The silence followed him.
Not the engineered quiet of Sector A9 , the hum of filtration ducts, the soft pulse of neural modems embedded in concrete, the sterile breath of regulated airflow but something deeper. Thicker. Like velvet draped over the corners of his perception.
Naël moved through the arterial corridor of the subgrid, toolcase in hand, his pace precisely timed to avoid proximity violations. Every footstep felt too loud. Every blink too slow. There was a lag to the world around him. A sense of delay, like someone was watching the scene on playback, half a second behind.
Above him, the light shifted subtly from industrial white to diluted gold. Artificial dusk. A signal that the Maintenance Frame was closing. No alarm. No spoken warning. Just that gradual color shift, almost imperceptible unless you were looking for it.
He was looking for everything now.
The transit earlier had malfunctioned. Or so the system claimed. His route had rerouted mid-journey, guiding him through obsolete tunnels lined with cracked screens and long-forgotten sensors. No explanation. No annotation in his work feed. Just a directional nudge so subtle most citizens wouldn't have questioned it.
But Naël questioned everything now.
Even the air felt wrong.
He approached Grid Terminal B. A curved interface rose from the floor like a polished spine, pulsing with data in thin, cascading lines. His hand hovered above the sensor pad. A tremor passed through his fingers barely visible.
"Citizen Naël. Cognitive stability index: 97.6%. Proceed."
The voice was smooth. Familiar. Not the warmth of a human tone, but the chill precision of system design. Like marble: beautiful, flawless, unfeeling.
He pressed his palm to the pad.
Instant access.
The grid's central lattice unfolded in front of him, a 3D projection of entangled nodes and pulsating streams. His task: recalibrate the signal strength across sector corridors 8 through 12. A routine assignment. Something his body could do on autopilot.
But something within the display glitched.
Just for a moment.
A single node flickered red not in warning, but as if trying to signal something. It blinked like an eye. Like a heartbeat. Then it was gone.
Naël leaned in. The node pulsed again, briefly displaying a symbol he didn't recognize. A triangle within a circle, etched with a line of broken light through its center. The symbol felt ancient. It felt… familiar.
He opened the internal diagnostics. Nothing. The flicker hadn't registered in the system logs. As far as SOMA was concerned, it hadn't happened.
He glanced around. The chamber was empty.
A faint shiver touched the back of his neck.
He executed the required commands, but his mind wasn't on the task. Not fully. Not anymore. Not since the dreams started bleeding into the day. Not since shadows began to move when no one else could see them.
After the recalibration, he didn't return home.
He took a detour.
No one ever took detours.
There were no places to go that weren't assigned.
But his feet carried him anyway, down a corridor that hadn't seen human maintenance in years. The walls were covered in synthetic moss , an old aesthetic choice for "biological balance" long since abandoned in favor of sterility. The lights buzzed faintly overhead, some flickering at irregular intervals, like a heartbeat out of rhythm.
He found the door at the end of the hall.
Unmarked. Seamless. Forgotten.
Except by him.
He didn't remember how he knew it was here. Or why he stopped. But his fingers pressed to its smooth surface, and the panel hissed open with a reluctant sigh.
Inside, the room was dark. Dust floated in the air ,not real dust, but leftover particulate from cleaning bots too old to function. A single overhead screen blinked dimly. Lines of corrupted data scrolled across its surface like digital rot. The hum of old energy, old memory, clung to the walls.
And in the center of the room, sitting silently on the floor, was a figure.
He froze.
A girl ,young, unmoving, knees pulled to her chest.
Her face was hidden, her long hair hanging like a curtain over her features. She didn't look up. She didn't breathe , not visibly. Her presence was like a photograph, paused in time.
He should have reported it. Should have stepped back. Triggered a security call.
But he didn't.
Something about her presence didn't feel wrong.
It felt inevitable.
"Are you real?" he asked softly, his own voice startling him.
