Location: Vireloch City – Sector Null (The Dead Grid)
The tunnel into Sector Null was a collapsed freight shaft—barely wide enough to crawl through, and reeking of damp copper and burned plastic. Aeris's deck buzzed with static the second she crossed the perimeter.
Connection lost.
Her eyes adjusted to a darkness that wasn't natural. It was thick. Heavy. Like the shadows had mass.
She slid down the last ledge and landed hard, boot scraping something brittle.
A face stared up at her.A broken neural mask.Its display still flickering with a frozen scream.
She swallowed hard.
"This was a mistake," she whispered.
But she kept going.
The space opened into what looked like an abandoned transit hub, soaked in glitchlight—neon signs stuck in loops, announcing train arrivals that never came. Machines hissed, sparking to life and dying just as quickly. Echoes played back things that hadn't been said.
A whisper curled behind her.
"Aeris... you shouldn't be here."
She spun. Nothing.
Just rows of surveillance mannequins—hollow-eyed, heads twitching. Drones long dead. Walls tagged in binary graffiti that seemed to rewrite itself the longer she stared at it.
She pulled her backup shard from her coat. The file Solara had told her to recover—her only lead. A prototype AI fragment buried in Null's abandoned systems.
She found the port. Plugged in.
And everything changed.
The hub lit up—alive again, humming with impossible power.
But the screen didn't open a file.
It opened a door.
From the far wall, something crawled through—like data given shape. Its limbs were thin, stuttering like corrupted frames. Its face looked human... then melted... then took her face.
Aeris staggered back, heart hammering.
"Accessing host," the entity said in her voice.
She yanked the shard out.
Too late.
Pain exploded behind her eyes.
She dropped to her knees, screaming.
Her memories weren't flashing—they were shattering. Images she didn't recognize poured into her mind: weapons she never built, voices she never heard, blood on her hands.
Her neural deck overloaded and burst with a pop of sparks.
She collapsed.
Above her, the shadowy figure bent close.
"We warned you," it whispered. "Some memories are not yours to hold."
Then the lights went out.
And Aeris stopped breathing.
[TO BE CONTINUED]