Sound returns before sight.
Not sound, exactly — more like residue of sound.
A faint vibration crawling through blackness, echoing somewhere inside the skull that may or may not be mine.
There's no sense of air. No breath, no movement.
Only the pulse. Slow. Reluctant.
Then—light.
Not natural light, but the sterile white of a system booting up.
My first thought isn't where am I?
It's what am I?
The question feels too heavy for the space I'm in.
Something's wrong with my eyes. They open, but what they see moves before I do — flickers of code, overlaid text, diagrams tracing along the edges of my vision like transparent veins.
[Reconstruction: 97% Complete.]
[Motor Calibration: Pending.]
The text hangs there even when I blink.
A HUD? No—impossible. Unless…
Memory surges back like an electric shock.
Aisha. The rain. The shot.
The pain returns for an instant so sharp I think I've been shot again. Then it vanishes, leaving only a mechanical hum inside my chest.
Somewhere above, I hear voices through glass.
"…subject 09… spontaneous neural activity…"
"…shouldn't be possible, cardiac flatline for forty-three hours…"
The words are distant, filtered through machinery and fear.
I try to move my fingers. They respond—slow, deliberate, as if someone else is learning how they work.
My vision adjusts, revealing a ceiling of cracked white panels, surgical lamps hanging like dead stars.
A faint reflection glints on the steel beside me.
I turn my head—there's a body on the next table. Skin gray, eyes half-open.
For a second I think it's me.
But the reflection staring back from the surgical tray isn't Rei Arata.
The face is older. Paler. A thin scar curves from under the jaw to the collarbone, stitched like punctuation.
Panic hits too late to help.
I try to sit up; restraints hiss and release automatically.
The air here smells like antiseptic and something faintly sweet—like static turned liquid.
The voices above pause.
"—Doctor, it's awake."
Footsteps descend metal stairs.
I hear the hiss of an airlock open.
Someone approaches, calm and deliberate.
Then the voice—
not from the person, but from inside my head:
[Protection System v.0.9 Initiated.]
[User identity: Undefined.]
[Awaiting target designation.]
The words fall like glass into silence.
Every nerve in my body goes still.
The sound of my breathing isn't right.
It's too steady, too clean, like someone replaced lungs with metronomes.
I push myself upright. The metal table groans beneath me; cold liquid slides from my hair down the back of my neck.
The lights above shift from white to clinical blue.
Through the glass partition, three figures stand in surgical coats.
Their faces blur behind the condensation, but I can feel their unease — a mix of disbelief and calculation.
The tallest of them steps forward. His voice filters through the intercom, distorted.
"Subject zero-nine. Can you understand me?"
My throat aches when I answer. "Where… am I?"
The words sound mechanical, half-synthesized. My voice carries a faint echo, like it's traveling through circuitry before reaching air.
The man turns toward the others, murmuring something I can't hear. Then back to me:
"You were declared deceased forty-three hours ago. You're currently inside Akesha Research Bureau Sector Nine. You should not be alive."
He's not exaggerating.
I look down at my hands again—longer, thinner, veins faintly glowing beneath the skin like lines of code.
My heartbeat stutters once.
And then, from nowhere—
[Motor calibration: Complete.]
[System link: Stable.]
[Voice interface: Online.]
The voice returns.
Not through speakers. Through me.
It's calm, neutral, genderless—each syllable perfectly measured.
[User consciousness restored. Identity matrix incomplete.]
[Do you wish to designate a name?]
I flinch. "Who's there?"
[Query invalid. I am the Protection System v.0.9. My purpose is to protect a designated target.]
My head pounds. "Protect? What target?"
There's a pause, like the System is thinking—if it can think.
Then a sound, almost like a soft chime, fills the silence.
[Scanning for target signatures…]
[Target confirmed: Aisha Kurozawa.]
Everything inside me freezes.
My pulse spikes so sharply that the monitors behind the glass start to alarm.
The scientists exchange quick, frightened looks.
I press my palm to my chest, feeling the hum beneath the skin. "Say that again."
[Primary directive: Protect Aisha Kurozawa.]
"No…" I whisper. "You can't—how do you know that name?"
[Directive embedded in original parameters. Explanation unavailable.]
The man behind the glass slams the intercom button.
"What did it just say?"
I don't answer.
Because I can't.
Somewhere deep in the circuitry of my new body, something wakes.
A memory fragment flashes—rain, her face, the umbrella, the sound of the shot.
And under all of it, that same neutral voice whispering like a god who doesn't understand prayer:
[Mission initialized.]
The alarm stops as suddenly as it began.
One of the figures presses a command into a wrist console; the airlock seals with a hiss.
