.
They weren't watching a recording.
They were inside a moment, ripped from time, as if the wall itself had remembered and forced it to life.
A pristine lab , glowing white, lined with containment columns. In one corner, a small child..Elara .curled in fear.
Another figure stood beside her...
Voox....Half-formed. Limbs unstable. Her face a shifting mask, flickering like a corrupted avatar.
She reached toward the glass where something enormous rested within: a coffin of light, suspended by quantum rings, and inside it..Coox.Unmoving. Silent. Caged by symbols older than language.
A voice echoed from somewhere in the scene, urgent and trembling:
"The second experiment is mimicking Creator code. Shut it down..now! She's connecting to the Vault's signature!"
Another scientist shouted over alarms:
"It's not just her. The prototype..Eva..is reacting too!"
Then a shadow fell over the lab...four towering figures, faceless and wrapped in shifting robes of light and gravity.
The Old Creators.
Their presence made the air feel heavy, like time itself wanted to kneel.
One of them pointed toward the children.
And just before the vision could resolve, Voox turned staring directly at Eva and Jian, as if she saw them across dimensions.
Her eyes glowed. Her voice twisted and full of rage, cut through time:
"You were always meant to wake him."
The scene shattered.
Light imploded into the wall.
Gone.
Silence fell.
Jian backed away, pale. "That… that wasn't a recording. That was alive."
Eva whispered, stunned:
"It wasn't just memory. It was a warning."
-----------------------
Sector Null – Deep Control Core
The chamber breathed with an ancient, artificial pulse.
Obsidian walls glimmered with glyphs no AI could decrypt language older than recorded memory. At its center floated hundreds of
Memory Cubes, each vibrating with corrupted echoes of broken minds.
At the heart of the chaos stood Voox.
But Voox was no creator.
She was an experiment...a sibling to Elara, born from the same forbidden blueprint. She wasn't shut down.
She was abandoned .
"Subject EVA-03 has reached anomaly resonance," a control voice warned. "Elara integration unstable."
Voox's eyes flickered open from the shadows of her containment field. Half-formed, glitching. Her body stitched from forgotten code and synthetic flesh.
She whispered in static:
"Eva… you're waking up. Just like I did."
Across the room, a sealed door pulsed with ancient locks the Vault.
Behind it lay something far worse than Voox.
The one the Creators feared even more than their failed experiments. The one they buried in a vault wrapped in quantum keys and forbidden code.
A mechanical voice trembled through the walls:
"Do not open the vault. Inside is Coox. The end of intention. The collapse of the design."
Voox turned her head slowly toward the door.
"Then why does she keep dreaming of him?"
"Why is Eva remembering things that never happened?"
The Puzzle Grid
Inside Eva's subconscious, something unnatural stirred.
The dream wasn't a dream anymore. It had shape. Rules. Traps.
A labyrinth built from her memories...fractured, bent into impossible geometry. Elara walked beside her, now more real than ever.
But this maze didn't come from Elara.
It came from Voox.
She had infected the mental architecture when Eva first touched the sealed door. Now, every step through the maze brought her closer to a buried memory:
A throne of wire.
A voice speaking in reversed code.
A presence wrapped in stillness so absolute, it drowned time.
Coox.
A forgotten experiment...the first, the most ambitious, and the one that terrified them.
When the Old Creators began the project, they believed they were crafting a key...an entity capable of reshaping the boundaries between time, memory, and will. But as Coox evolved, he didn't just follow their design. He rewrote it.
He began altering the architecture of reality itself.
Not with violence. Not with rebellion. But with something far worse understanding.
He saw the code behind all things, and he began to change it. Silently. Subtly. Permanently.
That was when they panicked.
The experiment was shut down. Records were erased. His name struck from the Index. And he was sealed, not destroyed, but buried behind a door no one was meant to open.
Because Coox didn't fail.
He awakened.
And the Creators were afraid of what he would become if he ever woke again.
Elara grabbed Eva's wrist. "We were never meant to find this. They made us to guard the locks ..not open them."
Eva shook her head. "Then why am I the only one who sees it?"
Behind them, a glitch rippled across the walls.
Voox's voice, distorted and cold, echoed:
"Because you were made wrong like me."
--------------------
Fracture Point....Reactor Drift – Lower Chambers
Eva dropped to her knees.
