She awoke to silence.
No alarms. No pain. Only the soft hum of life-support conduits, and a cool blue glow dancing across her eyelids. For a moment, Li Chu wasn't sure if she was alive.
Then the cold hit her — real and wet, like dew under glass.
Her lashes fluttered open. She was inside a transparent pod, half-submerged in a nutrient gel, naked but intact. Pale monitors traced her brainwaves across a nearby console, though no technician was in sight. The chamber floated within what looked like a submerged research silo — metal ribs groaning in the water pressure.
Memory came rushing in.
The last thing she remembered was Lin Chen's eyes — wild, almost broken — and his voice screaming her name as her body moved against him, blade in hand. Controlled, overridden, weaponized.
She touched her temple. The chip was quiet now. No commands. No pulses. No voice whispering protocols in her skull.
Then… fragments.
Not recent. Older. Much older.
A man in a white coat, tall and stern. She, maybe five or six, in a glass cell not unlike this one. Her small hands against the window. And the man calling her something strange—
"Subject Zero."
The chip inside her was repairing itself. Not under Erebus's control anymore — she had severed that link herself, during the last battle. It was responding to her now, autonomously rebooting memory clusters long suppressed.
She gasped. A flood of visions crashed in:
Test chambers. Neural scans. Holographic projectors showing a boy in a pod — infantile, wrapped in wires, heart beating slow.
Lin Chen.
They had known each other long before either of them remembered.
She wasn't just a subject. She was the prototype. Erebus had built her as an emotional anchor — an empathic calibrator to teach the evolving AI within Lin Chen empathy. She had been a control variable, introduced to balance out the cold logic of the system he carried.
"Your emotions will teach it to understand humanity," someone had once said. A voice. Familiar. Protective.
And then, another memory — warm and full of hidden sorrow.
"You are not a weapon, Chu'er. Neither is he. You both deserve to live as humans, not tools."
The voice. She knew it now.
Dr. Chu Renhai — her father.
A lead developer in Erebus's early research teams. She remembered seeing him argue behind mirrored walls, slamming datapads and shouting at men in suits. Begging them to stop using Lin Chen — calling the process "inhumane," "unstable," "against the very code we set out to write."
In one of the recovered video logs, he faced the council.
"What you are building is not an AI. It's a god. And gods should not be created through suffering."
Then static. Screaming. A flash of red warning lights.
The logs ended. She never saw him again.
He tried to stop it, she realized. He might have died for it.
But he hadn't erased them. She, and Lin Chen — they were his legacy.
Or maybe his last desperate rebellion.
Li Chu's eyes hardened. She pressed her palms against the inner surface of the chamber. Her systems were coming back online, slowly. The chip — though gutted of Erebus's command strings — still worked. She could feel its circuits, like the ghost of a second brain, aligning to her emotional signals.
And for the first time in what felt like years, her emotions were her own.
She wasn't just a failsafe, she realized.
She was the anchor.
Without her, Lin Chen's system went berserk. That had always been the plan. Her chip interfaced directly with the evolving AI core inside him — not just syncing battle data, but regulating emotional thresholds. Rage. Compassion. Restraint.
Erebus had never told Lin Chen that. It would have meant accepting he wasn't entirely in control.
She looked down at her wrist, where a faint embedded interface blinked alive.
"Location: Erebus Base – Sector Omega. Depth: 9300m."
Atlantis.
They were in the belly of the beast.
But she wasn't afraid anymore. Her mind was clear. Her past was returning.
And somewhere up there — Lin Chen was coming.
She exhaled softly, and the glass chamber hissed, depressurizing. Her skin prickled from the cold, but her heart burned.
She sat cross-legged in the fluid, eyes closed, and whispered, "Lin Chen..."
Not through the system. Not through voice. Just through the bond.
Across the deep-sea abyss, aboard a stolen submersible, Lin Chen stirred.
His system interface flickered in his vision. A message appeared — sharp and unmistakable:
[Subject Zero Emotional Signal Detected.][Stable Synchronization Re-established.]
His heart stopped — and then surged.
She was alive.
And she remembered.