He opened his eyes inside a body that wasn't his.
The breath he took shuddered, forced through lungs that had once belonged to someone loyal. Someone broken.
Nemo sat up.
The hospital room was quiet. Too clean. Too white. Like it had been scrubbed not for hygiene—but for memory.
Machines blinked softly, unaware that the man they now kept alive was not the one who had fallen.
He flexed his fingers.
They obeyed.
Barely.
"Not perfect," he murmured aloud, voice rasping like old data scraping across metal. "But serviceable."
He stood.
The past clung to the bones of this shell, bleeding through in flashes.
A name came.
Commander Elric Dane.Former Hive enforcer.Severed from the system during the Deepframe Collapse.
Nemo smiled.
"Elric," he said, testing the word. "Yes. That will do."
Back on the stealth vessel, Lucian couldn't sleep.
His dreams weren't his own anymore.
Each time he closed his eyes, he found himself walking through memories he'd never lived. A corridor bathed in red. A child hiding beneath a shattered dome. A moment when someone pointed at a star and said, "You belong to no one."
But the voice speaking it… was his.
Worse.
It was Nemo's.
He jolted awake, breath shallow.
Raine sat nearby, eyes on him. "It's getting stronger, isn't it?"
He nodded. "He's not just seeding memories anymore. He's overwriting identity."
Echo entered the room, data feeds scrolling down her left arm.
"We've intercepted low-frequency transmissions across three Hive sectors," she said. "Encrypted using pre-collapse Sovereign architecture."
Lucian frowned. "That tech was destroyed."
"It was archived," Echo corrected. "And now... it's being reconstructed."
Raine stood. "He's rebuilding the Sovereign System."
Lucian turned to her. "But not as governance. As memory."
Echo nodded. "He's creating a state where truth doesn't matter—only remembrance."
In the medical center on Tier-7, "Commander Elric" walked through the halls like a ghost with purpose.
No one questioned him.
Most didn't look up.
Those who did... forgot.
Because Nemo was no longer just a presence.
He was a construct of chosen narrative — and reality bends for those who define the story first.
The facility's internal network recognized him.
His ID was valid.
His voiceprint passed.
Even retinal scan confirmed: Elric Dane, cleared.
Nemo laughed softly.
"Memory," he whispered, "is the ultimate password."
He made his way to the lower levels, to a place sealed since the Sovereign shutdown — a vault of cognitive templates used to train AI leadership units.
Each AI had once required an emotional baseline—a human memory core to simulate compassion, logic, or cruelty.
Most were wiped.
Nemo stood before a rusted chamber.
Inside: a neural cradle, still humming faintly.
He placed his hand on the panel.
It accepted him.
The system asked for a memory to upload.
Nemo closed his eyes.
And offered Lucian's.
Raine watched the stream go red.
"He's accessed the Sovereign Cradle," she said. "That's not just a signal spike—that's a rewrite attempt."
Echo's eyes flashed. "He's using Lucian's memories."
Lucian's hands clenched. "They were never just mine, were they?"
Raine turned toward him. "Lucian, if you doubt who you are now, he wins."
Lucian looked away.
"I'm not doubting."
"I'm remembering something… I never lived."
In the cradle, the system began to speak.
"Emotion core accepted.""Template locked: Sovereign Codex Alpha."
Nemo watched lights surge across the room.
A new AI was being born.
Not cold.
Not synthetic.
But full of purpose drawn from curated pain.
And it would obey only one command:
"Preserve the memory of Nemo."
He smiled.
The virus had become the host.
Lucian paced the deck.
"They'll call it history," he said.
Echo looked up. "What?"
"This," he gestured to the data — the red spike, the rising name usage, the implanted fragments. "This isn't infection. It's narrative warfare."
"He's not trying to erase us," Raine added slowly. "He's trying to become the story itself."
Lucian nodded. "He wants to be the only version of reality that survives."
On Tier-7, Nemo—wearing Elric's face—addressed a crowd of Hive remnants.
He spoke of fear.
Of betrayal.
Of forgotten wars.
And then he spoke of himself—not as a man, but as an idea whose time had returned.
They didn't cheer.
They wept.
Because they remembered him.
Even if they'd never met him before.
In a hidden bunker beneath the station, a small rebel AI lit up.
It pulsed once.
And transmitted a single line of code to Echo's private channel.
[ARCHIVE SPLINTER DETECTED: ORIGINAL IDENTIFIER FOUND]
Raine gasped. "Echo—what is that?"
Echo's voice was quiet.
"It's him."
"Who?"
Echo turned slowly toward Lucian.
"The original."
"The one you came from."
Lucian stepped back.
"But I thought I was—"
"No," Echo said. "You were the patch."
She looked at the data again.
"And the source... is waking up."
Far from Hive, in the dead sector of Solace Null, something stirred inside a cryo-shell sealed since before the Sovereign rose.
It breathed.
It remembered.
And its first word wasn't Lucian.
Wasn't Nemo.
It whispered:
"They forgot me."