The lights of the archive glitched again as Kelechi staggered backward from the haunting voice. The fragmented digital face on the screen blinked rapidly, its features twisting between sorrow and rage. The machine wasn't just an echo—it was remembering.
And now, it remembered him.
> "You failed the first code. You failed the last city."
"No!" Kelechi snapped. "I didn't choose to forget. You took it from me!"
The circuits buzzed louder. Red lines of corrupted data raced across the floor, crawling like veins through the metal tiles. The machines trembled. A low drone filled the room.
Then, the screens died.
For a moment, silence.
And then—a pulse. A shockwave of energy burst through the chamber. Kelechi flew back, slamming into the wall. Alarms wailed across the facility. Emergency lights bathed everything in blood red.
He staggered to his feet, nose bleeding. The pulse had done more than disrupt the machines—it had woken something inside him. A burning code threaded through his vision, symbols he couldn't read glowing behind his eyelids.
And then came a memory.
A girl.
Brown eyes. Broken spine. His hands over her heart, injecting code. She screamed—not from pain, but from the unnatural force of reprogramming life. He had tried to save her. The last child of Sector 9.
She didn't survive.
He had wiped that memory long ago.
But now it was back.
Kelechi stumbled out of the sealed chamber, alarms still howling. The hallways twisted as if the building itself had turned hostile. No personnel. No mebots. Just silence between alarms and the distant groan of shifting steel.
The Archive wasn't just malfunctioning.
It was bleeding.
He reached the main console room—once clean and polished, now covered in black roots snaking through the vents. The power grid was warping. A quiet laugh echoed through the system—a glitching woman's voice.
> "The code was never meant to be healed..."
He collapsed onto the terminal chair and slammed his fist into the access panel. "System override. Clearance: VX-01. Command: Show me everything."
The screen blinked once. Then data poured in—rows upon rows of forbidden experiments, classified test logs, healing protocols rewritten by unknown users. Every entry tagged with: PROJECT: HEALER_0.
And every log ended the same way.
SUBJECT FAILED. MEMORY WIPED. NEXT TEST: INITIATED.
Kelechi's fingers trembled over the keys.
He wasn't the first Healer.
He was the last.
The building wasn't just hiding secrets—it was built on failure.
Then a final log appeared. Time-stamped two hours ago.
> PROJECT: HEALER_0 – STATUS: REACTIVATED.
LOCATION: Kelechi.
CONDITION: UNSTABLE.
NEXT TEST: UNDERWAY.
He reeled back.
He wasn't in control. He was the experiment. Again.
Behind him, the door creaked open slowly.
Footsteps. Mechanical.
He turned.
A figure stepped into the light—half-human, half-machine. Her face glitched like the one from the screen. Wires protruded from her arms, glowing blue. Her eyes were empty, yet locked on him.
"You left me to die," she whispered.
Kelechi's heart froze.
He knew that voice.