⭐ FULL CHAPTER 10 — “THE FIRST ECHO”
924 Words
The stillness after the walls breathed was worse than the movement.
Riven waited for another vibration, another shift, anything to explain the sensation that the room had settled into listening mode. But nothing came. The air was flat, cold, and almost too clean—like it had been filtered through silence rather than machinery.
A faint crackle of static bloomed across the projection table.
Calyx stepped forward. “It’s starting again.”
Riven didn’t need the warning. The projection wasn’t turning back on with light—it was turning back on the way a person remembers something painful: gradually, unwillingly, and out of order.
Shapes surfaced.
Not clear.
Not structured.
Just fragments of a corridor—walls warped, floor stretched long like melted wax, ceiling curving inward as though gravity had changed its mind. The image jittered, thinned, and reformed, each time closer to what might have been real.
Idris hugged himself. “That’s… that’s Deck 4. Isn’t it?”
“No,” Riven said quietly. “Deck 4 doesn’t look like this.”
“It did,” Idris whispered. “Once.”
Riven looked sharply at him. Idris shut his eyes, shaking his head, as if denying something internal.
Another layer of the projection clicked into place—and sound filled the chamber.
A deep metallic groan.
A running footstep.
A clipped, desperate warning siren.
And behind it, a mechanical pulse like compressed air firing in controlled bursts.
Calyx’s hand drifted instinctively toward his weapon. “Is this a recording?”
Riven shook his head slowly.
“No. Recordings don’t distort perspective. This is… reconstructed memory. Something trying to rebuild an event from incomplete data.”
The projection sharpened.
A figure appeared.
Not human-sharp. Not silhouette-soft.
It flickered through two poses at once—as if it existed in two frames separated by half a heartbeat.
It sprinted down the hallway, limbs jerking in ways that felt not wrong but unsynced.
“Freeze frame,” Calyx said.
“It’s not a frame,” Riven whispered. “It’s a memory loop. It won’t obey commands.”
Another timestamp blinked to life at the corner of the projection:
00:17:43
00:17:43
00:17:43
Like a drum, marking the beat of something that once happened and refused to stay dead.
The projection flickered again—and the chamber itself changed.
The wall to their right stretched outward several centimeters, matching the distortion in the recalled hallway. A door formed in the metal—a door that hadn’t been there seconds before.
Idris stumbled backward. “It’s changing the real room. It’s reshaping it.”
“No.” Riven swallowed. “It’s syncing us to the memory. It’s aligning physical space to fit whatever happened here.”
The figure in the projection twisted, glitching through another position. Something followed it—low, curved, moving in arcs too clean for instinct, too animal for robotics.
A sliver of metal glinted.
Riven felt his pulse spike.
“The half-ring,” he breathed. “We found the shard from this moment. This exact moment.”
Calyx’s eyes narrowed. “So the anomaly isn’t what attacked. It’s what survived.”
Idris made a small choking sound. They both turned to him.
He was curled forward, one hand pressed hard against his temple.
“I know this,” Idris whispered. “I heard someone shout my name. But not like now. Like…”
He trailed off.
“Like in a memory I shouldn’t have.”
The projection pulsed again—and suddenly the sound cut out.
A message formed in jagged white:
YOU—ARE—INSIDE—THE—MEMORY
The chamber darkened around them, as though withdrawing its attention from anything that wasn’t the projection.
Calyx stepped closer to Riven. “If this is a memory reconstruction, it could be incomplete. Wrong. It might pull in false details.”
“Or missing ones,” Riven added. “Which means it might invent space to compensate.”
The door behind them slammed shut.
The bolts drove into place with mechanical certainty.
Idris screamed—not from the sound, but from the pressure drop. The room inhaled sharply, then settled again. The temperature fell enough for their breath to fog.
On the projection, the figure stumbled. The curved metallic presence behind it lunged—but the frame shattered before contact.
A new corridor aligned itself behind the projection screen—the same one from the reconstruct, but manifest in real metal now, glowing with a sickly orange light.
Letters carved themselves across the doorframe:
GO—IF—YOU—SEEK—TRUTH
Riven exhaled. “It’s guiding us to the rest of the event.”
Calyx ran a hand through his hair. “Every step deeper means less certainty what’s real.”
“I think that’s the point,” Riven murmured.
Idris straightened, trembling but resolute. “I… I have to go. Something down there remembers me.”
“Or needs you,” Riven said.
Calyx tightened his jaw but nodded. “Then we go together. No one touches the walls. No one breaks visual contact. No hero moves.”
Riven stepped toward the new corridor first.
The orange light pulsed like a dying sun.
Behind them, the projection flickered one final time, showing nothing but the timestamp:
00:17:43 — RECALL PHASE: CONTINUE
Riven felt the weight of the moment settle on him.
“What happened at that time,” he whispered, “it’s not finished remembering.”
And with that, they stepped into the first echo of the forgotten event.
- Writer
