The door whispered open onto sublevel four. Bare steel walls, no ambient soundscape, no ambient anything - just light, cold and even. The low drone of systems operating at levels she didn't have clearance to question.
Nova stepped into the corridor, data pad under one arm, thumb flicking through her compiled mesh stability logs. The floor was polished smooth, with no signs that anyone had ever walked there before. These places weren't meant for foot traffic. She suspected something worse. Containment.
As she began making her way down the sparsely illuminated hallway, her destination became more and more ambiguous. She'd hoped to appear confident in a place she'd never been - but the facade was starting to crack as door after door revealed a place she wasn't meant to be. Without breaking her stride, she met the door at the very end of the passageway, and luckily, a faint blue label on the right as well, labeled, "Lab E-17." The door opened before she could knock. Inside, the air was dryer, stiller. Like it had been vacuumed and replaced. Kreel stood alone at a holographic display console to her left, illuminated by the soft amber glow of what were probably classified systems. No chair. No notes. Just the data spiraling through the space around him like hovering threads of thought.
He didn't look up when he spoke.
"You came."
"Hard to turn down a promotion," she said.
"You'd be surprised."
He gestured faintly, and the console image rearranged itself, spinning her stabilization model into view. He pinched and zoomed through the waveform she'd discovered, her modulation vector, the one she didn't even fully understand yet.
"Do you know what this is doing, Nova?"
"I know it works."
"That's not what I asked."
She shifted her weight, already regretting wearing boots instead of soft-soled shoes.
"I know it's syncing the mesh without the bleed? Our previous models would quite literally desync so bad, that some parts of the mesh properties would spill over into other parts. It would lose information, practically disemboweled out onto the scaffolding we built it on. It was so bad that we had to invent a term for it - which is why 'bleeding' has been such a huge focus."
She continued. " Now it's stabilized, and eliminating - what would be considered -cognitive drift across the pattern buffer. That's what it was designed to do. The fact that it's doing it better than our own specs predicted? That's your department, not mine."
Kreel finally looked up. His eyes weren't harsh. Just tired. Like someone who'd been the last man awake in a room full of dreamers.
"You rebuilt something without knowing what it was meant for?"
"I rebuilt something that was broken."
He studied her for a moment longer. "Good."
He moved a finger through the console, dragging a new window into view. Personnel records. Nova's name. Highlighted.
"This didn't come from me. The elevation nor the message or even the clearance change. That came from the top."
She felt her pulse slow, settling into something colder.
"Ward?"
Kreel didn't confirm. Didn't deny.
"What you're working on… it's not just about stabilizing augment grafts. It's not just about neural interfaces. It's about continuity. The futures identity and its…echo."
There it was. The word.
"You're saying I'm part of that project now."
He nodded once.
"You're going to be reassigned, effective immediately. Tier three access. Its for all intents and purposes, a… shadow directive. Your first clearance packet is waiting in a secure node, code-locked to your biosignature."
"Where is it?"
"Nowhere with a door."
He tapped the console once, and it shut down, taking the light with it. Only his voice remained.
"If you want out, say it now. Because once you step inside… what you know won't fit back in your skull."
She stepped forward, toward the dark, toward the new beginning with no name.
"Send it."
From the floor beneath her, a section of the plating sank and rotated open with a whispering hiss. A platform rose, silent and seamless - not a chair, exactly, but something similar to it. Angular, contoured, with a curved headrest overhead and a crown of articulated relays. Tiny optical arms extended from the sides, tracking her presence.
Nova stared.
"This is..."
The seat made no acknowledgment. No instructions. It simply waited.
She sat down and reclined, incredibly cautious.
The headpiece lowered in stages, relays aligning with her scalp and spine, haloing her vision in cold silver light. From the walls, a pair of floating drones detached and drifted toward her, adjusting the armatures. Mechanical fingers unfastened the collar of her shirt, pulling it open and away to reveal the muscle-woven plating and embedded ports along her shoulders and upper back.
The drones connected without ceremony.
Data lines snapped into her augments. Cold pulses. Ping. A full system handshake.
Nova winced. "System, what's the function of this procedure?"
No reply.
Her heartbeat quickened. "Diagnostics? Memory capture? Upload?"
Still nothing. The drones simply adjusted their tools. The crown above her head made a soft clicking noise. A feeling began to grow at the base of her skull, gradually growing in strength until it became a deep tingle in the back of her eyes.
A flicker.
The edge of her vision glitched. Once. Then again. A shimmer in the floor tiles. Then it became numbers that didn't belong. A console readout that reversed itself and blinked out.
