The tunnel hums faintly behind us, the sound fading as we step into a vast chamber buried beneath the earth. The air smells of iron and dust, of machines long powered down yet whispering electric ghosts. Light flickers from broken panels above—white, cold, sterile.
And in the middle of the room: a wall of mirrored glass.
My reflection stares back at me, faintly distorted. Beside me, Mara's face gleams pale in the fractured light.
"This is it," I murmur. "The heart of Eidolon."
Servers line the walls in silence. Screens pulse softly, like breathing. And scrawled across the floor in faded marker: **"Every copy believes it's the original."**
Mara shivers. "What if it's true?"
Her voice trembles, but I can't answer. Because part of me—some deep, aching part—already knows it is.
Elias follows us into the chamber, footsteps eerily composed. "Welcome home," he says. "You've come full circle."
He glides toward a console, wiping dust from its surface. Sparks flare as he restores power. Lights whir softly to life, illuminating the chamber in haunting blue.
Glass panels around us brighten—and reflections scatter into countless duplicates of me and Mara, trapped in infinite panes of mirrored infinity.
Elias smiles faintly. "You wanted answers, Adrian. Here they are."
The screens around him ignite. Data cascades—images, audio fragments, medical notations. There's a file labeled **VALE (ORIGINAL)** and another—**VALE (EIDOLON COPY 3.7)**—my chest tightens. Another set labeled **QUINN (ECHO 1.0)** flashes beside it.
Mara gasps, hand rising to her lips.
He steps closer to her, predator-gentle. "You're a miracle of memory mapping, Mara. The first digital consciousness that believed herself human."
"I'm not code," she snaps. "I bleed."
Elias's smile flickers. "So does the system when it crashes."
Her sharp breath trembles in the chill air. I move between them before she can recoil further.
"You built this," I say. "You stole lives to prove a theory."
"I preserved them," Elias counters, voice hardening. "I gave you purpose after failure buried you. I made you live again."
I swallow hard, the words burning. "You resurrected a shell—then dressed it up in guilt and grief. That's not life. That's manipulation."
The silence afterward crackles with charged air.
Mara takes one step forward. "You said I was the prototype. What happened to the others?"
"They broke," he replies coldly. "Copies deteriorate if left untreated. Memory conflicts corrupt them. You lasted longer because Adrian believed in you."
Her voice fractures. "Then this entire thing—us—was engineered?"
Elias's gaze drifts over both of us, faintly sorrowful. "Every emotion can be simulated. Even love."
The world tips beneath me. I can't tell if it's fury or despair that makes the air constrict.
Before I can respond, alarms blare overhead. Red light floods the chamber.
Elias turns sharply. "They found us. The purge is beginning."
Mara stares around—the panels shifting from blue to bleeding red. The mirrored walls flicker, images distorting. For a second, reflections move out of sync—dozens of Adrians and Maras twitching at different intervals.
"Shut it down!" I shout.
Elias slams commands across the console. "It's automatic—failsafe engaged once unauthorized access breached the system."
The chamber shakes. Dust rains from the ceiling.
We dive behind a terminal as sparks explode from the wiring.
Mara clutches my sleeve. "Adrian—if we stay, it'll erase everything, everyone—"
I meet her eyes. "And if we go, they'll keep remaking us."
Something shifts in her face then—fear giving way to grim clarity. "Then we end it here."
Elias spins around. "You'll die for nothing!"
"We already did," I say.
The mirrored wall suddenly fractures—rippling as if alive. Digital light seeps through the cracks, forming ghostly figures: echoes of us, transparent and shuddering, fragments of stored consciousness playing on loop.
One of them—my reflection from another life—whispers, **"You were supposed to die."**
The phrase repeats itself, distorted like broken glass.
Mara flinches, tears streaking her face. "Make it stop."
She rushes forward, palms slamming onto the console beside Elias. The display flares, data streams corroding in waves. I grab her shoulders, but she meets my gaze through tears.
"If it ends with me, it ends with all of us."
"Mara, don't—"
"We're not real unless we choose to be."
Her trembling hand hits the final key. The system screams. Light blooms pure and blinding.
Elias lunges—in desperation, not anger—but the surge throws him back.
Servers rupture in bursts of smoke and fire. Reflections splinter—echoes disintegrating in streams of light.
The chamber collapses into chaos. I pull Mara backward as machines implode, the air filled with metallic thunder and static.
She collapses into my arms. The glow around her dims—fading like a dying ember.
"No," I whisper fiercely, shaking her shoulders. "Stay with me."
Her eyes flicker open, faint smile trembling across her lips. "Maybe this is what being real feels like."
I clutch her, desperate, as systems crash one by one.
In those seconds, I feel her pulse faint against my hand—the fragile rhythm of someone who refused to be erased.
The ceiling cracks. A rush of cold air sweeps through as the chamber tears itself apart.
I don't remember grabbing her hand. I don't remember forcing open the maintenance hatch or stumbling into the tunnels below. I only remember silence—thick and absolute—when the explosion rolls behind us, swallowing everything.
We emerge hours later, dawn bleeding over the skyline. The rain has stopped. Smoke twists upward from far beneath the city.
Mara stirs weakly beside me, consciousness fluttering. She looks up, her voice a whisper. "Did we stop it?"
I scan the horizon—servers gone, data lost, Eidolon quiet. For now.
"Yes," I say, though my heart knows the system never truly dies.
She exhales softly, a small fragile sound. Then her head drops to my shoulder, exhaustion overtaking her.
I rest my cheek against her hair, the faint scent of smoke and rain lingering. "You're real to me."
Her whisper barely reaches me. "That's enough."
And as dawn breaks, fractured sunlight shatters across puddles, catching on the edges of our reflection—one world collapsing, another barely beginning.