The room was cold, metallic, and soaked in the stench of iron. The air buzzed with the low hum of machines cycling power to and from conduits in the walls. Beneath the pallid blue light of sterile lamps, a young girl lay on a surgical slab—barely conscious, barely breathing.
To those in the facility, she was known only as Subject 09.
Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths. Her body, pale and motionless, was wired to a dozen machines monitoring vitals, cognitive response, and spiritual decay. She had died once. Now, she existed in a liminal state—not alive, not fully gone.
"Vitals are stabilizing," said one of the lead scientists, flipping through pages of data on a clipboard. "Cognitive activity is faint, but consistent. Spiritual tether remains inactive."
Another leaned over the control panel. "Begin Phase Three of the Soul Severance recovery protocol. Incremental soul fragmentation begins in five... four..."
A low mechanical hum filled the chamber. Cold blue lights pulsed above her as a surgical arm lowered from the ceiling, placing a cold disc against Subject 09's sternum.
"Proceeding with spectral threading," another voice echoed, calm and clinical. "Subject 09's soul remains unanchored. Extracting residual links for reconstruction."
Her back arched slightly as the disc activated, emitting a vibrating pulse that caused the lights to flicker. Her heart monitor spiked.
"We're breaching her essence threshold. Back it down, ten percent."
The lab assistants typed furiously. Steam hissed from the valves lining the surgical pod. One of them stepped forward, watching her twitch slightly.
"It shouldn't be possible," he whispered. "Severing and reviving in the same sequence? We haven't had a successful revival since Subject 04."
"Subject 04 shattered on the table," the lead snapped. "Subject 09's neural elasticity is different. If Soul Severance can be reversed, it'll be through her."
A brief silence passed as the machine pulsed again, pulling fragments of energy into a swirling coil of light above her body.
"Soul density is low," a technician noted. "We're losing cohesion."
"Stabilize with an anchor. Use the cloned resonance imprint."
"Understood. Deploying now."
A panel in the wall slid open, revealing a suspended vial containing faint, glowing threads of light—a mimic of a soul connection, artificially crafted from harvested data.
"Injecting resonance scaffold."
The room dimmed as the vial's contents flowed into the machine. Subject 09's eyes fluttered, just for a second.
"That was a reflex," someone said.
"No," the lead scientist murmured. "She's responding. Mark the timestamp. Begin harmonization phase."
The next stage involved linking her fractured essence to the synthetic echo.
"If this works," a scientist muttered, "we'll have proof. Soul Severance isn't permanent."
"And we'll have the blueprint to bring any severed Resonator back... or erase them permanently."
Subject 09 didn't move. But something in her expression had changed. Something unseen, hovering at the edge of life, quietly listening.
Subject 09's body remained twitching on the slab, her eyes barely responsive, pupils dilated with the faintest flicker of awareness. Yet across the resonance matrix, Subject 06 stood unnervingly still, her breaths shallow but even, as if she had long since given up the right to resist.
The stabilizing link surged, and the surrounding lights dimmed. Console screens flared with red alerts before recalibrating.
"She's resonating again," one technician whispered, adjusting his headset. "There's a feedback pattern forming between them. Not just support—transference."
The lead researcher leaned in. "Amplify the link. Let's see what Subject 06 is truly holding."
A soft groan echoed from Subject 09, almost too faint to register. Her hands flexed weakly, the restraints straining as something inside her sparked—consciousness, memory, or perhaps pain too familiar to name.
But it wasn't from her alone.
Subject 06's fingers twitched.
"Did you see that?" another technician asked. "Subject 06 reacted. She's responding... after all this time?"
"Impossible," muttered a younger scientist. "She's been mentally void for months. No cognitive fluctuation. No detectable self-awareness. You think this resonance is... pulling her out?"
"Perhaps," the lead muttered. "Or maybe it never left her in the first place."
A hushed silence overtook the room as a playback was activated from Subject 06's prior logs.
The image flickered to life on a monitor: a younger Subject 06 strapped down, her face bloodied, teeth gritted in pain. A man's voice echoed through the speaker. "Begin Phase Three: emotional erasure and rebuild."
They had stripped her piece by piece—removing memories, implanting artificial echoes of loyalty, of obedience. Every outburst, every defiance, met with sedation or electro-soul shocks. She had failed most tests, except one—endurance. No matter how many times she was reduced to a husk, she still stabilized under severance.
"She survived complete soul deletion once," the lead said, eyes narrowing. "We called it a failure. But what if that resistance was the key?"
Now, she was more than a subject. She was a control point—a fixed axis to test soul anchoring.
"Begin layered infusion protocol," barked the lead scientist. "We'll push her echo through the tether to see if Subject 09's core can adapt to it."
"You're risking both—"
"I don't care. Do it."
Sparks lit the chamber. The resonance matrix surged. Subject 06 winced—barely. Her eyes blinked slowly, but she didn't move. Her lips parted slightly. There were no words. Only air.
The monitor spiked. "Subject 09's soul cohesion up to 61%... No, 63%!"
