There's a kind of silence only a dead system knows.
No ambient hum. No passive radiation. No wireless handshakes between idle machines.
Just raw, airless hush, like the world before electricity.
That's the silence I had to build, layer by layer, inside the buried lab.
I didn't trust even the old shielding. Whatever resonance my implant had emitted, whatever pulses I'd shared with her… Lyra, it had been strong enough to attract non-civilian surveillance. Maybe Helix, maybe not. Either way, the next flare could burn my last safe point.
So I fortified.
Electromagnetic dampeners over every exposed circuit. Optical scatter foil over the access hatch. I looped a thermal decoy upstairs to mimic a low-grade bioform in sleep, a burner dummy wrapped in synth-flesh, breathing shallow to fool airborne heat scans.
The rest of the lab I buried under counter-intrusion fail-safes. No direct network feeds. Just corded systems hard-lined to analog switchboards. If it didn't exist twenty years ago, it didn't enter this space.
Only then did I sit down.
Only then did I let the silence touch me.
And that's when I pulled the trigger.
I opened the ghosting suite.
Military-grade. Cracked deep. The kind of tool you only use once, because afterward, there's no going back. It didn't just erase traces, it nuked them. IDs, metadata, movement logs, neural touchpoints. Anything that linked me to the city, to Helix, to Kael, to Aaron.
Gone.
One by one, I watched them fall away.
My first contract. My enlistment file. Medical stubs. Disciplinary flags. Surveillance crosslinks.
Then something unexpected.
A gap.
Not an erasure, a void. My earliest record? A public school enrollment form. Age 9. No previous files. No medical history. No birth record. Just a first entry.
> Kael — Age 5 — Recovered: Sector Delta 3 — Status: Foundling
Nothing before.
Nothing.
Not even a foster transfer.
It wasn't that someone had scrubbed my past.
There was nothing to scrub.
I wasn't hidden.
I was never recorded.
My stomach turned, but I didn't let myself stop.
I wiped everything else.
Then turned to the lab systems.
There was one more thing.
Deep in the back end of the diagnostics module was a locked file I hadn't touched during the resonance bleed. I opened it now, slowly. The encryption was crude. Old-school. Hand-built.
It cracked like a brittle bone.
PROJECT: ECHO ROOT
I didn't breathe.
Inside: field notes. Neural schematics. Development logs. Most were damaged, missing headers. But some entries remained. Enough to form shape.
The project was built around cognitive pairing, two minds operating on a linked thread of memory and emotional data. Not a copy. Not a clone.
A split.
Two hosts.
Two threads.
One system.
The logs referred to them only as:
> SUBJECT A – Codename: Aaron
> SUBJECT B – Codename: Lyra
I froze.
There it was again.
Lyra.
Not a hallucination. Not a misfire.
Her name was part of the system.
Codenamed. Designated.
My counterpart.
The file mentioned resonance failsafes, something called "Emotive Drift Containment," and a final line that sent ice through my spine:
> "Third subject terminated. No viable shell."
Subject C.
Failed.
No name.
Just failure.
I backed away from the terminal, breath shallow. If Lyra and I were Subjects A and B… who was C? A sibling? A prototype?
I didn't know. And I didn't want to yet.
Not until I was safe.
That's when it happened.
A ping.
Soft. Buried deep in the noise.
Not hostile.
Not military.
Civilian.
The lab's outer diagnostic buffer lit with a soft white trace. A resonance echo bleeding across multiple frequencies, scanning. Weak. Searching. Not coded.
Her.
Lyra.
She was trying to find me.
Not consciously, the signal wasn't refined. But her chip was syncing outward, just like mine had before.
I didn't respond.
Couldn't.
It would only expose us both.
But the moment shook me.
She wasn't gone. She wasn't erased. And she wasn't dreaming.
She was awake.
Alive.
And closer than the system should allow.
I closed the console. Finished the last task.
My burner IDs flickered onscreen — a row of fake names, fabricated bios, carefully layered backstories.
But one by one, I deleted them all.
No aliases.
No fronts.
I didn't need to disappear.
I needed to become something new.
Someone clean.
Someone Helix would hire.
I created the file with precision.
Name: Kade Rowan.
Background: Retired signal analyst. No criminal record. Specialist in memory anomaly cases. Partial Helix contract history. All fake. All perfect.
He wasn't a ghost.
He was a solution.
The last thing I saw on the console before powering down was the Echo Root log.
It blinked once.
Then listed three lines:
> SUBJECT A — Proxy Active
> SUBJECT B — Drift Detected
> SUBJECT C — STATUS: FAILED
I stared at the third.
Failed didn't mean dead.
It meant dormant.
Or buried.
Or something worse.
I whispered, "They can't hunt what doesn't exist."
And began walking toward the surface.