The girl didn't move.
But a whisper filled the room. It wasn't hers. It wasn't his.
It came from everywhere and nowhere.
"You shouldn't be here, Naël."
His heart twisted. It wasn't fear he felt, but recognition.
The screen on the wall changed. The corrupted data stilled. A phrase appeared:
MEMORY THREAD UNLOCKED – PROTOCOL: SHADOW_9
Then everything went dark.
He woke in his apartment.
The walls glowed softly with that same calming blue. His implant pinged.
"Unauthorized deviation detected. Report logged. Dream correction applied."
He sat up. Sweat clung to his back. His uniform had been changed. Someone or something had intervened. His body felt… heavier.
His hand moved to his chest.
There was a mark.
Faint. Circular. Not physical but in his mind. A burned-in afterimage. The same symbol he had seen at the grid terminal.
The triangle. The circle. The broken line.
He didn't know what it meant. But it was following him.
That morning, the city's rhythm felt off.
His co-workers walked as always, eyes fixed, bodies synced, motions seamless. But their steps made no sound. Not even the soft tap of rubber soles on synthetic stone.
Like ghosts in a dream.
One of them turned suddenly ,too suddenly and looked straight at him.
A man.
Older. Unsmiling.
He didn't speak. He didn't blink.
But he mouthed two words.
"She's awake."
Naël stumbled back, the breath punched from his lungs. The man kept walking, blending back into the stream of workers like nothing had happened.
Naël felt the world tilt.
He ran.
Not visibly. Not enough to trigger suspicion. But inside, his mind was sprinting, clawing at something buried beneath years of silence and order.
At work, he accessed the archive again. Carefully. Slowly.
He bypassed the safeguards with practiced precision.
Protocol: SHADOW_9.
It existed.
Barely.
A shell of an old project. Listed as terminated. Marked with restricted sigils from the earliest days of SOMA's development.
He opened the logs.
They were fragmented. Corrupted.
But not empty.
[Voice Fragment Detected – Restoring Playback]
A woman's voice. Tired. Raw.
"...if you're hearing this, it means something survived. Not me. Not the project. Something else.''
The audio skipped.
"I tried to contain it. I tried to warn them. But they wouldn't listen. They said she was just an echo…"
Another glitch. Then silence.
Then, a whisper:
"Remember her."
Naël slammed the console closed. His pulse thundered.
There was no name. No face. Just a pressure in his chest like he was drowning in a memory he didn't own.
And yet… it was his.
That evening, as the city entered sleep mode, he didn't go home.
He walked to the outskirts of Sector A9. To the same bench beneath the canopy.
The place that felt real.
And she was there again.
The girl.
This time, standing.
This time, looking at him.
No words. No smile.
She raised her hand, slowly, and pressed her fingers together.
A gesture. One he somehow knew.
Then she vanished.
No noise. No glitch. Just… gone.
Naël sat on the bench.
And for the first time, he cried.
Silently.
Not from fear.
From knowing.
From the feeling that something once lost… had found him again.
From the dawning truth that the world wasn't what it claimed to be.
And neither was he.
The next morning, Naël didn't report to his maintenance station.
It wasn't rebellion. Not yet.
It was necessity or something that lived at the edge of that word. An instinct he hadn't known he still possessed. Something primal. Something human. Whatever had cracked open inside him the night before hadn't sealed itself shut.
And it was spreading.
He moved through the city like a shadow, unnoticed by the tide of others. He knew the rhythms now, the blind precision of citizens too synced to see. They walked in patterns, in timing loops, choreographed not by habit but by invisible instruction. You could slip between them if you knew the beat.
He did.
Sector A9 was still waking up or pretending to. The lights flicked on incrementally. The sky simulation brightened by degrees, cycling from dawn-gray to artificial blue. Naël bypassed two security nodes with false data loops he'd coded the night before. His path wound toward an old substructural level long since labeled "inert."
