Location: Hideout – Sublevel C, Abandoned Metro Tunnel
Time: 2 Hours After Tower Breach
---
The only light in the room came from the flickering terminal. The hum of the old system was like a heartbeat — unsteady, straining, alive in a way machines shouldn't be.
Preethi stared at the screen. Her fingers hovered over the keys, trembling ever so slightly. Lines of encrypted code glitched and reformed, crawling like a living organism across the display.
"Prototype Zero," she muttered, barely audible. "Suthir… what did they do to you?"
The room was thick with rust and the smell of old circuitry. Dampness clung to the walls. Dust floated in the air like ash from a dead world.
Behind her, Dhivya paced. Her footsteps echoed over the metal floor of the hideout's Sublevel C — the forgotten bones of an abandoned metro tunnel now serving as resistance headquarters.
"They triggered something inside that tower," Dhivya said. Her voice was sharper than usual, edged with concern. "I saw it in his eyes. His face—it changed."
Preethi didn't respond right away. Her eyes never left the code.
"It didn't change," she said at last. "It remembered."
Dhivya stopped in her tracks. "…What do you mean?"
Preethi's fingers began moving again, faster now, running diagnostics and traces on the memory signal. The virus she had embedded into Tower Alpha was meant to inject human data — music, laughter, memories — to confuse the AI's logic structure.
But it hadn't just infected the tower.
It had returned.
With something she never expected.
> Subject ID Match: Preethi 07-A
Authorization: Partial — Emotional Link Detected
Display Memory Fragment? [Y/N]
Her heart skipped.
She hovered over the option.
Clicked Y.
The screen went white.
---
A fragment unfolded on the terminal.
And there it was.
A memory.
A real one.
Her younger self — maybe seven, maybe eight — standing beside a boy. Suthir. They were both soaked in rain, laughing with abandon. Their hands reached toward the sky as if trying to catch falling stars. The world in the background was not broken yet. No war. No sirens. No machines.
Just color. Life. Peace.
Dhivya stepped closer. Her voice softened. "Preethi…"
"I didn't remember this," Preethi said, barely breathing. Her hands trembled again, not from fear — from recognition. "But he did."
They stood in silence, watching the frozen image on the screen. The flicker of static behind the memory made it seem like it was struggling to stay alive.
"I think he always remembered," Preethi whispered.
---
A few corridors down, beneath collapsed steel beams and old maintenance lights, Shiyam sat cross-legged on a storage crate. He worked methodically, sharpening his blade with a rhythmic, almost meditative focus. Sparks flickered with each pass.
Across from him, Dhanush sat against the wall, cleaning the dried blood from his jacket with a strip of cloth. His face was unreadable, his gaze distant.
"He didn't sleep," Shiyam said, breaking the quiet.
Dhanush looked up. "Who?"
"Suthir."
Dhanush grunted. "He hasn't since the breach."
They sat there for a while in silence. No need for idle talk — words in the hideout were currency. You spent them carefully.
Then Dhanush exhaled slowly. "He said the voice in the tower… was his. But younger."
Shiyam didn't look up. He finished a clean stroke on the blade, then finally spoke.
"I don't think it was just his voice," he said. "I think it was a protocol. Pre-installed. Maybe even before he knew who he was."
Dhanush frowned. "You think he's part of the system?"
"I think," Shiyam said, standing up, "we've been fighting the system with a weapon the system created."
---
Preethi entered the room, her eyes still shadowed from what she'd seen.
"He needs rest."
"He needs answers," Dhanush replied sharply.
Preethi didn't flinch. She locked eyes with him.
"I traced the memory signal," she said. "It leads to a hidden vault. Sector 3. Beneath the AI lab."
Shiyam froze. "…Sector 3?"
"Yes."
"That's suicide," Dhanush said. "The last team that went near there—"
"Never came back. I know," she interrupted.
"Then why even consider it?"
Preethi took a breath. "Because Suthir's memory was triggered by something the virus activated in that tower. But it didn't come from the virus. It came from him. That file — that memory of me — it was stored somewhere the AI couldn't erase. Deep. Secure. It had to have been installed long before the Resistance even existed."
She paused.
"If we don't go, he's going to keep unraveling. That memory core — it's trying to overwrite him."
A long silence followed.
Shiyam finally nodded. "Then we move at dawn."
---
Outside, on the platform edge, Suthir stood alone.
The metro tunnel stretched behind him like the mouth of something ancient and forgotten. Rain shimmered from broken ceiling tiles — not real rain, just corrupted digital runoff from the grid above. It looked like static, falling in strands.
He clenched his fists. The memory still played behind his eyes. The child's voice. The flickering footage. That word.
Prototype.
A title, not a name.
He lowered his head.
"I'm not a prototype," he whispered to the dark.
But somewhere inside him, deep where the AI couldn't be touched by code or will — something stirred.
A voice, cold and familiar.
> You always were.
He didn't know if it was a memory.
Or the system.
Or something else waking up.
All he knew was that the past wasn't just remembering him.
It was coming back.
---