Still in the data vault beneath Vehrmath, Benedict adjusted the interface as the echo's light faded to a low, steady pulse. The containment field shimmered faintly, echoing the tension in the room. The Overseer's projection had faded hours ago, replaced by unbroken silence and the hum of residual Pulse resonance.
In the quiet that followed, a soft chime echoed from Benedict's bracer—new data had finished decrypting. Ancient formatting. Pre-collapse structure. Pulse-indexed memory threads.
Cela leaned over his shoulder. "That new?"
"Buried beneath the echo's recursion," Benedict said. "A cartographic structure. Not a memory. A map."
He swiped the air above the interface and summoned a rotating lattice of points—each glowing faintly with spectral energy. The lattice was spatial, but not planetary. Dimensional strata overlapped the architecture.
Cela squinted. "Those aren't locations. They're events."
Benedict nodded. "Anchor points in Pulse space. Memories so intense they left spatial residue. If we plot these correctly, we may be able to follow the original collapse path."
"And rewrite it?" Cela asked.
"No," Benedict replied. "Understand it. Only then can we alter what comes next."
Cela smirked. "You always were better at riddles than policies."
"Which is why they keep me buried in basements like this," he shot back with a dry smile.
She rolled her eyes. "You say that like it's a bad thing. Some of us have to sit through Council reports, remember?"
Benedict chuckled. "You volunteered."
"Because someone had to make sure you didn't wire yourself into another consciousness loop."
He connected the lattice to the wider research network and initiated a low-band ping. Across Vehrmath, dormant receivers flickered online—stations that had not activated in centuries. One by one, old circuits connected, drawing breath like forgotten lungs.
"Echo Web," he whispered. "A mnemonic network waiting for minds to complete it."
Cela arched a brow. "So, what—now you're a cartographer of the dead?"
"Better than being a philosopher of the forgotten," he replied, tapping his bracer. "These tombs still think. We've just stopped listening."
She smirked. "That would make for a great tagline on a recruitment poster."
"I'll have it printed beneath my mugshot," Benedict muttered.
From Cela's point of view, Benedict was a force of contradiction—brilliant, reckless, often sarcastic, and yet maddeningly sincere. She watched as he moved with purpose, stringing old ghosts into new visions. There was an intensity to him now that hadn't been there before—ever since the first echo pulsed back, he hadn't slept much, hadn't paused. He was chasing something more than technology.
And yet, Cela couldn't help the feeling blooming in her gut—a mix of admiration and dread.
He paced slowly, muttering to himself. She recognized the pattern: problem-solving trance. She remembered him doing the same back during the archives fire—walking into collapsing walls just to salvage a schematic. Always the same look in his eyes: not fear, not thrill—certainty.
Cela turned back to the interface and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the dark glass. Her own face looked more tired than she felt. "What are we even doing here?" she whispered.
"Saving the future," Benedict said from behind, as if he'd heard her. "By mining the past."
He began laying out a technological ladder from memory to machine:
Stage One: Anchor Echo Stabilization—using memory pulses to map resonant zones.
Stage Two: Echo Interface Tools—bracers and drones designed to harmonize and decode mnemonic constructs.
Stage Three: Recovered Design Archives—blueprints passed through echoes, stored in ancient servers.
Stage Four: New Artificer Engineering—combining echo logic with real-time tech to generate recursive innovations.
Stage Five: Civilian Integration—products adapted from ancient memory tech, from neural-linked assistants to smart fabrication units.
Stage Six: The Engineer Renaissance—artificers reformed into something new: Earthbound engineers of cognition and legacy.
Cela broke the silence. "And the Council? They'll want control."
"They'll want results," Benedict corrected. "And I'll give them both."
She snorted. "That's the most political thing I've heard you say all week."
"Even mad scientists need funding," he deadpanned.
She nudged his shoulder. "I still remember when your big plan was to make a toaster that could sing opera."
"It still does," he said solemnly. "But it also brews decent coffee now."
Cela laughed despite herself. He always did this—pull her out of her doubts with absurdity.
He brought up a secondary interface. A list of disciples. Allies. Rivals. One name pulsed at the top—Calder.
"We're not the only ones who know what's buried beneath the crust," Benedict said. "It's time we started digging first."
A new glyph lit up on the console. A memory beacon had just activated in Zone Epsilon-3—a long-forgotten containment site deep beneath the oldest collapsed sector of Vehrmath.
Cela frowned. "Is that where...?"
Benedict nodded. "The prototype Mnemonic Archive. The one everyone pretends doesn't exist."
Officially, it had been sealed after the Pre-Fall pulse surge destabilized its core. Unofficially, it was rumored to have once been a place where early artificers experimented with echo-memory convergence and attempted to encode thought into architecture.
"Nothing's stirred there in centuries," Cela murmured.
"Until now," Benedict said, his eyes alight. "Not a flare. A call."
She studied him. "You're going down there, aren't you?"
"Of course," he said, already pulling up access requests and clearance protocols. "It might contain the original interface logic. More than a relic—it's the missing link."
Cela folded her arms. "You're not just rebuilding. You're reimagining the future."
"No," Benedict said quietly. "I'm waking up the past. And teaching it to dream again."
Cela exhaled. "I hope that dream doesn't bite back."
Benedict smirked. "If it does, I'll patent it first."
She laughed. "And sell it with a warranty, no doubt."
"Lifetime coverage," he quipped, eyes already scanning new incoming signals from Epsilon-3. "Assuming we survive the installation process."
As she watched him work, Cela felt the weight of it—of everything he was trying to become, everything he was dragging back from the ruins. Whatever was waiting in Epsilon-3, she'd follow him into it.
Because someone had to remind the dreamer how to wake up.