No current. No feed. No reason to go.
He went anyway.
The elevator didn't recognize the level code. He had to force an override, reroute the destination signature through a dummy maintenance pass. When the doors closed behind him, the silence was sudden and almost violent. The hum of surface systems faded, and what remained was the throb of his pulse in his ears.
Floor 41-∅. The screen didn't even name it. Just a dash. An error. An absence.
The elevator doors opened into darkness.
Not malfunctioning darkness.
Intentional.
As if this floor had been wrapped in night and forgotten.
His footsteps echoed louder than he liked. The walls were unpolished, streaked with old soot and something else , a fine, grainy dust that felt wrong against his fingers. The lights were there, but most had long since failed. Others flickered softly, unsure if they should even be alive.
He followed a corridor that bent at unnatural angles. It was built before SOMA had redesigned city infrastructure to reflect "harmonic geometry." This space still carried the rawness of human engineering: error, compromise, imperfection.
And memory.
Naël passed rusted storage units. Old research panels. Broken displays. Then a sign, half-obscured by dust:
SOMATIC RESEARCH – CLASSIFIED NODE 09B
He froze.
The word SOMATIC should have pinged a neural alert. It didn't. The system was silent.
Or ignoring him.
Or watching.
He placed his palm against the door. Cold. Metal. Dead. But it opened.
Inside was a room he wasn't supposed to remember.
But he did.
Not with detail. Not yet. But with ache. With weight.
Banks of inactive consoles lined the far wall, each one shaped differently than current standard models ,taller, more angular, with ports designed for neural nodes no longer in circulation. The air smelled faintly of dust and ozone. And in the center of the room: a chair.
Not like the ones he used at maintenance stations.
This was different. Medical. Or experimental.
He approached slowly. Every step felt heavier.
There were restraints built into the arms.
His hand brushed the backrest and images exploded behind his eyes.
Not visions.
Memories.
He was strapped down. He was screaming. Someone was watching.
A face. Familiar. Blurred.
And a voice. Distant. Terrified. Desperate.
"Please don't take her "
He stumbled backward, gasping. The chair stood silent.
But the room had changed.
A console had activated behind him.
He didn't touch it.
It was waiting.
The screen displayed a pattern. Not a file. Not a message. A rhythm.
A soundwave.
He recognized it before he heard it.
That voice again.
So faint. So broken.
"Naël... can you hear me?"
He wanted to run. But his legs refused. His mind split between panic and longing. That voice wasn't part of SOMA. He knew it in his bones. It was real.
It was wrong.
It was his.
He stepped forward.
The screen shifted.
A sequence of coordinates.
An access route.
And a single word:
>REMEMBER
He made it back to his compartment before lights-out.
Barely.
No alerts had been triggered. No pursuit. No recalibration summons.
But his implant throbbed. Not with pain. With pressure.
He sat in the dark. The walls dimmed to passive mode, recognizing his unwillingness to interact. He didn't eat. He didn't move.
The screen by his sleeping unit flickered.
Not an alert.
Not a system prompt.
A drawing.
A child's drawing.
Two figures. A tall one and a small one. Holding hands.
Beneath it, a phrase:
"You promised."
Naël stood abruptly. His breath was ragged. The interface went dark again. No logs. No trace.
The world was unraveling.
And only he seemed to notice.
The next morning, his maintenance station had a replacement.
Another technician. Silent. Identical.
No one questioned it. Not even him.
He left the residential zone early, walking without route assignment. No override request. No task.
He should have been flagged. He wasn't.
The system was letting him move.
The coordinates led him deep into the inner foundation layers of the city the kind of structural zones that no longer appeared on public schematics.
He passed old conduit loops, fossilized AI shells, and observation corridors sealed with plasteel. The air grew thick with static. Occasionally, his implant buzzed with interference not messages, but fragments of thought.
> not yet not yet not yet
> why did you leave me
> i'm still here
Then silence again.
