The hallway groaned as Rehn passed through it.
Metal walls bent in subtle ways, reacting to her presence—like the station remembered her.
Or was watching.
Her HUD blinked.
> LIFEFORM DETECTED. ID MATCH: 89% – SUBJECT: REHN.
She raised her weapon, heart pounding.
Footsteps echoed ahead—light, graceful.
From the shadows, she emerged.
Same face. Same gait. But the air around this clone was different.
Softer.
This version of Rehn had longer hair, flowing loosely over a white lab coat. No weapons. No urgency.
Her eyes glowed faintly, as if carrying something ancient.
> "I've been waiting for you," the clone said.
Rehn aimed. "State designation."
> "You already know. I am what you lost before the experiments began."
> "You're not real."
> "Neither are most of the things you've seen, Rehn."
---
Despite her instinct to resist, Rehn found herself following.
There was something magnetic in the clone's presence—calm in a way Rehn hadn't felt in years.
The clone walked with bare feet down a hallway that hadn't shown up on Rehn's map.
A corridor of soft blue light and reflective surfaces.
The walls mirrored her as they walked… but subtly different versions—smiling, scarred, scared, enraged.
Finally, they reached a small door with a golden glyph pulsing on its surface.
> "In here," the clone said gently. "You'll remember more."
Rehn hesitated.
> "Why now?" she whispered.
> "Because the Kael you knew is fragmenting. You need all of you to understand him."
Rehn stepped inside.
---
The moment she crossed the threshold, the door sealed behind her.
Inside: a small chamber, covered in glass-like mirrors. Each pulsed with slow, organic movement, as if breathing.
Suddenly—pain.
A piercing ache in her skull. Lights exploded behind her eyes.
She fell to her knees.
> "System—override—shut it—" she gasped.
> "Cognitive overload. Memory loop breach."
> "Stabilization failed."
She looked up—
the mirrors moved. The reflections weren't synced. They were doing things she wasn't.
Laughing. Screaming. Dying.
Then all mirrors showed one thing:
Kael. Standing behind her. Silent. Staring. Smiling.
Her body went limp.
Darkness folded over her mind like a slow wave.
> System override failed.
User Rehn: Shutdown sequence initiated.
Silence.
Weightless.
She floated in a dark void, her body no longer her own. No limbs. No breath. Only thought.
Only memory.
But even memory was fragile here. Slippery.
She saw Kael's face, laughing beside her in a lab.
Then—flashing—
Blood.
Screams.
A system override.
No. That's not how it happened.
The mirror had twisted it.
> "You're not gone," she whispered, though her lips didn't move. "Not all of you."
A faint hum vibrated through the void.
Light cracked across the black.
A sliver—silver and flickering—split the darkness. It was a shard. A piece of her mind. She reached for it.
And something tried to pull her back.
---
A voice echoed through the void, distorted, mocking.
> "Why fight, Rehn? We made you stronger without the burden of truth."
A clone's voice—but wrong. Artificial. Malevolent.
> "You're not the first version. You're just the most persistent."
She gritted her teeth and forced her awareness into the shard of light—
and as her will connected with it, memories surged into her mind:
Kael shielding her during a lab breach.
Her original design for the mirror room—it was meant to recover, not erase.
A protocol buried under layers of encryption: "REHN-PRIME: Recall Pathway."
She gasped in the void—lungs reappearing in imagined form—as her body began to re-form in the mindscape.
Flesh, armor, blood, thought.
---
The mirror versions surrounded her now, hissing and shifting—reflections of fear, rage, despair.
But she held the shard of memory tightly in her hand. It pulsed with her real name. Her real voice.
> "You are not me," she said.
And she slammed the shard into her chest.
A pulse of white light exploded outward.
Reflections shattered. Screams of clones evaporated into the black.
The room shook—both in the projection and outside. She felt her breath return. Her limbs real again.
> System breach reversed. Neural sync stabilizing...
> User Rehn: ONLINE.
---
She awoke on the floor of the mirror room, drenched in sweat.
Blood on her lip. Her hand clenched around the memory shard—real now, somehow downloaded from the trap.
She stood slowly, the golden glyph on the door fading.
And then—
Her comms lit up.
A voice came through.
> "Rehn. Sector 7 is no longer secure. Kael's last known signal just spiked."
She steadied herself.
> "I'm on my way."
---
The dim corridor buzzed faintly. Panels flickered as Rehn stepped over cracked tiles and broken consoles, her fingers stained with dried blood, her nerves frayed yet steady.
Sector 07 was mostly silent now. But she knew she wasn't alone.
She turned the corner—and there he stood again.
Back turned. The posture was too perfect. The stillness, uncanny.
"Kael," she whispered.
No answer.
She stepped closer, hand tightening on her sidearm.
The clone slowly turned—same face, same eyes—but blank. Not truly him. Just a remnant. A puppet.
But something glinted in his hand.
> A disk. Black. Embedded with the distinctive shimmer of organic-memory alloy.
She approached slowly.
"Give it to me," she said.
The clone blinked. It didn't resist. Instead, it reached out—and dropped the shard disk into her palm.
As soon as she touched it—images flooded in:
Kael recording something in secret, late at night, whispering:
> "They don't know about Sector 9. I buried the truth under layers of false data. If she finds this—Rehn—don't trust the mirror project logs. I had to change them…"
Flashes of a hidden doorway.
Coordinates. Access keys.
The clone's head twitched.
Its voice croaked:
> "You'll… find him… in the core."
Then its systems fried—imploding in a burst of static and light. Rehn stepped back, shielding her face.
The clone crumpled, dead for good.
---
She didn't wait.
Plugging the memory shard into her own implant, she downloaded the coordinates and launched a trace-scan for Sector 9—a place not even the official systems acknowledged.
> "System, bring up the hidden route Kael used."
> Confirmed. Rerouting via maintenance tunnels beneath Sector 15.
The floor beneath her hummed to life, revealing a sliding door she hadn't noticed before—dusty, sealed, ancient.
> "Of course," she muttered. "He always liked secret ways."
With a deep breath, she descended the narrow shaft, gripping her gear tighter.
---
The tunnels were colder here. Older.
As she moved through, she saw old signs of testing—scratched walls, clone storage pods long cracked open, and faded logos of defunct divisions.
She reached a locked gate. Her palm scan didn't work.
But the shard from the Kael-clone? It pulsed in her hand.
She pressed it into the panel.
The gate hissed open.
A quiet voice echoed in her implant:
> "Rehn… this is where it began."
She stepped into the darkness.