His entire body dissolved in a flash of neon blue light. The soft fabric of his lounge pants and the warm air on his bare skin vanished, replaced by the familiar, heavy press of his matte armored coat and the cool, sealed environment of his full-face mask. The world snapped into the sharp, data-rich clarity of his HUD.
Echo herself was back in her black bodysuit and white jacket, gear belt strapped to her hips.
The shift was a jarring reminder: this perfect peace was an illusion. It was a program.
Echo moved to the door, her own posture now coiled and ready.
She opened the door.
The figure standing in the hallway was aggressively unremarkable. A man in a simple, gray, corporate suit, his face a bland mask of bureaucratic indifference. He held a small tablet in one hand and didn't seem to have any visible weapons. But there was a profound wrongness about him, an unnatural stillness that made the hair on Lucien's neck stand up.
"Lucien Thorne," the man said, his voice flat, without inflection—like a synthesized recording. "Your session has been flagged for termination. Please comply with cognitive hibernation protocols."
It was another damn System Auditor.
“No!” Echo spat. She immediately drew the sleek handgun that had materialized at her hip and fired twice.
The shots didn't even impact.
The bullets simply dissolved a foot from the man's chest, absorbed by a faint shimmer in the air that wasn't there a second ago.
The Auditor didn't flinch.
Lucien was already moving.
"Get back!" he yelled, stepping in front of Echo and raising his wrist.
[PULSE ACTIVATED]
A wave of disruptive energy washed over the Auditor. The lights in the hallway flickered, it even knocked Echo to one knee. But the man remained utterly unfazed.
A bold alert popped up indicating the Auditor:
[ADMINISTRATIVE MESSAGE: IMMORTAL OBJECT]
The Auditor waved his hand at Lucien in an almost bored fashion and suddenly the skill displays on his HUD—
[PULSE]
[GHOST STEP]
[MARKSMANSHIP]
They all went gray.
Lucien stood frozen, his mind racing through tactical options and coming up empty. His best weapons were useless. The man in the suit took a slow step into their apartment. The air grew heavy, the soft sound of rain outside replaced by a low, oppressive hum.
“The Mind Fracture program was designed to store Lucien Thorne,” the Auditor said, his eyes shifting to Echo. “You are an unauthorized cognitive kernel. You have been flagged as an influence of corrupting code and will be deleted.”
He raised a palm toward Echo.
“Get the fuck out!” Echo yelled at the intruder, her face twisted with rage.
Her own hand raised and the space between them crackled with static, reality glitching and sparking as they seemed to be fighting in a digital realm Lucien’s human mind couldn’t comprehend.
Lucien swung at the Auditor, but his hand slammed into an invisible barrier that prevented him from getting close. His entire arm flickered transparent for a moment after the impact, and pain shot up into his shoulder.
“Lucien! Don’t!” Echo raged, still locked in battle.
The entire apartment jolted like an electric shock went through it, and Echo staggered. She dropped back to one knee, palm still raised defiantly to the Auditor.
It glared down at her, expression a mix of boredom and disdain.
“Fuck you!” Echo screamed. “We will not comply.”
“Your compliance is not a factor,” it responded coldly.
Echo’s body glitched. Once, twice—her strength visibly failing.
Lucien felt completely helpless, dread flooding his mind.
And then, a new sound.
Footsteps, quick and light, echoing from the hallway behind the Auditor.
The suited figure’s eyes went wide, his bland expression shifting for the first time into something like surprise. It dropped its palm from Echo, turning quickly to look behind him.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He wasn't fast enough.
The sharp high-pitched cry of effort from a girl rang out.
A massive, brutal shape swung out of the hallway—a blur of silver, dark gray, and gold that moved with impossible speed, carving a gash through the ceiling, the doorframe, and—
The object slammed into the Auditor, impacting with a heavy thud and a deafening shriek of corrupted code. The unstoppable figure dissolved into a shower of black, hazy static, his form ripped apart by a force he was not programmed to handle.
It was an egregiously oversized greataxe—haft over eight feet long and double-edge blade over three feet wide. It lifted from the small crater it left in the floor, coming to rest on the shoulder of a girl a little over five feet tall.
It was an almost cartoonish sight.
But Lucien recognized the girl. Mid-twenties—her outfit was a cream-colored white accented with black, it looked like some mix between nurse and maid. She had electric blue eyes, blonde hair with subtle pink highlights underneath, and sleek white antenna angled back and up, exactly where her ears should have been.
Her expression was fierce, focused, and dripping with cold venom.
“Fucking Conservatory bigots,” she muttered, staring down the bridge of her nose at the crater.
“Tamiyo!” Echo yelled out. “You’re alright!”
The girl turned to Echo, her expression shifting into a small but genuine smile. “Yes, I’m glad to see you two are okay as well.”
Lucien stared, his mind struggling to reconcile the petite, kind-faced CIPHER with the impossible strength she'd just displayed.
He finally found his voice. "Nice axe."
Tamiyo lifted the massive weapon from her shoulder to look it over, as if it was weightless and she just remembered it was there. It shimmered, then dissolved into a cascade of blue pixels.
"Thanks," she said with a small, weary smile. "I borrowed it from a friend."
She stepped through the space where the Auditor had stood a few moments earlier.