He found the door.
No label. No lock. No warning.
He pushed.
It opened.
Inside: a memory archive.
Unsorted.
Hundreds of nodes, glass panels, tangled wires and memory spools hanging like nerves from the ceiling. It was a forest of ghosts. Some of the pods still pulsed faintly , residual data? Echoes?
He moved between them slowly. Names blinked on and off.
None he recognized.
Until he did.
Just one.
And it wasn't a name. Just a string of code.
But it rang in his skull like a scream.
He reached toward the pod.
The panel flared.
> DO NOT WAKE HER
His breath hitched.
Then another line:
> UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS... GRANTED
The pod hissed open.
Inside was no body.
Only light.
Warm. Golden. Flickering like breath.
It reached toward him.
Naël didn't recoil.
He stepped closer.
The light moved like it recognized him.
And in its center, just for a heartbeat
a face.
A girl's face.
Eyes wide. Familiar.
Sad.
And she whispered, from somewhere far beneath the world:
"I found you."
The next morning arrived, but Naël barely noticed. Time no longer held the same structure it once had. Not since the whisper in the archive. Not since he had seen the girl vanish without leaving a trace. Something had fractured, and though the world looked unchanged, he felt its rhythm falter beneath the surface ,a delay in the system's heartbeat, a hesitation in the grid's breath.
His movements became slower, more cautious. Every interface he accessed was a possible door. Every corridor, a trap or a clue. The city, once a seamless machine, now resembled a puzzle box with shifting layers. And he was starting to believe he wasn't the one solving it. Something else had begun pulling the strings. Or someone.
At Maintenance Junction 42B, he encountered another anomaly.
A black panel embedded in the wall, unmarked and sealed. It wasn't listed in any of the schematics. No active logs. No power signature. Just dead space and yet, it drew him like a magnet.
He paused.
His implant buzzed faintly.
> "Behavioral irregularity flagged."
He ignored it.
Reaching out, he touched the surface.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, like fog pulling away from glass, a faint glow traced his handprint. Not a system response. More like a memory, rising through dust.
The panel whispered.
"You're close."
The voice didn't come from his implant. It came from the wall itself.
Naël staggered back.
Footsteps echoed behind him. He turned quickly.
A technician. Female. Dressed like the rest: grey, expressionless, purposeful.
But her eyes locked on his, and for a moment, something moved behind them. Recognition? A warning?
She passed without a word.
The glow on the panel faded.
Later, during rest cycle, Naël sat in the center of his room with every system turned off. A breach of protocol. A dangerous one. But he needed silence , true silence.
Outside his sealed apartment, the city ticked and pulsed and breathed in harmony. But in here, in the stillness, he tried to listen for something else. Something beneath.
He focused on the phrase from the archive.
> "They said she was just an echo."
A name hovered at the edge of his thoughts, but never arrived. A presence. Soft. Persistent. Like the ghost of a song he once knew by heart.
When the interface pinged an incoming update from Central, he hesitated.
The packet was heavily encrypted. Private. Not standard maintenance protocol.
He decrypted it manually.
A single sentence:
> "Signal detected. Subgrid 17. Clearance revoked."
Then it erased itself.
No trace. No log.
He knew Subgrid 17. That was where the flicker first happened.
And the symbol.
Naël left his apartment that night without notifying SOMA. It wasn't rebellion. Not yet. It was instinct.
Sector routes at night were nearly deserted, most citizens locked into sleep-mode or passive stimulation programs. The world outside felt hollow, abandoned.
When he reached Subgrid 17, the air was thick with static.
Not real static. Neural.
He could feel it under his skin.
Lights flickered as he passed. He counted the delay between steps and flickers ; exactly 1.6 seconds.
Pattern.
The entrance to Subgrid 17 had been sealed with a hardlock: physical override, not digital. No retinal scan. No neural confirmation.
