The hallways of the Helix had hundreds of contractor meeting rooms, all indistinguishable by design, no clocks, no windows, no screens unless they wanted one. The walls drank sound like dry earth drinks rain, everything vanished, even footsteps.
That was by design..
I was led through three checkpoints, each requiring retinal confirmation and chip sync. The last door hissed open on a short corridor that terminated in a seamless black panel.
Room 7 was colder than the others. Sterile and engineered.
The glass beside the panel shimmered faintly, thin, translucent. Not a mirror. Surveillance screen.
They were watching already.
I stepped in with the same controlled gait I'd practiced in ops: shoulder aligned, arms loose, expression calculated. The name on the file was Dr. Lyra Thompson, assigned to neural field simulations and predictive resonance modeling.
She sat already waiting.
I'd seen a hundred flashes of her, through half-bleeds and neural flickers. But this was different. Physical. Present. And she wasn't the same woman from the dream sequences.
Her hair was pulled back, functional, clipped. Standard Helix blue coat, sealed at the collar. Her ID tag blinked low-tier amber. The readout above her head told me the name assigned to her now: L. Thompson, Research Division.
But the name didn't matter.
She looked exactly how I remembered.
And not at all.
She didn't look up right away.
Her fingers were steepled like she was meditating or dissecting. But her eyes…
They met mine, and everything halted.
No recognition. Not directly. But some silent part of her stilled, like a frequency just at the edge of awareness had suddenly aligned.
I didn't speak. Neither did she.
A file hovered above the desk, a basic Helix interface displaying security logs. I didn't read it. I was reading her.
The way her breath subtly hitched. The way her posture wasn't fear, but tension.
A scientist watching a subject, or maybe the other way around.
A quiet frequency hummed between us. Not sound. Something deeper. Familiar.
Like stepping into a room you used to live in, and not knowing why the smell of the floor brings tears to your eyes.
And then hers did too.
The neural chip beneath my skin vibrated once. Not strong. Just a whisper.
I saw the light pulse at her neck, the faintest flicker of amber just below the dermal layer.
> "Operator K. Rowan," I said.
Her brow twitched. Almost imperceptible.
> "Dr. L. Thompson," she returned.
Her voice was composed, the edges rounded by conditioning. But the chip in my neck fluttered. And hers did too.
We were syncing.
Too early.
It had begun.
But she shifted. Her eyes narrowed.
The same expression from that buried memory. That second before the fire.
We were children again, looking at each other across the hallway as glass exploded behind our mother.
And then it was gone.
I shifted my foot slightly under the table, brushing the leg support. She flinched, just enough to notice.
A buried reflex.
My heart wasn't racing. But something in me tightened, old scar tissue remembering pain before memory could explain it.
The glass wall to the right flickered softly. A reminder: nothing in this room was private.
> "You're here as part of the Subject Alpha diagnostics," I said, still watching her eyes.
She blinked slower than necessary. "I was told it was pre-clearance behavioral mapping."
> "We're mapping something."
Her eyes narrowed.
That hit somewhere.
She folded her hands.
And tapped.
Three taps. Then two.
A sequence.
Not random.
A pattern.
I knew it.
We'd tapped it on ductwork when the rooms were locked. When we were too young to. A knock code.
My jaw locked.
I returned it.
Two. Then three.
Recognition shivered across her expression, but she caught it fast. Suppressed it.
The air in the room felt heavier now.
But her eyes said something else. Something neither of us could afford to admit yet.
> "This is a preliminary sync interview," said the voice through the intercom, Specter, always Specter. "Please confirm readiness."
I nodded once. She didn't.
The pause was everything.
> "Confirmed," she said eventually, her voice a degree too sharp.
Our implants pulsed again.
A slow, rhythmic thrum beneath thought.
> "Begin."
The lights dimmed slightly as the protocol activated.
For the next five minutes, we'd be allowed to speak. To engage. Helix would be watching for sync patterns, voice harmonics, pulse spikes.
We had to lie with every blink.
> "You've seen the anomalous neural data?" I asked.
She tilted her head, just a fraction.
> "Only what Helix sent."
I leaned forward. "And what do you think it is?"
She didn't answer directly. Instead, her hand brushed the edge of the desk, tapping twice. Slow. Deliberate.
Two taps.
Two taps meant listening.
I tapped once back. Understood.
She exhaled and glanced to the side, not at anything. Just away. Like memory was touching something she didn't give permission to.
> "Do you believe the resonance flares are deliberate?" I asked.
She was slow to respond.
> "I believe memory doesn't just store events. It stores... location. Frequency. Emotion."
She looked up again. This time she didn't blink.
> "I think... resonance isn't just feedback. It's memory. Amplified. Stored across subjects."
> "Shared memory?" I said. Just above a whisper.
She didn't nod, but her pupils dilated.
We were syncing.
Too quickly.
Helix wouldn't miss it.
I tilted my head toward the glass.
> "I'm going to need deeper data access," I said. "Visuals from the test vault. Memory imprints."
> "You'll need Voss's authorization," she replied smoothly.
> "Get it."
A flicker again, there, in her left hand. The tremor.
Her chip was running subroutines in real time. Not simulated.
She was hiding it too.
The same way I was.
> "Meeting concluded," Specter's voice cut through.
A sharp static chirp came through the ceiling. The kind Helix used to signal transitions.
> "Time's up," she said, standing before the voice could tell her.
> "I'll need more of your data," I said quietly.
> "You'll need to ask better next time," she answered.
She moved to the door.
Stopped.
Looked back once, her expression unreadable.
But her hand touched her neck. Right where the chip pulsed.
Right where mine had, too.
Then she was gone.
And I sat alone in the white noise, finally breathing.
Not because it was over.
Because it had started.
The door clicked open behind me.
I stood slowly. Let her stay seated.
Just before stepping through the threshold, I looked back. I hesitated. One last look. Her eyes held mine. Still locked in the memory we hadn't spoken aloud.
Recognition. Silent. Crashing.
She remembered.
I didn't need confirmation.
I felt it.
She did too.
And now, we had five hours before our next "interview."
Five hours to prepare the next step.
Five hours before Helix realized exactly who they had locked in the same facility.
Together.