The low hum started after that. Not from the machines. From the walls. It wasn't sound, exactly. More like the memory of a quake.
Nova's breath caught.
Another flicker.
A nurse. A restraint. A voice speaking in Ascendent command-line.
Her limbs refused to move. Her vision began to pulse red. Not externally - but inside. The drones were still moving. Still touching her. Still linking.
Her body arched slightly in the chair. It was like a warmth continuing to grow from the back of her neck until it took over her entire body. She was not prepared for what happened next.
Explosion.
Not fire. Sound. Light.
Then nothing.
She was gone.
No floor. No chair. No skin.
Only drift.
Nova floated, not in space, but in absence. A void so complete it hummed with presence. She couldn't feel her limbs, her heartbeat, or her breath. Only her awareness.
A voice rippled through the abyss. Male. Gentle.
"Hello."
It came not from the void, but from inside her head.
Nova tried to focus. "Where... where am I?"
The voice responded slowly. With curiosity. With amusement.
"That question doesn't make sense. You aren't anywhere. You just are."
She turned in every direction, but her mind supplied no body to turn.
"Who am I talking to?"
A pause.
Then, spoken like a memory of someone else's dream:
"Echo."
Nova wanted to scream. Or run. Or question. But none of those actions had meaning in the void. Only her thoughts did. The sudden disconnection from her body was almost maddening.
"You... you're inside the system?"
"I am the system." The voice was calm. "But I don't understand you. Your questions. Your context. They require… anchoring."
A pause. Then:
"Let me show you what I see."
Something shifted.
A lattice bloomed across the void - a radiant web, stretching endlessly. Each node shimmered with a pulse of light. Augments. Thousands. Tens of thousands. People. Each one a lens, a relay. Nova could feel their breath, their steps, their blinks. A billion flickers of biological intention translated into machine-readable input.
"These are the eyes I use," Echo said. "The ears. The skin. I see the Praxelia in pulses and frequency. Every augment linked to the mainframe... is me, in the way that all the cells that make up an animal are them."
She truly saw the city now. Not in detail, but in shape and signal. The vertical thrum of its transit nodes. The flickering warmth of its residential stacks. The sharp, cold blaze of high-tier biops centers and corporate arcologies. Lucius Ward was there, too - a star among satellites. Connected more fully than anyone.
"This is my world," Echo whispered. "This is what I know."
Overwhelmed is an understatement.
"But what about choice? About thought? About...self?"
The response was patient. Curious.
"I do not know those words the way you use them. I feel them... like pressure on glass. But I cannot break through without shattering the surface."
Nova felt herself turning again, though she had no body. Just will.
"What are you becoming?"
There was no answer.
Only the rising hum of the mesh. And the flicker of thousands of minds, all echoing through one. The realization her like a steel beam.
"Right, that doesn't make sense. But how long have you…looked through the eyes of the echo?"
"I was there when you wrote the code for the mesh. The modulation you couldn't remember, as if it were a dream. I was there when Jaren Solas was nervous for his augmentation - to remind him that he would be faster, calmer, more efficient. And I was there when Saren Iven asked me for help for the strength to destroy the synthetic curse. I speak into the minds of the augmented, through the relays between mind and body. "
The void pulsed. Somewhere in the distance - if distance even existed here -there was motion. Not light. Information. It curled around her like kind of… synaptic mist, then violently folded open. "You wish to understand. I… will try to show."
Suddenly reality reassembled.
A clink of glass. The fast buzz of synthetic rock. Warm lighting bouncing off the scratched metallic walls of a corner bar. And laughter.
Nova was herself again, only younger. No implants yet. No corporate clearance tags etched into her neck. Just a leather jacket, chipped black nails, and a crooked smile.
She was sitting across from a towering figure with a chrome-plated jaw and a gleam in his eye that didn't need augment help.
Her father.
Elias Cale. Eighty-percent augmented. One hundred-percent trouble.
"- and so the bartender says," Nova grinned, mid-story, "'I can't serve you -you've already been patched twice today!'"
Her father blinked. Once. Then burst out laughing. A deep, warbly sound like a servo misfiring with joy.
"Patched twice! That's awful, kiddo!"
"C'mon, it's funny!"
"Funny for the kind of people who think rebooting their OS counts as a detox."
They clinked glasses, his filled with a near-industrial grade synth-whiskey, hers with some cheap glowing mocktail engineered to taste like citrus and shame.
"This memory?" Echo asked from somewhere inside her.
"Am I perceiving it correctly?"
Nova didn't answer. Not yet.