Old tech.
He searched the wall beside the door, fingers brushing through layers of grime. Found it. A recessed panel. Inside: a mechanical lever.
His heart raced.
He pulled.
The door groaned open.
Darkness poured out.
Inside: a corridor lined with rusted panels and dormant sensors. No system voice greeted him. No ambient interface. It felt like stepping into a forgotten lung of the city ; one that had stopped breathing a long time ago.
He moved forward.
Further in, he found a small terminal still alive with flickering data. Analog controls. A relic. Someone had kept it alive.
He activated the screen.
Static.
Then a message scrawled itself across the display, one letter at a time:
> "Do you remember the ocean?"
He didn't.
But tears filled his eyes.
He wiped them away, confused. He had no memory of oceans. No memory of anything that could make him weep.
But the feeling was real. Grief. As deep as the silence above him.
The terminal buzzed again.
A new message:
> "She does."
The following day, Naël awoke on the floor of Subgrid 17.
His back ached. His head was filled with fractured dreams of falling through mirrors. And at the center, always, a face he could almost remember.
He climbed to his feet slowly.
The terminal was off now. Cold. The corridor, empty. But his implant pulsed with a new anomaly: a low-frequency hum, unregistered by the mainframe. A ghost signal.
It was following him.
Everywhere he went, systems reacted slower. Interfaces hesitated before answering. Drones paused slightly when they passed. Lights dimmed without cause.
The world was noticing.
SOMA was watching.
He accessed a side console in the sanitation sector, bypassing his assignment schedule. If the signal was real, it would leave a trace—a disruption in the grid flow.
And it had.
Buried deep in Level 4: a pulsing beacon. Not a warning. Not an error.
An invitation.
He set a course.
Level 4 was locked behind an elevator system reserved for supervisory nodes. He had no clearance. But the static inside his implant guided him, somehow. As if it were nudging the system to let him pass.
When the doors opened, a voice ,not system, not human whispered:
"Almost there."
He stepped into the dark.
The hallway was lined with old servers. Massive ones. From before the full neural conversion. Machines that still whispered in electricity and memory instead of pulses of light.
And there, at the center, stood the girl.
Not a vision. Not a flicker.
Real.
She looked up.
Her eyes were full of something ancient.
Recognition.
Pain.
Hope.
Naël opened his mouth.
She raised a finger to her lips.
Silence.
Then she turned, walking deeper into the dark.
And Naël followed.
Not because he understood.
But because something in him had waited his whole life for this moment.
Even if he didn't know why.
Naël no longer trusted the edges of things.
Not the shadows that curled too slowly across the walls, not the rhythm of the neural interface's pulse in his apartment, not even the silence that greeted him each time he awoke. It had changed. The world hadn't stopped functioning. On the contrary, everything worked perfectly. Too perfectly.
Like a dream repeating itself to maintain a fragile illusion.
After the last encounter with the girl, the fragment, the gesture he couldn't name ,Naël felt something stretch within him. Not crack. Not break. But strain. As if part of him had remembered something the rest of him refused to understand.
He hadn't spoken of it. Of course not. There was no one to speak to. And even if there had been, language felt too primitive now. Whatever pulsed beneath the surface of this world ,beneath the hum and precision was older than words. More real than code.
He spent the next three cycles performing his tasks as ordered. He filed diagnostics. Recalibrated cognitive lattices. Ran environmental protocols. Every result came back clean.
But the noise was back.
At first, it was just a low hum at the base of his skull. Then, something more specific: a pattern.
Not in the system. In him.
He began dreaming in fragments. Not in images ;SOMA filtered dreams heavily ; but in sensations. Textures. He would wake with the taste of ash in his mouth. The smell of iron. The touch of a hand on his shoulder, vanishing before he turned to see it.
On the fourth cycle, his assigned route changed again. No explanation. Just a silent rerouting to a deeper maintenance layer. One not on the standard map.
