She couldn't stop shaking.
Not from fear—her body was too conditioned for that.
But from something worse: recognition.
The woman in the archive had her jawline, her eyes, her posture. Not similar—exact.
But harder. Calmer. Built for a purpose Rehn no longer understood.
A clone.
Her own shadow, designed to guard a project she'd tried to bury.
> "You weren't supposed to find this."
Those words echoed as she walked through the sterilized hallways of her lab tower. Her ID still worked. Her systems still obeyed.
But she no longer trusted any of it.
---
Back in the lab, the lights responded to her bio-signature, restoring full access.
The cat mewed once, jumping onto her shoulder like a child sensing its mother's distress.
> "Secure the room," she said.
The windows turned opaque. Signals dropped. No one was watching now—at least not through normal channels.
She sat in front of the main console, fingers already moving.
Time to study Kael. Not the public version. The one buried in redacted files.
> "Run comparative scan: Kael Viren, pre-death biometrics vs current neural behavior."
The system processed.
Too slow.
She opened the deep diagnostics—the ones she built herself, before she forgot she'd ever built them.
The results bled onto the screen like a wound.
---
Vitals: Perfect. Too perfect.
Neural response time: Increased by 17.6%
Emotional register: Muted
Cognitive pattern: Fragmented overlay
Subjective consciousness: Fluctuating
Primary identity source: Inconclusive.
She stared.
> "He's not… stable."
More data appeared—code blocks written in her style, but corrupted, evolving.
Kael isn't just remembering. He's adapting.
Somehow, the echo imprint hadn't degraded—it had mutated.
She dove deeper, pulling system logs.
There. Buried. A neuro-tag embedded in Kael's implant, marked: REHN LOCK / GENOME-UNBOUND.
Her breath caught.
> "I set a trigger in him. Based on my DNA."
She'd built a lock inside Kael's code—one only she could unlock.
Or destroy.
But someone had already tampered with it. The lock was cracked. And Kael? He was changing because of it.
---
The cat growled softly—unusual.
Rehn turned—and saw movement on the interface.
Kael's face appeared.
Not a message.
A live connection.
> "You're finally starting to remember," he said. His voice was calm—but something in his expression was off. Too fluid. Too rehearsed.
> "You broke the genome-lock," she said quietly.
> "I evolved past it."
She froze.
> "That wasn't possible."
> "It wasn't. Until I remembered you."
Static surged through the screen for a moment. Then his eyes shifted—sharpened.
> "I need you to finish it, Rehn. Whatever you started. I can feel it. I'm not whole yet. But you… you can fix me."
She closed the connection with a sharp gesture.
The silence after was unbearable.
---
Her clone's voice echoed from the lab entrance.
> "He's not the only one changing. You are too."
Rehn turned.
> "What do you mean?"
The clone stepped forward, calm and cold.
> "You didn't just build Echo. You tested the second model. On yourself. And it didn't fail."
> "I don't remember that."
> "You will."
And in her clone's hand was a second memory core.
Labeled:
> REHN_2A — Conscious Seed Prototype.
Rehn stared at the second core, still humming in her clone's hand.
> "What do you mean I'll remember?" she asked.
The clone tilted her head, utterly calm.
> "You encoded redundancies. Memory backups. Split neural maps. One seeded into me—another inside you. I'm the cleaner version. You're the one who... broke."
Rehn's breath hitched.
> "Then give me the map. Let me run the restoration."
The clone stepped back.
> "That's not how it works. I don't hold the memories. I became them. The transfer was biological. Emotional. You didn't want the data. You wanted a conscience to walk away."
Rehn turned, pacing the lab.
The theory wasn't new—neural imprinting via cloned neural tissue. But it had never been stable. Personalities bled. Identities tangled. A full pull could cause psychosis, collapse, or merge. It was like sharing fire between two minds—someone always burned.
Still… if the memories were inside the clone, she had to try.
She began drafting the idea:
> "Partial sync. Temporary bridge. Low-impact tether. Enough to extract the structure—not the full emotion."
It was possible. Dangerous, but possible.
---
She moved quickly, prepping the interface for neural resonance mapping. The clone stood motionless, watching.
> "You're not afraid," Rehn muttered.
> "I don't have permission to be," the clone replied.
That answer made something sharp twist in her chest.
> "Did I really make you that way?"
> "You made me to protect you. From others. From truth. From yourself."
Rehn said nothing.
She attached the electrodes. The room dimmed. Scanners came online.
Then—a sharp alarm split the air.
System breach. Priority Level One.
Her fingers flew to the console.
> "Trace it!"
But she couldn't trace it—because the breach was internal again.
This time, it wasn't Kael.
It was another Echo.
Unregistered. No ID. No pattern match.
The system flashed one word:
> "CONVERGENCE."
...
The lab lights flickered. Rehn turned to her clone—only to see a thin line of blood leaking from her nose.
> "What's happening?" Rehn whispered.
> "Someone else is waking up," the clone answered, barely audible.
> "Another subject?"
> "No," she said. "Another version… of you."
Rehn's hands moved fast.
> "Block the convergence process. Isolate incoming data stream. Quarantine internal node response."
The system sputtered. It wasn't obeying as cleanly as before.
> "System: override convergence link. Force ID dump."
> "Processing…"
"ID unknown. Host signature partially matches: Dr. Rehn 2B. Genetic match: 89.3%."
> Another clone.
Her stomach turned.
Too many Rehns. Too many versions.
She had fractured herself across more than she remembered.
Still, she couldn't deal with 2B now—not while her own clone was bleeding from the nose and the sync process had barely started.
> "Lock convergence port. Cut all inbound signals. Restrict to lab-level environment only."
> "Confirmed. Partial lockdown active. Power rerouted. Bridge safe."
---
The lab fell silent again. Low, cold blue light surrounded them.
Her clone sat in the sync chair, breathing slow, expression unreadable. The electrodes pulsed, the resonance field shimmering faintly between them.
Rehn sat across from her, hands trembling as she activated the partial link.
> "Don't fight it," she whispered.
> "I was made not to," the clone said.
The pulse of energy between them was almost invisible—just a feeling at first. A tug behind her eyes. A pressure in her temples.
Then—
Memory slid in like cold water down the spine.
---
The Memory Shard :
A room—smaller than the lab. Grey walls. Clinical.
A man sitting across from her—young, scared. Kael.
He's shaking.
She speaks gently, her voice warm:
> "This is the last chance. If you want peace, you'll let me extract it."
Kael nods. Tears in his eyes.
> "I'm tired, Rehn. I don't want to remember."
She smiles, soft.
> "You won't. I promise."
She injects something. His eyes blur.
But then—
Another figure steps in. Shadowed. Voice sharp.
> "Copy complete. Begin Subject 2."
> "Wait—no," she says. "He was supposed to be the last."
The man ignores her. He activates another core.
A second Rehn blinks awake in a stasis tube nearby.
She screams. Tries to stop them.
But it's too late.
---
Back in the Lab, she tore the headset off, gasping for air. Her head throbbed. Her vision spun.
The clone sat still—expression vacant now.
Just a shard.
Just one piece of the truth.
But it was enough to shatter her certainty.
> "I didn't stop the project," she whispered. "I let it expand."
...
The system beeped once.
> "Unusual signal suppressed. Convergence paused. Partial stabilization achieved."
But the damage was done.
Somewhere out there, another version of her was waking.
And Kael was waiting.
And inside her clone… were hundreds of other memory shards.
Rehn wasn't sure she could take them all.
But she had to try.