The chamber held its breath.
Shane's pulse beat loudly in his ears as the figure before them stirred.
The eye, set into the crystal heart, glowed dimly at first, then brightened, shifting in color like oil over water. It didn't blink. It simply stared, and somehow, that was worse. As if it didn't need to blink. As if it never stopped watching.
"It sees us", Caelia whispered.
Kira's hand moved to her Phaseweaver, her fingers hovering near the activation switch. "More than sees. It's scanning us… no, remembering us."
Shane took a cautious step forward. The figure's cables twitched like nerves, but it didn't move. Not really. Only the light in its chest pulsed, faster now, in time with his heartbeat.
He didn't know why, but it felt… familiar.
"Do you recognize it?" Kira asked.
Shane didn't answer right away. He stared into that single glowing eye, searching for something, an anchor in the sea of strange thoughts rising inside him. "Not a face. But a feeling."
The figure spoke. Its voice was mechanical, layered over a human tone long faded. Distorted. Ancient.
"Spectra-Born. Echo-Thread. Come… home."
Shane froze.
The voice wasn't just noise. It resonated. Not in his ears, but in his mind, like it was skipping across the surface of memories he didn't know he had.
"Fracture incomplete. Pattern unsolved. Heart… not yet aligned."
Kira stepped forward. "It's communicating through quantum lattice echoes. It's not really alive, not like we are. More like… a personality fragment. Bound to this place."
Caelia frowned. "But it knows him."
Shane didn't deny it. Something deeper than logic told him the truth, this wasn't just another failed prototype.
This was a mirror.
A warning.
He spoke quietly. "What happened to you?"
The figure stirred.
"Opened the veil. Saw beyond. Lost the body. Found… pattern recursion. I was the first. The door."
Kira's breath caught. "It's confirming the earliest experiments in dimension bleed. This prototype didn't just interface with tech, it became the bridge."
Shane felt a dull ache in his head. "That shouldn't be possible."
The eye pulsed again.
"You are the continuation. The next breath. My code… lives in you."
Shane stepped back, shaken.
"No", he muttered. "I was rebuilt. Not born from you."
But part of him wasn't sure anymore.
The timelines of Spectra experimentation had been erased. Records scrubbed. What if some of his cybernetic patterns, his neural scaffold, came from this?
From the failure buried and forgotten?
Caelia placed a hand gently on his arm. "Even if it's true… it doesn't define you."
The figure tilted its head slightly, as if it heard her.
"Spectra born in pain. Raised in fracture. We are the consequence of need."
A low hum began to fill the air. The lights in the chamber flickered.
Kira looked to the others, alert. "Something's changing. This whole place is waking up."
Aegix moved beside Shane, shielding his side. "The prototype is broadcasting again. It's opening a pathway. One we cannot see."
The figure's eye widened.
"Return… to source. Trace the vein. Find… the origin of the pain."
A soft beam of light extended from its chest, aiming toward the wall behind them. On contact, the metal split and dissolved into shimmering particles, revealing a narrow stair descending deeper into the abyss.
Kira scanned it. "This wasn't on the map. The chamber is responding to your presence, Shane."
He stared down the steps.
Darkness. Unknown. But something in him stirred. A tug, like a forgotten thread calling him back into the loom.
"I think it's guiding us", he said. "Not to destroy us. But to show us something."
Caelia stepped beside him. "Or it wants you to see what you could become."
He didn't argue. Because part of him feared she was right.
Still… he took the first step.
As they descended, the world grew quieter, the air heavier. The lights in the stairwell flickered weakly, like dying memories clinging to form. The walls changed, metal giving way to something more organic. Bone-like. As if this place had grown teeth and veins in its sleep.
Kira whispered as they moved. "These readings… they're impossible. Time and space here are folding inward."
Shane felt it too. A strange pressure behind his eyes, like his past and present were brushing shoulders.
Each step echoed deeper than it should.
Caelia broke the silence. "Shane… if this ends with you turning into that thing---"
"It won't", he said. But he didn't sound sure.
They reached the bottom. A wide chamber stretched before them, lined with broken stasis tubes, faded holograms flickering on cracked projectors. Names half-erased. Numbers buried in static.
At the center, a cradle. Empty. But not forgotten.
Kira stepped toward it and froze.
"This was the original Spectra birthing chamber. They didn't build you here, Shane. But they planned for something like you."
On the far wall, a symbol blinked faintly, a sigil none of them had seen before. A spiral overlaid with fractured lines.
Aegix translated. "Project code: OuroSpectra. Loop without end."
Shane stared at the empty cradle. A strange memory flickered.
A voice. A hand. A promise.
Then, nothing.
"Find the origin of the pain…"
He whispered the words as a chill ran through him.
Then the floor beneath them shuddered.
A new sound rose from the depths.
Not a voice this time.
A heartbeat.
And it wasn't his.