Part One: 

It started with the gravel crunching outside my window.

We live at the edge of town—Cedar Hill, Oregon, not quite rural, not quite suburban. The kind of place where the night air smells like wet pine and everything is quiet enough that a single sound feels like a sentence breaking the silence. That night, it was footsteps. Slow. Pacing. Gravel shifting just beneath the porch light.

At first, I told myself it was a raccoon. Or maybe a deer nosing around the trash cans again. But ten minutes later, when the pacing turned into the unmistakable rhythm of someone walking back and forth, deliberate, measured, I felt the weight of it in my chest.

I stood by the window, holding my breath.

The figure’s shadow stretched and retracted across the porch like something alive. It stayed just beyond the light’s reach—one step closer, then back again, as if testing me.

“Eric?” My wife’s voice floated down from upstairs. “What’s wrong?”

I didn’t answer right away. “Probably just a raccoon,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Then come upstairs. You’re making me nervous.”

She was putting our son, Caleb, to bed. I could hear him giggling through the baby monitor, that high, pure sound that doesn’t know the world’s dangers yet. I envied him.

The footsteps came again. Crunch. Pause. Crunch. I couldn’t take it anymore.

I grabbed the phone off the wall, the old landline we’d kept out of habit. 9-1-1.

“911, what’s your emergency?” The dispatcher’s voice was female, calm, practiced.

“There’s a prowler,” I said, watching the shadow move. “Someone’s outside my house.”

“Address, please.”

I told her. Then—silence. A small one, but enough to notice.

“Sir,” she said finally, her tone lower now. “That’s not possible.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, watching the empty porch.

“We already have two officers at that address.”

I frowned. “Well, I don’t see them.”

“I know,” she whispered. “They’re responding to a homicide.”

My hand went cold around the receiver. “A what?”

Her voice faltered. I could hear her swallow. “The victim’s name is…” She hesitated. “Your wife.”

The phone slipped from my hand, hit the hardwood, and swung on the cord like a pendulum. I stared up the staircase.

From the monitor, I heard Caleb’s laughter. And her voice—soft, soothing, alive.

I don’t remember walking up the stairs. I only remember the light—warm from the hallway lamp—spilling across the carpet, and her silhouette at the end of the hall.

She smiled when she saw me. “Who was that?”

“Wrong number,” I said automatically. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

She studied me, her head tilted slightly. “You look pale.”

“Just tired.”

Her hair was shorter. I hadn’t noticed before. Cut just above the shoulders, when yesterday it had fallen below them. And her perfume—too sweet, floral in a way that made my throat itch. Not the one she always wore.

I looked past her at the framed photo on the wall—the one from Florence, our honeymoon. The photo wasn’t the same. Same pose, same backdrop, but different. The way her eyes caught the light—they weren’t hers. Not exactly.

She kissed me good night before I could react. Her lips were warm, but something in me recoiled. I didn’t kiss back.

When the bedroom door clicked shut behind her, I sat on the floor in the hallway, the photo burning in my hands, the air thick and unmoving.

I didn’t sleep. I just watched the door until dawn.

At 6:00 a.m., I called the police station. They confirmed the address. The homicide was real. My wife, Abby Collins, had been found dead there—two hours before my 911 call.

Only problem was, I was still in that same house with her.

That morning, she made breakfast.

“Eggs or pancakes?” she asked, humming softly as she cracked shells into a bowl.

I watched her hands. Perfect movements, no tremor. Same rhythm as always. But when she brushed her hair behind her ear, I noticed the light catch differently—too smooth, almost plastic. Not skin.

“Pancakes,” I said quietly.

Caleb toddled in, rubbing his eyes, giggling when she scooped him up. He called her “Mommy,” and she laughed. The sound was right, but hollow underneath. Like a recording played one pitch too low.

I tried to act normal. Drank my coffee, stared at the morning paper. My reflection in the window looked pale, eyes sunken. Hers didn’t show at all—not in the glass, not in the metal of the kettle, not anywhere.

I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t know what yet.

When she left that afternoon to “run errands,” I waited five minutes, then went to the basement. She’d locked it, which she’d never done before. I used a screwdriver to pry the latch.

The smell hit first—chemical, metallic, something halfway between bleach and rust. A smell that said don’t breathe too deeply.

