The day began with blue light and perfect numbers.
As she entered her lab, the biometric scanner greeted her with a quiet tone of recognition. The walls shifted subtly in color, adapting to her biorhythm. A tray glided toward her on invisible rails, presenting her preferred morning drink—green infusion, with neural stabilizers tuned precisely to her cycle.
She glanced at the translucent panel hovering near her wrist.
Twelve clients. All elite. All stable.
Except one.
Her fingers hovered over the stream of vitals displayed in shifting waves of pale green and violet. A red flicker blinked. Then vanished.
Cardiac strain.
Client 0471—Dr. Kael Viren. Male. Age 96 (rejuvenated to 34).
Vitals normalized in 0.3 seconds.
It could've been an anomaly. A sensor glitch. But her system didn't glitch. She had programmed most of it herself.
With a swipe, she called up his detailed profile. No medical alerts, no system flags. But there it was again—hidden deep in the raw data feed.
A microsecond of irregularity.
His heart had paused.
Not skipped.
Paused.
Her brows furrowed slightly.
She opened a secure channel and sent a light inquiry to the Health Grid. Standard procedure—nothing alarming. The system would ignore it if it was nothing. But it would mark it if more patterns appeared.
As she prepared to move on, the cat jumped onto the table, curling beside her hand. She stroked it absentmindedly, her eyes still on the interface.
And then something strange happened.
The lab's core interface blinked red.
A soft chime.
Unusual.
Then a voice. Calm, emotionless, yet urgent.
> "Unauthorized intrusion attempt on neural programming core. Sequence origin: internal."
Her hand froze.
She was the only one authorized to touch the programming core.
And no one—not even the system—should say the word "intrusion."
Her heart didn't race. She had trained for emergencies, even if they were rare in this sterilized age. Calm as always, she stood and activated the full lockdown.
Her cat hissed once, softly. Then went still.
She spoke aloud for the first time that day.
> "Run diagnostic trace. Full sweep. Show me origin point."
The system hesitated. Then answered.
> "Origin matches profile: Dr. Kael Viren. Permission override: granted 2.3 seconds ago using your neural signature."
That was impossible.
She hadn't granted anything.
And only she could use her neural signature.
Unless…
She stared at the floating interface, cold realization dawning.
Unless someone else had access to who she was.
Or had been.
She stroked the cat's soft fur without thinking, her eyes locked on the data.
The anomaly was small—barely a second—but it bothered her.
Kael Viren's cardiac rhythm had halted and resumed too perfectly. As if the failure had been planned. As if something had intervened.
"Query full cardiac sync history. High-resolution feed," she instructed.
The system responded instantly. But the results came back with compressed fragments, as if someone had erased the past ten seconds of raw signal—then stitched it back together to look natural.
Her jaw tightened.
That wasn't normal. That was…manipulation.
A quiet tone pinged behind her.
New message. Encrypted.
Level: Internal.
Sender: Unknown.
She hesitated.
No one used internal encryption. It was obsolete—replaced decades ago by quantum locks. The message glowed in red. Her instinct said: don't open it.
She opened it.
"He remembers."
Just two words.
A pulse moved through her chest—not fear, but recognition.
Something old, buried. Something not from this life.
She blinked once. Images flickered behind her eyes—gloved hands, a sterile hallway, voices yelling in a language no longer spoken.
"System," she said, voice now low and cold. "Trace the message origin."
The response came too fast.
"Message was written from your internal workspace."
That was impossible. She hadn't written it. She hadn't even thought it.
Her skin went cold.
Outside her lab window, a medic drone passed, scanning rooftops. Everything looked normal. The air was clean. The city hummed with peace.
But inside her lab—her sanctuary—something was wrong.
She turned quickly, locking down her files, encrypting her private logs, and initiating a full system reboot. It would take twenty minutes. During that time, she was invisible to the Grid.
And alone.
She opened her personal terminal, the one not synced to anything.
Typed in a command from memory—a root access string she hadn't used in years, passed down by someone she'd barely remembered until now.
The screen turned black. Then white. Then text.
"Welcome back, Dr. Rehn. Sleep cycle complete."
"Awakening Level Two: Initiated."
Her real name wasn't the one on her ID.
She hadn't heard "Dr. Rehn" in decades—or lifetimes.
And if Level Two was initiating…
That meant Kael Viren wasn't the only one waking up.
The system was still rebooting.
She sat in the dimmed lab, every automated comfort offline—no sound, no scent, no warmth.
Only the soft weight of the cat curled at her feet reminded her she wasn't completely alone.
On her private terminal, the words pulsed faintly:
"Awakening Level Two: Initiated."
"Accessing: Echo Protocol // Archive: [REHN_428–∆SIGNAL_34]"
"WARNING: Memory containment breached."
Her fingers hovered above the keypad. She shouldn't continue—not without preparing backups, firewalls, a direct uplink to off-grid storage.
But she knew this wasn't just data.
It was a piece of herself.
She hit Enter.
The screen flickered.
Then… images.
A dim room—clean but crude, far older than the smooth labs she worked in now.
Wires everywhere.
A man on a table—sweating, shaking.
She saw her hands—gloved, younger—adjusting something on a crude neural interface.
A voice echoed from the playback, her own, sharper than it was now:
"Begin Phase Three. Record everything. If this fails, destroy all backups."
Another voice, deeper, male, trembling.
"He's not stabilizing. You're pushing too far."
Her voice again:
"I don't care. If we can store memory across death—we end memory loss forever. Don't you understand? This isn't about him anymore."
Static.
Then—screaming.
She blinked hard. Her temples pulsed. The cat mewed once, sensing the shift in her body.
The file ended with a name flashing on the screen:
ECHO PROTOCOL: SUBJECT_34 – Status: Deceased
Last signature match: Kael Viren
She leaned back, breath catching.
Kael had died.
She remembered now—she had watched it happen.
But somehow, here he was—alive, with vital readings too perfect, and a glitch in his brain's rhythm that no system could trace.
More than that…
If the protocol reactivated, it meant her own memory containment was breaking.
Everything she chose to forget, all those years ago, was coming back.
And she wasn't the only one remembering.
Suddenly, the power surged. Lights snapped back on. The regular system rebooted—but now, her private terminal began to self-wipe.
"Unauthorized file detected. Purging sequence active."
"No—stop!" she shouted, diving toward the keyboard.
But the data melted away in front of her eyes—every log, every voice, every image—gone.
Except one line.
A final echo.
"Project Echo was never terminated. It was buried."
Outside her med-panel buzzed. An urgent override request came through.
Kael Viren was on his way to her lab.
And he wasn't coming for a check-up.