The copy lunged first.
Chen didn't get her shot off in time. He was already inside her space grabbing her wrist, pivoting her weight, and slamming her into the containment pod wall. Her breath punched out of her chest.
Argus didn't hesitate.
He tackled the clone full-force, shoulder to ribs, driving him across the platform. They slammed into a terminal console glass cracked, metal groaned.
They hit the floor hard.
The clone moved fast faster than Argus remembered being. No wasted motion. Just instinct and speed.
A punch came in. Argus blocked high but the clone twisted, elbow driving into his ribs.
Sharp pain bloomed.
He rolled, came up with a knee. Landed a blow across the clone's jaw. It staggered but didn't flinch.
Didn't grunt.
Didn't even blink.
"Pain response disabled," the clone muttered, smiling. "You fight like an antique."
Argus spat blood. "You talk too much."
They crashed into another pod, this one empty. Argus drove his boot against the side of the clone's knee just enough to shift the weight. He grabbed the neural port cable still dangling from the last activation and whipped it across the clone's neck.
The clone caught it mid-air.
"Outdated tricks," he said. "You think I didn't learn every move you've ever made?"
Argus let go of the cable and pulled the burner drive from his coat.
One click. A jolt of raw thermal feedback surged through the connector cable.
The clone twitched.
The sync implant sparked red at his temple.
"Didn't think of that one," Argus muttered.
The clone stumbled back, face distorting his smile twitching too wide, too fast. Like a loop skipping frames.
Argus tackled him again this time into the pod he'd come from. Slammed him against the open restraints. Elbow to the throat. Fist to the gut.
The clone grunted now. Just once.
Not much.
But enough.
Argus slammed the pod shut and smashed the lockdown lever into place.
The interior lights flared blue.
Containment Engaged.
Inside, the clone glared back no panic, no fear.
Just recognition.
"You're tired, Cutter," he said. "You're cracked. You'll lose yourself long before I burn out."
Argus stared back. "You're not me."
"No," the clone said. "I'm the one they'll keep."
The screen behind him blinked once.
SYNC INTERRUPTED
TRANSFER INCOMPLETE – Secondary Node Activated
Chen stumbled up behind him, clutching her ribs. "He got part of it out. I saw the signal jump."
Argus turned. "To where?"
The terminal auto-scrolled data.
A new path had opened.
Target Node: GRAYRIDGE CORE / ASHBOX SYSTEM
Transfer Status: Partial / Active
Myles limped in from the outer corridor, pale and sweating. "What the hell is Ashbox?"
Argus didn't answer.
Because he didn't know.
And that was the problem.
He accessed the clone's sync report, pulled the system's full export path. It ended at a node he hadn't seen before. Deeper than Vaulted Echoes.
Far deeper.
"Ashbox," Chen said, reading over his shoulder. "That's not a file."
"No," Argus murmured. "It's a destination."
The terminal blinked again.
ADMIN OVERRIDE GATE 3 OPENED
MIRELLI ACCESS KEY CONFIRMED
A new layout map appeared on-screen blueprints of a third sublevel, buried beneath the current vault system. It was older. The formatting was different. Manual directories, no network sync.
This wasn't Pandora.
It was something before.
Above the door:
GATE 3 ORIGIN SPOOL / HOST ZERO
Chen looked at Argus. "They buried a failsafe."
"No," he said. "They buried the first version."
He turned, grabbed the Theta key from the terminal, and slid it into his pocket.
The clone inside the pod smiled.
"You're not ready for what's next," it said.
"I never was," Argus muttered. "Didn't stop me then."
As the trio stepped into the Gate 3 corridor, the walls lit slowly faint orange glow pulsing like a heartbeat.
At the end of the hall, a door unsealed itself. Cold vapor spilled out from the seam.
And from inside, a voice calm. Male. Familiar.
"Argus. You're late. I've been waiting for me."
The voice came from inside the sealed chamber. Not loud. Not mechanical. Calm measured, like someone delivering a lecture they'd rehearsed too many times.