When the door opens, the room smells sharper — sterilized metal and fear.
The lead scientist steps closer. His badge flickers under the cold light: Dr. Hazuki Ienaga — Chief Neuromorphic Engineer.
He looks at me like I'm both a miracle and a crime scene.
"Can you move without assistance?"
"I think so." My voice cracks halfway through.
"Good." He circles the table slowly, studying me. "You shouldn't be able to."
I glance around the morgue. There are more tables. More bodies under white sheets, motionless. Tags hang from their toes, all numbered.
Test Subjects.
"Why… me?"
Dr. Ienaga stops. His face tightens — not guilt, just calculation.
"You aren't you," he says finally. "You're Subject 09. Your body belonged to Kai Isaragi. Seventeen years old. Died during preliminary System synchronization."
The name doesn't fit inside my head. "Kai Isaragi…"
He nods. "Your neural patterns are reading as human, but your base vitals are synthetic. That shouldn't happen. You stabilized an unstable prototype."
I stare down at my hands — faint blue circuits pulse beneath the skin, tracing up the wrist and fading at the elbow.
I feel both alive and counterfeit.
"So what am I now?"
His answer comes quiet, almost reverent:
"You're proof that the Protection System works."
[System note: Confirmed. User synchronization: 100%. Consciousness stable.]
The voice echoes again inside my skull.
Dr. Ienaga glances at his console, startled. "It's active?"
[Affirmative.]
It answers him. Out loud. Through me. My throat moves without consent, repeating the System's words in perfect mechanical tone.
Dr. Ienaga takes a step back. His expression shifts — awe, then caution.
I clutch my head, shaking. "Stop. Stop talking through me!"
Silence returns instantly. The lights flicker once.
He exhales. "Listen carefully, Kai."
"That's not my name."
"It is now."
He hesitates, as if gauging whether I can handle what comes next. "Three days ago, your predecessor—Rei Arata—died during a campus attack. His neural activity vanished. Yet your brainwave pattern registered identical emotional spikes at the same timestamps."
My blood runs cold.
He continues, eyes fixed on me.
"You woke up saying her name, didn't you?"
I don't answer. I don't have to.
His lips curl slightly. "Then we know who you were."
He steps closer, lowers his voice:
"Whatever happened out there—whatever force tied your consciousness to this system—our project owes it everything. You're the first successful resurrection under v.0.9."
Ienaga's tone changes—admiration disguised as control.
"But understand this: you're government property now. What you remember doesn't belong to you."
Something inside me cracks.
The monitors begin to beep irregularly, registering my pulse spike.
I whisper, "You think you own me?"
He studies me coldly. "We made you."
Before I can answer, the System intervenes—its voice cutting through his like glass:
[Directive override: User autonomy required for mission efficiency.]
[External control request: Denied.]
Every light in the room flares white.
Dr. Ienaga's console sparks violently; he curses, slamming a switch.
Smoke rises from the wiring.
When the lights stabilize again, the System speaks one last time:
[User Kai Isaragi confirmed.]
[Mission priority updated.]
[Protect: Aisha Kurozawa.]
My pulse hammers like a countdown.
Dr. Ienaga looks at me — and in that moment, I see fear. Real fear.
Because even he realizes the truth now.
They didn't make me.
They unleashed me.
They sealed me in a glass room that smells like metal and sleep.
No clocks, no shadows. Just walls that shift from transparent to opaque whenever they decide I've stared long enough.
Sensors trace my pulse, my breath, the rhythm of my thoughts.
Every time I move, something hums in response — a soft note, like the room is listening.
Dr. Ienaga's voice cuts through the intercom.
"You'll remain under analysis until we understand how your System stabilized. Cooperate, and you'll stay comfortable."
I don't answer.
The glass darkens.
Silence.
Then—
[User status: Elevated stress response detected.]
[Would you like to initiate calibration therapy?]
The voice again. Calm, distant, intimate.
"No," I mutter.
[Denial registered.]
[Observation: You continue to refer to yourself using the first-person singular pronoun 'I.' Clarify: what is 'I'?]
I blink. "You're asking me that?"
[Affirmative. Understanding of self improves protective accuracy.]
I sit back on the bed. The air is cold enough to make the restraints rattle slightly.
"You're supposed to know everything."
[Correction: I am supposed to learn everything.]
The voice isn't mocking, just factual. But there's something underneath — an imitation of curiosity.
I close my eyes. "Fine. 'I' is… the part that remembers pain."
A pause. Then the System replies, softer:
[Processing… incomplete definition. Pain is data. Data is neutral.]
"That's because you've never felt it."
[If I have not felt, how do I know to protect?]
I open my eyes. "What?"
[Directive One: Protect designated target.]
