The room felt colder now.
Not just from the cryo-pods or the sterile air, but from the presence that had just spoken. It lingered in the silence, like something ancient had woken and was listening from the dark.
Shane stared at the screen, the final message burning behind his eyes:
:: PROTOTYPE ALPHA – STILL ONLINE. STILL HUNGRY. ::
Caelia broke the silence first. Her voice was low, careful. "That… wasn't just data. That was aware. It saw you."
Shane nodded slowly, fists clenched at his sides. "It called me Spectra-born. Like it knows what I am."
Aegix stood near the console, scanning the room with quiet precision. "The recursive signal didn't come from here. This place is only a listening post. A decayed echo chamber. The source is deeper."
Kira's hands moved across her Phaseweaver Core, syncing it with the flickering terminal. "There's a signal map embedded in this loop. It's fragmented, but it shows links, tears across dimensional fault lines. All branching from one core rupture."
She turned the interface and showed them.
A map of the region appeared, then shimmered, glitching as if the layers beneath reality itself were straining. Webs of thin red lines stretched underground, some pulsing faintly. At the heart of it all, deep below any known level, a black node throbbed like a buried heart.
"Here", Kira whispered. "The source node. This is the Fracture Veil. The original Spectra containment zone."
Caelia narrowed her eyes. "I thought they sealed that place decades ago."
"They did", Kira said. "But it didn't stay sealed."
Shane stepped closer to the map. The node pulsed again. Something about it sent a tight pull through his chest, like he'd dreamed of that place once, or maybe died near it.
"Why call it a veil?" he asked.
Kira hesitated. "Because it's where things bled through. Not just machines or data. Thoughts. Emotions. Sometimes... other selves. The veil's thin there. Spectra didn't just build weapons, they opened windows into other timelines, trying to steal from themselves."
Aegix turned toward them, his synthetic voice somber. "And something came back through."
For a moment, none of them spoke.
Then Caelia said, "This… Prototype Alpha. Do we think it survived?"
Kira looked at her, then slowly nodded. "Yes. Not as a person. But as a presence. A code-being… fused with a human host. If it evolved within the veil, it might be more than just an AI. It could have grown past logic. Past limits."
"Like a ghost in the system", Caelia murmured. "Still connected. Still watching."
Shane felt a slow dread building in his chest, not the panic of danger, but the sharp tension of recognition. Something in him remembered.
Or feared.
"What if it's been guiding me?" he said softly. "All this time. What if everything, my survival, Rose, even Vault Theta, was leading to this?"
No one answered right away.
Kira stood, her Phaseweaver still active. "There's a narrow rift traceable through the lower levels. It's unstable, but I can anchor it long enough to get us in range of the signal source. It's not a full breach… more like a… tear in static fabric."
"An echo corridor", Aegix said. "Half-real. Half-dream."
Caelia met Shane's eyes. "Are we really doing this?"
He nodded, jaw set. "We have to. If it's still alive down there… if it remembers us… then we're already part of it. We finish this, or it finishes us."
Kira adjusted her device, opening a thin, shimmering rift ahead, soft like mist, but pulling at the edges of space itself. A cold wind passed through the room, drawn toward the opening like breath being stolen.
"One step through", she said quietly, "and there's no coming back the same."
Shane took a breath.
Then stepped into the rift.
The world bent.
Color faded. Sound warped.
They passed through a narrow tunnel of half-light and static. The walls flickered with echoes, images from the past, looping and breaking like old film reels. Faces. Screams. Broken machines. Children born inside chambers. A memory of him, younger, crying inside a vat.
Then, darkness.
And then, silence.
They emerged into a wide, low space. Unlike the bunker above, this place was… organic. The walls weren't steel. They pulsed faintly, like veins of bio-metal grown in unnatural patterns. Light came from nowhere, yet everything glowed dim red.
Kira looked around, tense. "This isn't man-made anymore."
"It adapted", Aegix said, lowering his stance. "It grew roots. Like a seed becoming a forest."
At the far end of the chamber, something glowed beneath a cocoon of cables.
A figure.
Unmoving. Bound in cables. Its head tilted forward, covered by a metal crown fused to its skull. Its arms were gone. Its chest opened, revealing a heart made of refracting crystal.
"Is that…" Caelia whispered.
Kira's face had gone pale. "It's still alive."
The light from the crystal pulsed once.
Then again.
Then, opened its eye.