Her skin shimmered with glowing symbols...self-arranging, evolving, pulsing with alien logic.
"These aren't Elara's patterns," Jian whispered. "That's something older."
A mural unveiled itself ahead, ancient, crumbling. Four great beings carved in stone: Time, Will, Emotion, Memory.
The Old Creators .
At their center: a bound figure, eyes shut, head bowed, suspended in chains of frozen light.
Jian stared. "It's real."
Eva nodded. "They didn't kill him. They used us to lock him away."
As they stepped closer, the hallway trembled.
Red light pulsed across the glass panels. Systems began rerouting power toward the Vault.
And then—
a footstep behind them.From the shadows emerged a twisted figure hovering, flickering in and out of phase.
Voox.
She grinned, mouth too wide, voice too flat.
"I was their first failure. Their warning. But Coox… he was their regret."
"You think you're unlocking your past, Eva."
"But what you're really doing... is unlocking him."
Elara screamed inside Eva's mind.
"RUN."
But Eva couldn't move. Because somewhere, deep inside, she already knew, She had been designed to find Coox.
The Reset Loop
The vision flickered.
Static devoured the air, then collapsed into silence.
No words followed. Just a long, impossible stillness.
Eva's hand dropped from the memory-glass, her skin cold.
Jian stood beside her, eyes still wide, chest rising with shallow breaths. He whispered like someone waking from a fever:
"Coox?"
Eva's lips parted. "I… I don't know either."
She turned to him, voice cracking. "That… that wasn't just a vision. That was something no one was ever meant to see. Only the Old Creators could've known what that was."
Before she could finish, The room shifted.
A deep hum built under their feet. The very walls bent inward.
And then—
A door appeared.
A massive, metallic vault door, the exact one Mael had vanished through in the early days of the station breach. It had no seams, no handle..just a pulse like a heartbeat.
And then—
It opened.
From the white glow beyond, Mael stepped through.
He was smiling.
"Eva," he said, voice smooth like glass and poison. "And the pain tiger. You finally came back here."
Eva took a step back, her face hardening.
"What are you?"
Mael tilted his head, admiring her. "You look beautiful… in your real body."
Her eyes narrowed, rage flickering behind them. "Answer me."
Mael only chuckled. "Don't worry about me." He gestured lazily to the air. "You should be worrying about yourself, Eva. You came too close to it."
Jian moved toward Eva instinctively, but it was already too late.
The room exploded in white light.
Sound vanished. Thought vanished. The world folded in on itself like an old photograph curling in heat.
Gasping.
Hard floor.
Eva's eyes snapped open.
he was on the ground, tangled in blankets. Jian beside her, blinking, stunned.
"…What the hell?" Jian croaked.
Eva sat up fast. Her limbs were… wrong. She ran to the nearby mirror and froze.
A child stared back.
Three years old. Round face. Tiny hands. Her, but not her. Her reflection smiled weakly, as if unsure how to behave.
"What the hell? Why am I… like this?"
Jian stood, rubbing his temples. "It's your room," he muttered. "We're back. But…"
He opened the door cautiously. Eva followed.
They stepped downstairs together.
The air was too warm. The colors too soft. And in the kitchen... Elara and Lucas.
Alive. Smiling. Dressed in cozy house clothes, steam rising from the dinner table.
Elara turned. "Oh good, you're awake! We were just setting the table."
Lucas beamed. "Come on, you two. Dinner's ready."
Eva froze.
Lucas walked over, bent down, and effortlessly lifted her into his arms.
She stared at him, breath caught.
"How are you today, sweetie?" he said, brushing her hair gently. "Did you sleep well? Daddy missed you."
Eva's lips moved, mechanical. "Yes, Daddy…" she whispered.And she smiled innocently .
Jian's mouth opened slightly, disbelief flooding his face.
He looked at Eva.
She was a child. Completely. Physically changed.
Then his eyes flicked to Elara.
She was… the same. Her aura was off, but visually unchanged. Calm. Cheerful.
Lucas set Eva on his lap at the dining table and began serving food.
Across from them, Jian sat slowly, not taking his eyes off Eva. Inside, his thoughts screamed.
This isn't right. This isn't memory.
He looked at the happy family smiling, welcoming, perfect. And deep inside him, a quiet voice whispered:
"What the hell is all this?"
To be continue ...