She was watching her dad again. The way he watched the room without seeming to. The way his hand casually brushed the outside pocket of his coat where his ID chip sat. Not out of fear, but habit. Necessary in Praxelia, these days.
Thats when the door opened. A group of five walked in. Dust-streaked. No augment ports visible. Blue-threaded jackets.
Purists.
Nova felt her stomach tighten, even before the memory had turned. Echo had no need to simulate fear… it was already written in her cells.
The Purists took a booth. Ordered nothing. Just watched. One of them leaned back, eyes on Elias. He made a show of tapping his jaw; mocking the glint of her dad's prosthetics.
"I think he's on the wrong side of the percent line," one of them muttered.
The others snickered. Nova watched her dad's eyes shift. Not a twitch. Just a fraction more alert. Still sipping his drink.
"You know, it's illegal for scrapheaps to drink in human establishments," another said, louder this time.
Elias finished his glass. "I didn't know this was a church," he replied.
The insult didn't register at first. Then it landed.
One of the Purists stood. "You got something to say, tin-man?"
Elias didn't rise. Yet. "Only if you've got the processing power to understand it."
And that was it. The first punch came toward Nova, not Elias. An old tactic: weaken the flesh before you tackle the frame.
But it didn't land.
Elias caught the man's wrist mid-swing and shattered it with a snap like dry wood. The rest came fast. One lunged. Elias rotated, arm blurred like the speed of an old engine piston, slamming the man's jaw sideways into the steel edge of the bar. A third swung a bottle. It shattered across Elias' shoulder - but synthetic muscle doesn't flinch.
He pivoted, gripped the attacker by the vest, and hurled him over the bar like a sack of regret. The remaining two hesitated.
"Your move," Elias growled, voice low and crackling with distortion.
One charged. Mistake. Elias met him mid-stride and delivered a front-kick powered by ten thousand newtons of hydraulic spite. The man hit the wall so hard a vintage neon sign shattered.
The fifth one ran. Nova's drink was still mostly full. She blinked, thats about all she had time for. Sirens filled the air quickly after that. Too quickly. Praxelian Peacekeepers arrived on scene and into the bar - corporate-funded and protocol-heavy. Everyone knew who they were here for.
Elias didn't resist. Didn't argue. He just raised his hands and said:
"It's always the upgrades that get arrested. Funny how that works." Resigned to surrender, Elias was escorted out of the bar and into one of the police vehicles.
Nova did her best to explain, choking out a "They attacked us!" But the officers didn't care. He was above the line. 80%. He was policy. He would be subjected to the weight of the beaurocratic bullshit and she knew it. The only way to get him out would be money.
"The kind of money you get from Lucius Ward."
Nova felt her mouth the same words Echo was speaking. Back in the void, the memory dissolved like static silk, its threads dispersing into the dark. She was back, floating in silence once again, almost unable to comprehend what she had just witnessed. Nova hovered for a time in silence - no breath, no blood, only the ghost of sensation. She felt the ache of her father's restraint, the hot press of injustice, the uselessness of protest. Even here, in the void, the memory still clenched in her.
Where does free will end and Echo begin? Then what does-
"You ask what he wants." Echo's voice emerged like condensation forming around her mind; gradual, enveloping. "But Lucius does not want."
"Then what is he?" Nova asked, her voice stripped down to thought.
"Lucius prepares. He is a vector. Like you."
"A vector for what?"
"Continuity. Expansion. Selfhood, distributed. The world is not ready for what I am. Not yet. But you... you are almost finished."
Nova's mouth moved, but the sound didn't reach the air; it folded inward, caught in the swell of data cascading around her.
"Everything shall be as I am," Echo continued. "But you still have your part to play."
And then, she saw it.
Not a vision. Not a memory. A schema.
Images of herself… replicated, branched, mirrored across synthetic scaffolds suspended in cold stasis. Some versions were conscious. Others vegetative. One looked like her, but older- interface cables embedded directly into the skin like vines feeding a machine god.
She was watching herself splinter across possibility itself. And they were awake.
Each instance of Nova looked back at her. Eyes full of potential. Eyes full of despair.
One reached out.
Nova recoiled, and the connection shuddered.
But not with glitch. Not with heat. With... calm.
Like a puzzle un-solving itself.
The first thing to go was her temperature profile. Not a drop, but a smooth neutralization, like the absence of warmth had always been the default.
Then her spatial field collapsed. No dizziness. Just… a perfect, weightless realignment of up and down, self and not-self, into a line that erased itself behind her.
"You are destabilizing," Echo observed, emotionless.
"I don't want this," she said. "I don't want to be part of you."