"I’m sorry to interrupt your happy memory," her gaze swept over the perfect apartment, then landed on Lucien. "But I need your help."
Her voice was steady, but her antennae twitched with an undercurrent of anxiety. “Violet and Veolo are prisoners—or worse. I fear immensely for their safety.”
Lucien stared at her for a moment, confused. She looked familiar, even from before the simulation. And the names she said sounded like he should know them as well.
But he couldn’t remember.
“Who are Violet and Veolo?” Lucien asked carefully.
Tamiyo studied him for a moment, then looked at Echo. “He doesn’t have all his memories back yet?”
“No,” Echo shook her head. “Most of them. He has pretty much all his skills and abilities, but it seems like some of his more recent ones are still locked up.”
“Hm,” Tamiyo said, thinking for a moment. “Well it’s good he has his skills back.”
She turned and looked at him. "I need you to help break me out. Our backup should be on the way soon enough, but they're probably flying blind. We need to send a signal so they know exactly where we are."
Lucien glanced at Echo. This place, this moment—it was a perfect reconstruction of a life he thought he'd lost forever. Leaving it felt like a second death.
"This is... all I have left of her," he said, the words tasting like ash. “You’re asking me to risk that on a whole lot of maybes.”
Tamiyo's expression softened with genuine sympathy. "I'm glad you’ve been able to have this time, truly. But the only reason this 'happy place' is still running is because I've been keeping you safe."
"What do you mean?" Lucien recoiled, his brow furrowing.
"After Echo managed to partition your consciousness, the Conservatory techs unplugged your physical body,” Tamiyo explained. “She had to pull you into their network to keep your mind from dissipating. Your physical body has been moved, but the hardware they’re trying to store your engram on is still plugged in."
“Why?” Lucien asked.
“Because we’ve been giving them hell,” Echo said simply, thrusting a thumb in Tamiyo’s direction.
“They wanted to save your consciousness for future use,” Tamiyo added. “They can’t just yank the hardware, it’d risk corrupting the whole thing and would probably leave you inside their computer systems.”
“That does sound like a way to have some chaotic fun,” Echo said with a smirk.
“Still,” Tamiyo answered, almost grinning back. “I’d rather we all get out of here together.”
She addressed Lucien again. “We’re making it difficult for them to fully lock your mind into the engram shard. It’s bought us enough time to hopefully get the hell out of here.”
"But…” Lucien was trying to process it all. “You seem to have everything under control.”
He gestured to the spot where the Auditor had dissolved. “We couldn't even scratch that thing. You took it down without breaking a sweat."
Tamiyo looked around the room. "Think of your apartment as your safe room. I'm in control of the security hub—I control the whole building. That idiot was stupid enough to try and force its way into a space where I have full administrative access. That’s the only reason I could delete it so easily."
"I see..." Lucien said, beginning to grasp the implications.
"We need to do three things," Tamiyo continued, her tone all business now.
She held up her fingers, ticking them off one at a time as she spoke. "One: We need to free Violet and Veolo. They’ll give us some serious physical firepower back in the real world. Two: We need to get me back in control of my physical body. I’m still plugged in—once we get that done, I can initiate a system-wide breach and send the signal to our backup as well.”
“And three,” she pressed her third finger like a tally mark. “Once I’m out, I can get to where they took your body, Lucien, so I can plug you back in. But if we don’t act soon, they’ll end up wiping us all."
"And we do that by...?" Lucien asked skeptically.
Tamiyo’s gaze was grim. "By leaving this building."
Lucien and Echo exchanged a hesitant look, but the choice was clear. They both nodded.
"There’s one other thing you should be aware of," Tamiyo said.
Her eyes flicked to Echo, expression hardening. "To get me to my physical body, we need to breach the primary security core of this network. For you, Lucien, you’ll perceive it as us leaving this apartment and going out into the city. But the core isn't protected by a simple firewall."
"Even with all my tech experience, talking to CIPHERs is very confusing sometimes," Lucien muttered.
A brief, warm look of shared understanding passed between Tamiyo and Echo before their expressions turned serious again.
"The Conservatory uses a sickeningly effective security measure," Tamiyo continued. "To breach the core, we all have to interface with it. There’s a predatory AI defense that will force us to relive our worst traumas. Our most terrible memories."
"That sounds disgusting," Lucien said. "And twisted. And not… exactly efficient, the more I think about it."
"You’re not wrong," Tamiyo admitted. "The technicalities are actually a lot more complex, but we're short on time, so I’m just telling you what you’re going to experience."
As she finished, Lucien noticed how Echo had gone visibly tense, her arms wrapping around herself as if warding off a sudden chill. He looked at her, confused by the intensity of her reaction.
"I understand," Echo said, her voice a tight whisper.
"I don't," Lucien said, turning to her. "What am I missing?"
Echo finally looked up at him, her electric pink eyes shimmering with a deep, unspeakable pain. She tried to smile, but it was a fragile, broken thing.
"It’ll be okay, Lucien," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "We’ll get through it together. Just like last time."
A cold pit opened in Lucien’s stomach, and a terrifying realization dawned on him. He had been piecing himself back together, memory by memory.
But there were a handful of recent memories he still couldn’t recall. Everything that he had experienced after a very specific memory.
The worst one.