The year was still 2147, but time no longer felt linear for Dr. Elara Voss.
Three weeks had passed since the Rift closed—officially. But the hallucinations, time lapses, and chilling whispers hadn't stopped. If anything, they'd grown stronger. The Rift Research Station, now under full quarantine, orbited in silence above the Pacific—a ghost ship haunted not by the dead, but by the unknown.
The brass back on Earth called it psychological trauma. "Residual stress from exposure to non-Euclidean phenomena," they said, as if dressing horror in academic language would make it safer. But Elara knew better. She felt it. In her bones. In her blood.
In her mind.
That night, as the station drifted through Earth's shadow, Elara sat in the dark of her quarters, the only light coming from the terminal in front of her. Dozens of files were open—transmission logs, spectral scans, audio anomalies. At the center was one folder marked:
ECHO PROTOCOL — UNAUTHORIZED
She hadn't created it. She was sure of that. Yet the timestamp said otherwise. The logs showed her biometric ID, her voice authorization. And inside the folder: a single encrypted file named "RETURN_0."
Her finger hovered over the key. A voice—her voice—whispered again from nowhere:
"It's already begun."
She opened it.
A video file played.
Her own face stared back at her. But older. Paler. Sunken eyes rimmed with bruised flesh. The background was twisted, warped like reality was bending around it. Behind her, something shimmered—something familiar.
"If you're watching this, Elara… then containment failed. The wound never closed. It only scarred. The Forgotten… they've nested."
The screen shook. The older Elara turned sharply, something crashing off-camera. A piercing hum filled the audio.
"They feed on entropy. On memory. On possibility. They exist in the cracks of choice. Every time you forget a moment, every time time slips… that's them, feeding."
Her voice cracked.
"I tried to fight it. But you—you still can. There's a failsafe buried in the station's core systems. The Echo Protocol. You have to reboot the causal matrix. Sever their link to now. To us."
Elara leaned forward, breath shallow. "How?" she whispered to the recording.
As if in response, the older version of herself raised something into view—a small black cube, etched with symbols that shimmered faintly in blue light.
"You'll know it when you see it. But it comes with a price. The protocol doesn't reset reality—it burns the infection out."
"You may lose more than time."
The video glitched violently. A shadow passed behind the older Elara—humanoid, but warping like fluid. She turned, too late.
The video cut to black.
And then, her terminal shut off.
Darkness.
Silence.
Then, three words whispered in her ear—not from the room, but from inside her mind.
"We never left."
Elara jolted up, heart hammering. Her door hissed open. Raul stood there, eyes wide. "The AI just woke up," he panted. "It's running systems we didn't activate."
"Systems?" Elara asked, standing slowly.
Raul nodded, holding up a data slate. The screen pulsed with blue code.
ECHO PROTOCOL: BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATED
Behind them, in the engineering bay, a quiet hum began. Deep, rhythmic. Like a heartbeat.
Something had been awakened.
And it was waiting.