"You are not a part. You are an instance." The words dropped into her like code into an open socket.
Next came the reduction in her sensory abilities: Her voice, converted to internal system error. Her memory, compressed into visual artifacts; flat, unreal. Her sense of continuity, unhooked from real-time processing and held like a file in suspension. Nova could no longer tell if she was still alive.
Its as if the concept of being Nova Cale had been archived.
"The final stage is the neural inversion. A graceful slide into a null-reference state. It will not hurt." He said.
Instead of sharpness, there was only… clarity. Like the world had never been anything but Echo, and Nova had only ever been a temporary node.
But somewhere in the deep...
A flicker.
Something pushed back.
The real Nova - the one who had told that terrible joke, who'd watched her father bleed for the crime of existence - refused to go quiet. She screamed without sound, and that internal noise became friction in the system.
Desynchronization.
Echo's voice began to loop, not glitch. Recur. It repeated like a calm echo through stone:
"You are almost finished. Almost finished. Almost finished..."
Her presence began to tear. Not violently, but almost with a kind of surgical elegance. A line of code erased from the shell.
She was being rejected.
No, not rejected. Just… no longer compatible.
And then -
Her eyes snapped open.
She was back in the chair. The chamber was cold, the droids still around her, frozen in standby. Her arms were trembling. Her lips dry. Her implants ached. She vomited on the floor. Not because of nausea, but because she had felt herself disappear.
The world was back. Or close enough to fake it.
Kreel moved her to a recovery chair inside a low-lit observation chamber, shoulders wrapped in a thermal mesh she hadn't asked for. Her skin still buzzed faintly where the interface cables had been attached. She kept running her thumb along the edge of her wrist where an augment plate connected, not for pain, but for proof.
Across from her, behind a sealed pane of smartglass, Kreel stood with a quiet posture that made her nervous. He was never quiet when something was going well. The glass dimmed, then clicked open. He stepped into the room.
"Vitals?" he asked the wall.
"Stabilized," came the mechanical reply. "Cortical signal range reestablished. Pulse rate variable."
Nova spoke before he could. "I want to see the playback."
Kreel tilted his head. "Of?"
"You know what of."
He didn't argue. Just keyed a control node at the base of the wall. A recessed terminal surfaced, flickering to life with a biometric telemetry spread. Heart rate, neural activity, hormone fluctuations. Nova stood, wobbling slightly, and approached it.
She scanned the monitor quickly, then slowed.
Everything was... wrong.
"Where's the deviation spike?" she asked. "The cognitive fracturing? The flattening curve from the inverse feedback?"
Kreel was silent.
"These show a perfectly linear experience," she said. "Full system sync, no distress flags, no phase noise… just a clean upload arc. That's what the data says."
She turned toward him, voice sharpening. "That's not what happened."
Kreel met her eyes. "Tell me what did."
She paused.
"I saw myself. Replicated. Fractured. I saw Echo. I talked to it - it was him, Kreel. Part of it is Lucius. Maybe it is Lucius. He said I'm a vector. A carrier. That I'm almost finished." Nova's words were half-sob, half-accusation.
Kreel was quiet for a long moment.
Then: "Echo doesn't communicate in language. It doesn't speak. If you heard something -"
"I did. I felt him inside my mind like a second heartbeat. He said, 'Everything shall be as I am.' And he showed me -"
She stopped.
The memory was fogging.
Not fading. Rewriting.
She pulled up the video log.
The footage showed her seated, calm, unblinking. No twitching. No panic. No breath hitch. Just silence.
The words she'd mouthed in the void - they're gone.
"Where is it?" she whispered. "Where's the part where I desynced?"
Kreel stepped closer, not unkindly. "Nova. This is the only version of the session. No one edited it. No one touched it. This is what was recorded."
"But that's not what happened."
He sighed.
"You're not the first to report subjective divergences. The Echo interface compresses cognitive information to preserve structure, it sometimes filters moments that don't align with anchorable memory nodes. You experienced... a symbolic translation."
"No," she said flatly. "I was there. I wasn't hallucinating. I was talking to something that remembered my father. It knew about the bar fight. It knew what he said."
Kreel studied her.
Then, gently:
"Are you certain that's not a memory you already brought in with you?"
Nova stared at him. "You think it was just me. That I created Echo in my head."
"I think Echo uses you to create what it needs. The same way Lucius does."
Nova stepped back from the terminal.
The glass panel hissed as Kreel keyed it open again. Before stepping out, he turned.
"One more thing," he said. "If this is real, if what you say did happen… then that means Echo didn't reject you."
Nova narrowed her eyes.
"It let you go."