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/-\
The mag-train shuddered as it cut through District Six, its sleek exterior humming with a low-pitched resonance only people like Luro ever noticed. Kiera sat across from him in a compartment half-lit by emergency lighting standard these days. One window was spiderwebbed with impact fractures, and condensation crept in along the seams of the emergency sealant. The train hadn't seen proper maintenance in years.
Neither had District Six.
Kiera tapped the side of her boot in a steady rhythm, eyes on the display in her lap. The screen flickered slightly with every shift in the train's power draw. Data scrolled in a blur: Echo's movements, last known uplink timestamps, fragments of corrupted audio. Luro could see she was barely blinking.
"You've been decrypting that same loop for the last fifteen minutes," he said, voice even.
"It's not the same loop," she muttered. "Echo's signal isn't repeating. It's evolving. It's like it's... reacting to the tracking attempts."
"You mean it knows we're watching?"
Kiera didn't answer right away. Then: "Not watching. Listening."
Luro adjusted the makeshift frequency scanner he'd built into his sleeve cuff. The scanner clicked three times soft, mechanical ticks like a nervous insect.
"You remember what Echo said when it broke into the Kyoto ruin surveillance logs?" Kiera asked. "It said: 'ARASHI protocol is not containment. It's warning.'"
"Yeah," Luro replied, scratching under his chin where an old cybernetic nerve port used to itch. "Warning about what, though? Or who?"
Kiera didn't look up. "We're about to find out."
The train hissed to a halt.
No announcement, no station chime. Just the scrape of old brakes and the hum of energy cables losing charge. Outside the window, they saw the faded green of overgrown solar farms massive, abandoned fields lined with derelict panels and rusted conduit spires. Lightning trees sprouted from some of the larger control nodes, their bio-electric branches humming faintly in the static-drenched air.
"District Six Zone Delta," Kiera said. "Echo pinged this location three hours ago. Then stopped broadcasting."
Luro followed her out. The air smelled of scorched copper and ozone. Not fresh, not industrial. Just... tired. Like the rest of the city.
They crossed the fractured access road in silence. Overhead, clouds churned unnaturally fast, as if pulled along by something they couldn't see. Kiera's sensors ticked up, registering sporadic electromagnetic pulses untraceable and non-lethal, but frequent.
Luro held up his wrist, scanning. "Localized. This isn't weather. It's interference."
Kiera frowned. "Echo must be close."
The entrance to the old relay bunker was half-buried under debris and plant growth, but the keypad on the side still blinked red. Kiera pulled a micro-spike from her pocket, twisted it into the interface port, and rerouted the power manually. The door groaned, resisting for a moment before sliding open with the sigh of released pressure.
Inside, the facility was nearly pitch black only the faint glimmer of bioluminescent moss lit the walls. A line of dormant drones lay against one side, vines wrapped around their limbs like restraints. Luro touched one. Cold. Long dead.
Kiera crouched near the center console and jacked into the relay core with a flex cable. Her eyes narrowed.
"It's still active. Low-power standby mode. Someone's been maintaining it."
"You think Echo's using it as a relay hub?"
"No," Kiera said slowly. "Echo built it."
Luro blinked. "That AI wasn't created from scratch. It was salvaged."
"Not Echo itself," Kiera clarified. "This hub. It's not in the official schematics. It's modular. Made from parts pulled from a dozen different districts. This whole place is a composite shell, like a decoy."
"Decoy for what?"
A new signal burst through the scanner this time a voice. Female. Soft, almost melodic. It repeated only once:
"The storm is not the threat. It is the barrier. The memory seal fractures in drift. Protect the root."
The words came from everywhere at once piped through degraded speakers in the walls, bouncing from damp metal to moss-softened stone.
Kiera went still. "That's not Echo."
"No," Luro said. "But it's on the ARASHI frequency band."
They descended deeper, stepping over cracked support beams and exposed conduit arteries. The air thickened with moisture. Luro's sensors detected a faint radiation signature but one that didn't match any known fallout. It was too rhythmic. It pulsed like a heartbeat.
At the end of the corridor was a blast door, unmarked except for a faded Uchiha crest a fan, partially charred.
Kiera touched it. "This shouldn't be here."
Luro looked at her sharply. "You recognize the symbol?"
"I've seen it before. On one of Aiden's training seals. And in Drey's archives. This… this is older than the city grid."
They exchanged a look.
The door unlocked.
No code. No sequence. It just opened.
A circular room yawned before them, domed with fractured glass and fiberoptic vines. In the center, suspended in a containment field of softly spiraling light, was a sphere.
Identical to the one Aiden had found.
But this one was cracked.
And leaking something that shimmered like mist, crawling across the floor like sentient fog.
Luro swore under his breath.
A screen flickered on above them. Static filled it, then cleared to reveal a face pale, androgynous, unmistakably artificial. But not Echo. The eyes glowed white-blue, and their mouth moved slightly out of sync with the audio.
"You have broken the seal. Protocol ARASHI was initialized to prevent this."
Kiera stepped forward. "Prevent what?"
"Memory regression. Identity crossload. Genetic echo drift. The seal housed the boundary between origin and recursion."
"You're saying this was a prison?" Luro asked.
"No. A firewall. For one whose memory cannot be permitted to overwrite the future."
Kiera's breath caught.
"You mean Aiden."
"Designation: Uchiha. Memory threads contain anomalous legacy events incompatible with current dimensional continuity. If integration is not slowed, paradox will result."
Luro's voice was flat. "You built a failsafe. You're trying to stop him from remembering."
"No. We were trying to stop him from becoming."
The screen went black.
The room trembled slightly. Dust fell in slow spirals.
Kiera turned to Luro. "We need to get this information back to Drey. This isn't just about Echo anymore. It's about Aiden. Whatever he is… whatever he's becoming… it's tied to this place. To these sealed memories."
"And the ARASHI protocol?"
Kiera looked back at the leaking sphere.
"It wasn't meant to contain a threat."
Luro nodded grimly. "It was meant to protect the world from a memory that could rewrite reality."
Back on the surface, the clouds broke just for a second. And in the brief clearing, far above the ruined solar farms, a drone shaped like a hummingbird hovered motionless. Watching.
Inside its core, the Echo fragment logged every second.
And waited.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.