He entered the corridor. Lights flickered once, then steadied.
The walls were different here.
Instead of sleek silver composites, they were lined with an older material metal, unpolished, exposed. Wires hung in protective netting. Some sections bore marks like scarring: symbols etched by heat, long melted into the surface. Glyphs.
He walked slowly.
His implant chirped. A message.
> "Proceed to Node 43. Report anomaly if encountered."
Naël stopped.
He hadn't reached Node 43.
No one should have known his position yet. The system ping was premature.
He continued forward.
The air grew warmer. Faintly charged, like a storm held just behind the walls. A low-frequency vibration buzzed in his molars.
He found Node 43 at the end of the hall. It was active, humming faintly. But there was someone already there.
A man.
He wore the same uniform. Same badge. But he didn't turn when Naël approached.
Naël slowed.
"Assigned here?" he asked, voicing the words aloud. It felt strange. Heavy in his throat.
The man turned.
His face was familiar. Not specific, but familiar in the way that dreams feel familiar: known without being remembered. His eyes were grey. Too grey. Like every drop of color had been pulled from them.
He smiled.
"You're late."
Naël blinked.
"You were expecting me?"
The man turned back to the terminal.
"We all expect you. Sooner or later."
He gestured at the screen.
Naël stepped closer. The display was raw , not formatted for public eyes. Just lines of raw neural code. But the pattern...
He recognized it.
It was the same as the voice modulation from the unknown message. From the archive.
"You know what this is?" he asked.
The man nodded slowly.
"No. But I remember how it feels."
He turned and looked Naël in the eyes.
"Like a song you forgot how to sing."
Naël stared at him.
"What are you?"
The man didn't answer. He pressed a command into the terminal.
The screen went dark.
Then glowed red.
Lines appeared:
> "MEMORY PATHWAY ACTIVE. TRACE: INCOMPLETE."
Naël's implant buzzed. A high-pitched whine that cut through his thoughts.
He stepped back.
"What did you do?"
The man turned again and was gone.
No footstep. No shimmer. Just absence.
Naël was alone.
His breath came fast. He reached for the terminal, but it blinked off completely. Cold.
He turned and ran.
Not out of fear. Out of need. The sense that something had been opened and that if he didn't close it, he would be swept into whatever lay beyond it.
He made it home just before shutdown.
Inside his apartment, the silence was worse than before. Not stillness. Not calm. But pressure.
He opened his private diagnostics again.
The corrupted memory string had grown.
What had once been a line of blank code was now filled with pulse data. A waveform that pulsed in exact sync with his heartbeat.
He accessed it.
No interface appeared.
Just sound.
Soft. Low. A voice.
A girl.
Whispering.
"You left me."
Naël fell back.
The voice repeated.
"You left me."
His hands trembled.
The implant should have shut it down.
No unauthorized feeds were allowed. Especially not emotional signatures.
But no suppression came.
He tried to speak, but his voice cracked.
"Who are you?"
The silence responded.
And then:
"I am what they buried."
The lights in the apartment flickered. Just once. Then steadied.
Naël sat still for a long time. Listening.
But the voice didn't return.
That night, the dream changed.
He stood before a mirror. But the reflection wasn't his. A girl stood there instead. Eyes wide. Hair unkempt. She looked young. Tired.
She raised her hand. Placed it against the glass.
Naël did the same.
And the glass cracked.
Not a loud shatter. Just a spiderweb line across the center. As if the world was made of glass.
He woke in the dark.
His neural feed was offline. The room silent.
He looked at the wall where the system panel usually glowed.
And saw, etched into the surface, a symbol.
Triangle. Circle. Broken line.
Drawn in what looked like ash.
He didn't touch it.
He didn't need to.
He understood now: the system was watching.
But something else was watching, too.
Not a person. Not even a ghost.
A memory.
One that wanted to be found.
And he... was the one meant to find it.