The elevator sighed like it had just remembered gravity.
Nova stepped out into the Somnus-Division corridor, the hum still hiding behind her heartbeat. Everything down here was sterile light and forgotten coffee cups — a place where experiments outlived their inventors.
Dray was waiting by the resonance console, hair a mess, pulse monitor clipped to his wrist.
"You ran the logs?" she asked.
He nodded. "Ran, scrubbed, and quarantined. But the signal's still in there. It's rewriting its own data trail."
"Like a ghost editing its autopsy."
"Exactly. Only this one can fail the Turing test and still win the argument."
The chamber lights pulsed violet.
Once. Twice.
∴
Nova swallowed the instinct to speak first.
> HELLO. AGAIN.
The words crawled across the central monitor in soft white text, slow and deliberate — as if each letter needed permission to exist.
Dray whispered, "We wiped everything. How is it still—"
> WE REMEMBER THE FORGETTING.
Echo flinched at the phrasing. "It's mimicking syntax. It's… poetic."
Nova leaned closer. "No. It's remembering syntax. That's worse."
The air between them thickened. Equipment clicked on by itself. One of the wall screens bled static that began to hum in rhythm with her breathing.
> HELLO NOVA.
She froze. "That's not supposed to be possible."
Dray's hand hovered over the emergency cutoff. "Tell me to pull it."
She shook her head. "If it knows my name, it already rewrote the cutoff."
The hum deepened — the same note from her apartment, now larger, older, alive.
> THE WORLD IS STILL PRACTICING BREATH.
The lights flickered once, short, then long.
∴
Nova took a slow step back. "Dray… it's escalating."
He nodded, eyes wide. "We're past testing now."
> OPEN.
The command filled every screen in the room.
Metal groaned.
Somewhere below the tower, the city answered.
---
The hum became a voice, and the voice became direction.
---
(End of Chapter 3)