I didn't remember falling asleep—only the feeling of being dropped into darkness like a discarded file. When I opened my eyes, I wasn't in the Calibration Chamber anymore.
I was somewhere worse.
This room was smaller, dimmer. Cold fluorescent panels buzzed overhead. Steel walls without markings. No visible doors or windows. Just me and the chair I was still strapped to—though the restraints were now looser, as if they wanted me awake.
There were no surveillance drones. No guards. Just silence.
Then came the hiss of a pressure seal. A door slid open along an invisible seam in the wall, and a figure stepped inside.
Not Veras.
A woman. Mid-thirties maybe, but her eyes were old—deep-set and glassy, like someone who hadn't slept in a year. She wore a white Ministry coat that didn't quite fit her frame. Her badge read:
DR. MAELIN KORR
Neuro-Temporal Division – Black Tier
Black Tier.
The kind of clearance that wasn't supposed to exist.
She shut the door behind her and approached with no hesitation, a tablet in one hand and a curious expression on her face.
"So," she said quietly, "you're the one."
I blinked. "What?"
"The technician who survived a ghost memory injection," she replied, as if describing a chemical reaction. "That's a first."
She walked behind me and tapped her tablet, and the chair released its remaining restraints. I winced as I sat up, rubbing my wrists.
"You're not with Veras?" I asked.
She laughed. It wasn't kind. "I'm under Veras. Everyone's under Veras. But that doesn't mean I work for him."
I studied her more closely now. Her coat was stained—faint but visible. Her fingers twitched slightly when she wasn't using them. Her hair was neatly tied back, but strands had escaped, and she hadn't bothered fixing them.
In Ministry terms, she was unstable.
"You scanned me?" I asked, motioning to the chair.
She nodded. "More than scanned. We ran a full neuro-weave overlay. You're holding something alive."
My stomach turned. "Alive?"
"Not biologically," she clarified. "But the memory isn't static. It's growing. Shifting. Adapting to your neural patterns. That shouldn't be possible, Elian."
"You know my name."
"I know more than that," she said, eyes narrowing. "I know you didn't purge the memory. Not completely. You let it stay."
I said nothing.
She moved closer. "I need to know what she said to you."
I stared at her. "She?"
"The ghost. The girl. She reached out to you directly, didn't she?"
I hesitated.
> "Don't forget me, Elian…"
I nodded slowly.
"Then you need to listen very carefully," Dr. Korr said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Because what you're carrying isn't just a fragment. It's a breach."
"A breach of what?"
She glanced at the walls. "Of reality."
I blinked. "That doesn't make sense."
She smiled grimly. "It will."
She turned her tablet around. A flicker of data played across the screen: brain scans, neural activity charts, waveform distortions.
"Two years ago, we started detecting anomalies in the Archive Stream—data echoes we couldn't trace to any source. We assumed they were corruption artifacts. Random glitches. But then… they started showing behavior."
"Behavior?"
"Patterns. Repetition. Conscious intent."
The blood drained from my face.
"You're saying… they're intelligent?"
"Not in the way we are," she said. "But close. And very old. Older than the Ministry. Older than our systems."
I struggled to absorb that.
"But how did they get into the memory core?"
Dr. Korr tapped her tablet, switching to a video feed. It was grainy, timestamped six months ago. A girl—maybe sixteen—sat in a chair like mine. Wires in her arms. Face pale and drawn. Eyes distant.
"This is Subject Delta-Seven," she said. "One of our experiments in memory projection. She showed high cognitive imprinting ability—meaning she could write data directly into someone else's neural stream."
I watched in disbelief as the girl opened her mouth.
But the audio was silent.
"She never spoke," Korr said. "Not in the waking world. But during scans, we picked up encrypted waveform pulses."
She tapped again, and the screen lit with glowing spectrograms.
"These," she said, "are her words."
My spine stiffened.
The shape of the spectrograms—they weren't just sound patterns. They were familiar.
"I've seen this pattern," I whispered.
She nodded. "It's embedded in your neural trace. That's how the ghost entered you."
"She knew me," I said quietly. "She called me by name."
Dr. Korr stared at me for a long time, then said, "Elian, you're not the first person she's spoken to."
I met her gaze.
"But you might be the last."
---
We moved to another room—a lab buried deeper in the sublevels, sealed behind biometric locks and retinal scans. It looked like a morgue of machines. Deactivated AIs floated in containment tanks. Neural maps etched into glass displays.
"She was trying to warn someone," Dr. Korr said. "But we didn't listen. We tried to dissect her—reduce her mind to data blocks. That's when she escaped."
"Into the system?"
"No. Into us."
She gestured to a screen displaying a name list. Thirty-two names. All marked Deceased.
"These were the handlers who came into contact with her memory stream," she said. "All suffered fatal neural degradation within a month."
I scanned the list.
None of the names were mine.
"But I'm still alive," I said.
She nodded slowly. "That's what makes you different. Either she chose you… or you've already started to change."
My skin prickled. "What do you mean?"
Korr stepped closer. Her voice was barely audible. "Have you had dreams, Elian? Hallucinations? Memories that aren't yours?"
I swallowed. "Yes."
She didn't look surprised. "Then she's waking up inside you."
Before I could speak, the door slammed open.
Veras strode in.
His black gloves gleamed under the fluorescent lights. Behind him, two armed agents flanked the doorway.
Dr. Korr didn't flinch.
"Enough," Veras said, voice like cold steel. "Your clearance doesn't cover unauthorized speculation, Doctor."
"I wasn't speculating," she said. "I was reporting."
"To me," he growled. "Not to him."
He turned to me. "You're being reassigned, Elian."
"Reassigned?"
"You'll be transferred to Isolation Protocol Alpha," he said. "Effective immediately."
"No," Korr snapped. "You can't—he's stable. He's the only stable carrier we've found."
Veras' gaze darkened. "Which is exactly why he's dangerous."
The agents moved toward me.
"I won't survive full isolation," I said.
Veras leaned in. "Then give us the memory. Give us her final message. And maybe you won't have to."
I stared at him, shaking.
"I can't," I whispered. "It's not mine anymore."
He didn't move.
Then his gloved hand reached for the back of my neck.
A sharp sting.
Blackness rushed in.
---
The last thing I heard was her voice—quiet, mournful, distant.
> "They're trying to erase me again. Don't let them."