EPISODE 9: The Memory Flood
1246 Words
The silence after the battle was a lie.
Beneath the ruined shell of the sentinels, the system still pulsed—cold and calculating. Seviah could feel it, a low throb in her chest like a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to her. The light in her palms faded slowly, reluctant to let her go.
Renn crouched beside one of the fallen machines, dragging a knife across its cracked core. Sparks jumped, but there was no reboot.
“They’ll send more,” she said. “And they won’t be this easy next time.”
“Was that easy?”
Renn shot her a crooked grin.
“For you? Apparently.”
Zorren remained seated, wires still embedded in his skull. The glow in his eyes dimmed, but his voice remained steady.
“You felt it, didn’t you? When you touch them.”
Seviah didn’t answer. She was still shaking.
“What did you see?”
“Flashes,” she said. Images. Not mine. People they’ve killed. Rooms they entered. Orders. A voice calling them back to the ‘Mother Node.’”
Zorren nodded.
“It’s part of the Archive. The sentinels don’t just eliminate—they record. Every death. Every gift that failed to ignite. All of it… stored in the core system. And now that you’ve connected to them—”
“The Archive has touched me.”
“No.” His voice grew quieter.
“You’ve touched the Archive.”
The moment he said it, Seviah dropped to her knees.
Pain lanced through her skull.
Not normal pain—memory pain.
A thousand voices. A thousand eyes. A thousand final breaths.
All inside her.
Renn stepped forward.
“She’s seizing!”
Zorren raised a hand.
“No. She’s syncing.”
The floor glowed beneath Seviah. Her veins lit like fault lines. Her breath caught in her throat as memory after memory surged—each one more violent, more raw than the last.
She saw herself.
No. Not herself. A version of her. Younger. Eyes wide with terror as white coats pushed her into a room of mirrors. She screamed. The glass rippled. Then broke.
Another flash—
A boy with silver tattoos is burned alive in a chamber.
Another—
A girl, barely twelve, begging not to forget her own name.
Seviah choked on their fear.
“Make it stop,” she gasped.
“You have to let it complete,” Zorren said calmly. “If you cut it off now, the memories could fragment your own.”
She pressed her palms to the floor, sweat streaking down her temple, her jaw clenched to stop herself from screaming. The lights above flickered again.
The core was responding.
“Why would they let this happen?” she managed.
Zorren’s expression hardened.
“They didn’t. They were counting on you dying in Room Six. The moment you took 421’s Gift, you corrupted the entire data stream. The Archive thinks you’re an echo, not a person.”
“An echo of what?”
“Everyone.”
The final wave hit like a flood.
She gasped.
And then it was over.
The pain stopped.
The lights stilled.
Seviah blinked.
She was back in her body.
But her thoughts weren’t alone anymore.
“You downloaded it,” Renn said, disbelief written all over her face. “You really downloaded everything.”
Seviah stood slowly, the echo of thousands still whispering in her head.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“But you did.”
“Now what?”
Zorren looked toward the sealed door.
“Now you choose: stay here and become the Archive’s vessel—or burn the system from the inside.”
Seviah’s fists clenched.
“What happens to others if I destroy it?”
“They fade,” he said. Peacefully. Finally.”
“And if I don’t?”
“They’ll keep feeding you… until you forget who you were before all this.”
The thought made her stomach twist.
“There’s another option,” Renn said.
They both turned to her.
“Don’t burn it. Rewrite it.”
Zorren frowned.
“You’d risk a system reboot?”
“I’d risk anything,” Renn said. “If it means she doesn’t have to carry their deaths to her own.”
Seviah looked at them both.
In her glowing hands.
On the cracked floor.
The walls still pulsing like a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.
“Then get me to the central node.”
Zorren hesitated. Then—
“Follow me.”
The chamber door hissed open.
Outside, alarms had gone silent.
Not from peace.
But from the calm before the war.
The corridor ahead was different.
Clean. Polished. Clinical.
Unlike the rusting pipes and flickering wires of the lower sectors, this one was smooth, sharp-edged, lined with pulse-lit panels that adjusted to their movement. It wasn’t built for people like them. It was built for control.
Seviah felt it instantly—pressure.
Like she was walking into the lungs of a beast mid-inhale.
Renn drew her blade again, but this time her grip trembled slightly.
“Feels like it’s watching us.”
“Because it is,” Zorren said. “We’re inside the Neural Spine.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s the nervous system of the Archive. The part that thinks. If it wanted, it could trap us here forever and no one would ever know.”
Seviah paused mid-step.
“Then why hasn’t it?”
Zorren gave a ghost of a smile.
“Because you still have a question you can’t answer.”
They reached a fork in the hall.
Two doors.
One pulsing blue.
One pulsing red.
Seviah turned to Zorren.
“Which one leads to the core?”
“Both.”
“Meaning?”
“The Archive doesn’t just store data,” he said. It splits it. One half is the logic node—the truth, the raw files. The other half is the memory node—the filtered narratives, the emotions, the lies.”
“So I choose what kind of truth I want?”
“Exactly.”
Seviah stared at the doors.
Blue: Cold knowledge.
Red: Emotional memory.
What she’d seen was the truth.
But what she’d felt… that was something else entirely.
“Which one did you pick?” she asked Zorren.
“Red.”
“And did it destroy you?”
He didn’t answer.
She stepped forward, fingers brushing the glowing panel of the red door. It responded instantly—recognizing her. Accepting her.
The others tensed.
The door opened.
Inside was a chamber of red mist and floating data fragments, shifting like puzzle pieces in water. The floor didn’t exist—just glass panels above a void of infinite screens.
It was… alive.
Seviah stepped in.
Instantly, her vision blurred.
She wasn’t in the chamber anymore.
She was seven years old, standing in the rain. A woman’s voice called her name from somewhere she couldn’t reach. She turned and saw herself.
Older.
Eyes are glowing.
Bloody hands.
“What is this?” she whispered.
A voice replied—not from the room, but from her own mind.
“These are the memories they buried.”
Her body jerked.
Flash. A fire. A scream. A name she didn't recognize—Kael.
A whisper:
“You killed him, Seviah. And they made you forget.”
Her knees buckled. She hit the glass with a gasp.
And the chamber whispered again—
“Ready to remember it all?”
- Writer