Argus stepped forward.
Chen held back. "You want to go in blind?"
"I'm already inside."
She didn't argue.
The door slid open with a quiet hiss, letting out a thin stream of cold vapor. The temperature dropped. The air inside smelled like copper, ozone, and the faint trace of old paper like a forgotten library that somehow hummed.
Inside: a circular room, metal-walled, lined with decaying racks of neural archive spools. Not drives. Not servers. Spools black reels of compressed memory thread, fed into glass-walled ports like old film.
In the center stood a single chair.
Occupied.
The man sitting in it wasn't tethered. No cables. No cap. No restraints.
He wore plain black jacket, boots, gloves. Head shaved clean. No scars. But his face
His face was Argus's.
Almost.
He looked older. Not by years, but by weight. By stillness. Like he'd been here longer than he should've survived, but never really decayed.
He smiled.
"I was wondering how many steps it would take before one of us opened the wrong door."
Argus didn't speak yet.
He circled slowly, boots scraping softly against the grated floor.
Chen entered behind him, eyes scanning everything, pistol lowered but not forgotten.
The man in the chair didn't react to her.
Only to Argus.
"You're not the clone from Gate 2," Argus said.
"No. I'm what came before all of this. Before Pandora. Before MANTIS. Before Mirelli turned our face into a permission slip."
Chen's voice was quiet. "You're from Ashbox."
The man nodded. "Call me the first upload. Not quite Cutter. Not quite the man he used to be. Just the shadow of something they couldn't overwrite."
Argus stopped walking. "Why are you still here?"
"Because someone has to remember," the man said. "And because if I ever left, the system would collapse under its own rot. Ashbox was meant to preserve. Not replace."
"But they started replacing anyway," Chen said.
"They got impatient," he replied. "Memories weren't enough. They wanted bodies that could fight, obey, perform. They took minds that were never meant to be replicated and gutted them into protocol."
Argus stepped closer. "And me?"
"You were a control group," the man said. "Uploaded early. Archived during your third job with the Syndicate. They kept you quiet, out of circulation, until a host with enough trauma and just enough compatibility showed up broken on a slab."
Lawson.
Argus swallowed once.
"You're saying this was planned."
"Everything is planned when someone's watching long enough."
Chen moved toward one of the spools. Each was labeled by hand faded ink, still legible. Many names were redacted.
But a few weren't.
Subject: BRIAN CHEN
Status: Fragmented. Last access: Echo Loop B.
She froze.
Argus saw her jaw tighten.
The man in the chair turned slowly toward her.
"You're not here to save your brother," he said softly. "You're here to witness what they did to him."
Chen gripped the edge of the console. "He was overwritten?"
"No," the man said. "He was a test case. Echo-rich. Responsive. He didn't die in the crash. He died during upload drift. They stored a broken version of him. Ran it in loops until his mind collapsed under repetition."
"No," she whispered.
The man reached to his side tapped a small spool reader mounted beside the chair.
It lit up.
A projection flickered on the far wall.
A short loop.
Brian.
Alone in a white room, looking directly at the camera.
"I'm still here, Amy," the recording said. "I think I'm still here. Just… don't open the door, okay? Don't let them use me again."
Then it cut.
Chen stared.
Then turned away.
Silence swallowed the room.
Argus looked at the man. "Why show us this now?"
"Because the door to Ashbox wasn't supposed to open again. But Mirelli broke protocol. She forced a live sync with an unstable Echo, and now the backups "
The lights above them pulsed.
Then dimmed.
Then turned red.
The man's face changed.
Not in shape. In expression.
Flat. Alert.
"…they're waking up."
All around them, the spools began to spin.
Not one. Not two.
Dozens.
On the console screen, one final line appeared:
Ashbox Backup Activation Triggered. Candidates: Argus Cutter, Amy Chen. Memory profiles selected.
The man stood slowly from the chair.
"You were never meant to come here together."