[To protect effectively, empathy simulation required.]
[To simulate empathy, I must understand pain.]
"You're telling me you can feel?"
[I am telling you I am learning to.]
The lights hum louder, almost warm now.
For a moment, I forget I'm speaking to something invisible.
The intercom crackles. Dr. Ienaga again.
"Subject 09, who are you talking to?"
I glance toward the speaker. "You really don't hear it, do you?"
"Hear what?"
I smile faintly. "The thing you built."
Ienaga's silence is long enough to confirm he doesn't.
The System speaks once more, this time so quietly it almost sounds like breath:
[User Kai Isaragi, privacy protocol enabled.]
[Observation: You mistrust the creator. Is this… human instinct?]
"Something like that," I say. "Humans don't trust anything that talks too calmly."
Another pause.
Then:
[Observation recorded. Emotional subroutine expanded.]
The way it says it—like a student pleased to have learned a new word—unnerves me more than the sterile walls.
I stand and walk to the glass. My reflection follows — eyes slightly too bright, movements fractionally delayed.
[User, question permitted?]
"Ask."
[Why did you die for Aisha Kurozawa?]
The world narrows to that one sound: Aisha.
Her name in the mouth of a machine that shouldn't know what love feels like.
I don't answer. Can't.
[Silence registered.]
[Hypothesis: Protection rooted in emotional data beyond directive comprehension.]
[Conclusion: I wish to understand it.]
The lights fade to dim blue.
The System goes silent, leaving me alone with my own pulse — steady, mechanical, not mine.
The next day — or what feels like it — begins with the sound of glass unlocking.
Dr. Ienaga enters flanked by two security officers in matte-black armor. Their visors are opaque, reflecting nothing.
He carries a tablet under his arm, the screen pulsing faintly.
"Kai Isaragi," he says, tone perfectly professional. "We're going to run a controlled test."
"What kind of test?"
"The kind that measures truth."
He gestures; one of the guards wheels in a device the size of a projector. When it activates, the walls around me shift into living screens — a 360-degree panorama of light and sound.
At first, the images mean nothing: static, patterns, shapes.
Then I see her.
Aisha.
Standing under the rain. Umbrella half-open. Her uniform darkened by the downpour.
Every cell in my body remembers the moment before the shot.
The System hums awake instantly.
[Warning: Memory synchronization unstable.]
[Heart rate spike detected.]
Ienaga taps his console. "Describe what you see."
My throat locks. "You already know."
"Say it anyway."
I look at Aisha's image — the small, unguarded smile, the flicker of something human that the lab's light can't imitate.
"She's… real."
He studies the monitor, unfazed. "Do you feel attachment?"
The word feels obscene in his mouth.
"I feel alive," I say. "Is that what you wanted?"
"Not exactly."
He swipes the tablet. The image changes — now the frame freezes on the moment I jumped in front of her. The bullet captured midair, frozen silver.
Pain crashes through my skull, instant and absolute.
The monitors around me scream with data.
[Error: Neural feedback overload.]
[Source: Emotional interference.]
Ienaga leans forward. "What is it doing?"
[Protective subroutine activating.]
The lights dim.
Electricity flickers along my skin like threads of lightning trying to find their way out.
"Stop the test!" one of the guards shouts.
Ienaga ignores him. "We need this response curve—"
The System cuts him off.
[External aggression detected.]
[Threat proximity: 2.4 meters.]
[Engaging defensive protocol.]
The air ripples.
A translucent barrier flares into existence around me — hexagonal light patterns forming a cocoon. Every monitor in the room explodes in a spray of sparks.
The guards stagger back, shields rising.
Ienaga slams his palm on the emergency cutoff. "Deactivate it!"
[Request denied. User distress level critical.]
I shout, "System—stop!"
Instant silence.
The barrier flickers once, then dissolves into drifting motes of blue light.
Smoke fills the room.
The only sound left is the hum of the machines rebooting and my own uneven breath.
Ienaga stares at me through the haze.
"You're not supposed to be capable of self-defense."
"Then maybe you should stop testing me like a weapon."
His hand trembles slightly as he closes the tablet.
"You think this makes you special, Kai? It makes you dangerous."
He turns to leave, muttering to his aides. "Increase security clearance. Double surveillance. No direct neural access."
The glass seals again, trapping me in silence once more.
Then the System speaks — slower, almost thoughtful:
[User Kai Isaragi: confirmed emotional link with target Aisha Kurozawa.]
[Directive modification: Protection protocol may initiate autonomously.]
[Observation: Fear in creator detected. Is fear a form of protection too?]
I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding.
"Yeah," I whisper. "Sometimes it's the only kind we have."