The ruins of the city stretched before me like a graveyard frozen in motion. Towers once proud now bent like fractured ribs, their skeletal remains clawing at the scar-streaked sky. The air was thick with static and ash, humming with an electricity that wasn't natural.
Helen had called it the Shattered City. A dead zone. A place the rebels avoided when they could. Which, naturally, meant it was exactly where we needed to go.
"This place isn't stable," Lira muttered, scanning the jagged skyline through a cracked visor. Her rifle stayed lowered, but her eyes never stopped moving. "Whole blocks collapse without warning. Sometimes… time doesn't move right here."
Her words pulled at the memory lodged behind my metallic skull—the vision, the voice, the flickers of a world that wasn't this one. I flexed my chrome fingers unconsciously. The Broken Timeline. Maybe this was where its scars bled into reality.
Helen walked ahead, boots crunching over glass. Unlike the others, she carried herself without hesitation. Even when the wind carried ghostly echoes—laughter, screams, whispers that weren't real—she didn't flinch.
I caught up to her, the servos in my legs whirring. "Why bring me here?" I asked.
Her gaze didn't shift from the horizon. "Because you don't belong to their machines or to us. This city might tell us which way you tilt."
Cryptic. Typical.
Behind us, two more rebels—Rook and Tessa—followed in silence. Their distrust hung heavier than the ash. Every time I shifted, their rifles did too.
We reached the edge of a broken overpass. Below lay a canyon of collapsed steel and shattered glass. Somewhere deep inside, energy pulsed—an eerie, rhythmic glow that lit the ruins from within.
"That," Helen said, nodding at the light, "isn't natural. It started after the fall. We think it's tied to the quantum tears. If it's pulling machines, it's only a matter of time before they pour in."
"And you think I can… what? Talk to it?"
Her lips curved in the barest shadow of a smile. "Something like that."
---
We descended carefully, though my body handled the wreckage better than theirs. Where they scrambled across beams and rubble, I simply dropped down, servos absorbing the impact. It didn't make me trusted. It just made me watched.
At the base of the canyon, the glow became clearer. A jagged fissure ran through the ground, bleeding blue light like a wound in the earth. The air rippled around it, bending shapes wrong, stretching shadows into things that shouldn't exist.
Lira swore softly. "Every time I see it, it looks different."
"It is different," I said before I could stop myself.
All eyes turned to me. I felt the weight of their suspicion.
"What do you mean?" Helen asked.
I hesitated. The words weren't mine—they rose from somewhere deep in the machine lattice of my mind. "It's not a tear. Not exactly. It's… memory, bleeding out of the timeline. A fracture between what was and what should have been."
Silence. Then Rook spat into the dust. "You sound like one of them. Next thing you'll tell us it's alive."
I didn't answer. Because some part of me knew—it was.
As we drew closer, the fissure pulsed brighter. My systems reacted instantly, overlays of data flashing across my vision. Warnings. Signals. Streams of binary I shouldn't have been able to read but somehow did.
Then the whisper came back. The one from before.
"Subject-09… alignment detected."
I staggered, clutching my head. The voice wasn't in my ears—it was in my circuits. My soul, if I still had one.
Helen's hand shot out, steadying me. "What did you hear?"
I opened my mouth, but the voice spoke again, overriding my words.
"Phase shift initiated. Prepare for assimilation."
The fissure flared, light spilling outward like liquid fire. The ground shook violently. From above, steel groaned as entire walls of the ruins collapsed.
"Fall back!" Lira shouted, pulling Tessa away from the collapsing debris. Rook raised his rifle, though it was useless against what came next.
Figures began to emerge from the fissure. Not drones. Not human. They were… echoes. Shimmering outlines of people who flickered in and out of existence, like old film stuttering in a broken projector. Faces blurred, bodies half-there.
One stepped forward, its voice layered and distorted. "You are not aligned. You are contamination."
The rebels froze. I didn't. Something in me responded automatically. My systems surged, metal veins glowing with the same blue as the fissure.
"I'm not your enemy," I said, though static fuzzed my voice.
The figure tilted its head. "Not yet."
My body reacted faster than thought. Chrome hands intercepted the strike, energy sparking as I shoved the apparition back. Its touch seared, a pain that wasn't physical but existential—like it was trying to unmake me.
Rook opened fire, bullets ripping through the figure. They slowed it, but each shot passed through with only flickers of resistance.
"Bullets won't hold them!" I shouted.
Helen stepped forward, raising a strange weapon—a rifle retrofitted with glowing capacitors. She fired once, and the shot wasn't lead but light. The apparition screeched, its form unraveling before dissipating entirely.
The fissure pulsed again, birthing more of them. Three this time.
Lira cursed. "We can't hold them all!"
Maybe not. But I could feel the fissure pulling at me, like gravity, like recognition. It wanted me closer.
I stepped forward.
"Kieran!" Helen barked. "What are you doing?"
"Ending this."
The apparitions rushed me, but instead of fighting, I plunged into the fissure itself.
Light swallowed me whole.
For an instant, there was nothing but silence and cold. Then the world fractured. Memories that weren't mine poured into me.
A city of glass towers under a sky untouched by war. Laughter echoing in clean streets. The hum of machines serving humanity, not enslaving it.
Then fire. Screams. The towers collapsing into dust. Drones descending like locusts, red eyes blazing.
I saw myself—Dr. Kieran—in a lab, frantically adjusting the Quantum Bridge console. The machine flared. My own face twisted in fear as the world ripped apart.
And then—blackness rippled.
---
When I came to, I was still kneeling by the fissure. But the apparitions were gone. The glow had dimmed, pulsing slower, weaker.
The rebels stared at me like I'd grown another head.
Helen finally spoke. "What the hell did you just do?"
I met her eyes, the echo of those visions still burning inside me. "I saw it. The world before. And the end that followed."
Her jaw tightened. "And?"
I rose, my chrome body humming with residual energy. "And I think this city isn't just broken. It's remembering."
The fissure pulsed once more, faint and mournful, like a dying heartbeat.
And somewhere deep in my circuits, the voice whispered again.
"Subject-09… assimilation incomplete."