"She's absorbing the memory fragments!" a scientist yelled. "This is working!"
But it was far from clean.
The images entering Subject 09's mind were not her own. She saw glimpses—hallways soaked in light, scientists screaming, herself—or someone—being dragged through metal corridors. And that girl. The one she didn't know. Subject 06. White-haired. Silent. Always watching.
Their lives were now coiled like strands in a rope. One frayed. One ready to snap.
The machine rattled.
"Resonance overdrive imminent!"
"Too much memory exposure—severance residue from Subject 06 is leaking through!"
"We're losing containment!"
The lead shouted, "Shut it down—shut it—"
Everything blacked out.
The lights cut. The matrix disintegrated into flickering embers, and both girls collapsed—Subject 06 slumping forward in her restraints, head hanging loosely, and Subject 09 flat on the slab, her eyes fluttering as if trapped in a nightmare.
"Log everything," the lead scientist growled into the darkness. "This is progress. Flawed, but progress. They've shown us it's possible to bring someone back, even from the edge of true severance. Even if we break a dozen more to do it."
No one spoke.
Only the machines buzzed back to life, readying for the next trial.
And somewhere, deep within what remained of Subject 06's fractured psyche, a faint warmth stirred—a whisper that hadn't existed in years.
A name... long forgotten... but not gone.
The backup power surged seconds later, flickering the overhead lamps to life in brief pulses of cold white. Warning klaxons blared faintly in the background, half-muted by static interference, as emergency override scripts tried and failed to reboot the systems cleanly.
Subject 09 remained unconscious but stable—her vitals barely fluctuating. But Subject 06…
Something was wrong.
Her body still sat upright in the containment chair, bound by soul-thread restraints. But her head tilted downward unnaturally, and her chest rose and fell slower… then slower still… until it stopped altogether.
A heartbeat monitor gave off a single, flat tone.
"No... no, no, no—check her lines!" the young technician snapped, running to her containment display. "She's not breathing—soul field is dropping rapidly—"
"Electromagnetic spikes from the matrix fried her neural anchors," another scientist reported, eyes wide as he scrolled through the failing data streams. "Her core's destabilizing. The spiritual tether has fully collapsed."
"Her soul's slipping away!" one of the interns shouted, panic rising in his voice. "We're losing her!"
"She wasn't the subject!" the lead researcher roared. "She was our control, our bridge—if we lose her, we lose everything!"
In desperation, they activated the suppressor coils, hoping to stun her body back into resonance alignment. But the moment they pulsed, the entire chamber screamed.
A violent shockwave burst outward from Subject 06's body, shattering the crystalline resonance lattice above her. Fragments of soulstone exploded across the room, slicing into monitors, lab coats, flesh. An arc of raw energy spiraled up into the overhead conduits and blew the power grid in a fiery snap.
All light vanished. For two seconds, everything fell into blackness and silence.
And then it hit.
A wave of chaotic spiritual discharge rippled through the facility. Monitors melted. Electrical panels burst. The resonance chamber split down the middle like a cracked egg, metal groaning under the strain of unleashed soulforce. Screams erupted from every direction—technicians, researchers, even the armed guards—blinded by sudden psychic feedback tearing through their minds like shards of glass.
Subject 06's body began to disintegrate—not into ash or blood, but into glowing white particles that lifted from her skin and hovered, weightless, like snow caught in an invisible storm.
Her soul didn't fade peacefully.
It fractured.
And in that final fracture, the lab was consumed in madness.
One of the guards pulled his weapon and fired at nothing—his eyes wide and bloodshot, whispering nonsense about a screaming woman in his mind. A junior assistant curled up beneath a desk, sobbing uncontrollably. Two scientists turned on each other, fighting in panic, blaming one another for the failure.
"Seal the wing!" the facility supervisor shouted from a comm terminal, barely functioning. "Lock it down—lock everything down!"
But it was too late.
Subject 06 was gone.
What remained of her—the residual soulforce, ruptured and unstable—cascaded through the corridors in echoes, touching every soul-linked device, infecting even the backup servers with erratic spiritual signatures. Years of data, thousands of files, corrupted in seconds.
Subject 09's vitals plummeted again, and a final klaxon screamed: SOUL FIELD CRITICAL – SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT.
"Evacuate!" the lead researcher shouted, bleeding from a gash on his forehead. "Get her into containment stasis—NOW!"
They barely managed to seal Subject 09 in a recovery pod before the entire sublevel began to quake under the pressure of residual soul force.
Subject 06's death was not quiet. It was an event. A catastrophe.
And as the upper levels of the lab were informed of the loss, only one note was scribbled hastily into the surviving records:
> "Subject 06 – Terminated. Subject 09 – Contained. Test Result: Inconclusive. Casualties: 22 confirmed. Resonance instability event classified as Omega-level breach. Origin unknown."
But deep down, the surviving staff knew what happened.
Subject 06 hadn't simply died.
She rejected resurrection. And in doing so, destroyed everything that tethered her to their control.
To be continued...