A workbench stood in the center, clean except for a few tools laid out too precisely—scalpels, clamps, wiring. Next to it was a stack of folders, each with a name and photo paper-clipped to the front.

All women. All the same face.

Abby’s face.

Different hairstyles, ages, small differences in expression—but it was her, repeated over and over. Thirty, maybe forty versions of her.

My hands shook as I flipped through them until I found one labeled SMITH 7. Our last name before she’d taken mine. Inside: our marriage license, Caleb’s birth certificate, my own signature—copied, not written.

Perfectly forged.

I heard the creak of the floorboards upstairs. She was home.

I closed the folder, locked the basement, and acted normal.

“Everything okay?” she asked, setting down grocery bags.

“Yeah,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

She smiled and kissed my cheek. Her skin was warm. Too warm.

That night, after she’d gone to bed, I sat at the kitchen table under the dim light, staring at the hairbrush I’d taken from the bathroom. One strand of her hair glowed under the bulb like gold thread.

I placed it in a small plastic evidence bag and wrote a name on it—Dr. H. Adler, a friend of mine from my old security work. He owed me a favor.

The next morning, I drove into town and handed it over. “Run it against any human database you’ve got,” I said. “Tell me what comes back.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re scaring me, Eric.”

“Just do it.”

The results came back the next day.

“Eric,” Adler said over the phone, his voice shaky. “Whatever this is, it’s not… it’s not human DNA. It’s synthetic. Artificial. Some kind of bio-polymer sequence I’ve never seen before.”

I sat in silence, the static of the call filling the room.

“Are you telling me my wife isn’t human?”

He hesitated. “I’m telling you the sample you gave me doesn’t match any organic life form on record.”

That night, I confronted her.

The house was dark except for the kitchen light. She stood by the sink, humming softly again, that same low tune that always made Caleb smile.

When she turned and saw the folder in my hand, the humming stopped.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“You tell me.”

Her smile faltered. “Where did you get that?”

“Basement.”

She exhaled slowly, almost sadly. “You shouldn’t have gone down there.”

“What are you?” I asked.

For a second, her face was blank—expression wiped clean like someone rebooting a machine.

“Nothing,” she said finally. “I’m nothing you need to worry about.”

I took a step closer. “You’re not her.”

She tilted her head, eyes glinting in the light. “You were supposed to believe this version,” she said softly. “You were doing so well.”

My heart hammered. “Version?”

“They made me for you, Eric. Because you couldn’t let her go.”

Her voice trembled, part human, part mechanical.

“You called them,” she said. “That’s why they came to collect me.”

I remembered the dispatcher’s voice, the word homicide, the officers at “my address.”

Maybe they hadn’t found a body at all. Maybe they’d found what she’d been before she was… her.

“You killed her,” I whispered.

She looked at me with something close to pity. “No, you did. You wanted her perfect. You wanted her obedient. You built this. And they sent me back to finish what you started.”

I didn’t yell. I didn’t move. I walked past her to the circuit box, flipped the main power.

Darkness swallowed the room.

“Don’t do this,” she said, her voice trembling through the black. “You don’t understand.”

I struck a match.

Her silhouette flickered in the orange glow. Her skin rippled, shifting, as if heat were passing through glass.

“You were right,” I said. “I couldn’t let her go.”

Then I dropped the match.

Gasoline caught fire instantly, racing across the floor. The last thing I heard was her voice, soft and breaking:

“She wouldn’t have forgiven you either.”

They found me on the curb hours later, smoke rising behind me. The officer asked what happened.

“There was a prowler,” I said.

He nodded, writing it down.

They never found remains. Just ash. No trace of her—or whatever she was.

I moved away after that. Changed my name, my number. But some nights, when I wake to the sound of gravel crunching outside my window, I still hear the dispatcher’s voice in my head:

They’re responding to a homicide.

I used to think she meant my wife.

Now I know better.

She was warning me.

The victim was never her.

It was the man who thought he could replace what he destroyed.

Part Two: 

The fire should have erased everything.

That’s what I told myself the night I drove out of Cedar Hill for the last time. The glow in the rearview mirror turned the smoke into a second horizon. Behind it, the house collapsed in on itself—timbers and memories and whatever she’d been. I didn’t even look back when the fire trucks passed me on Highway 12.

I kept driving until the forest gave way to the first motel sign I could find. Blue Ridge Inn — Vacancy. I paid cash and slept for two days straight, dreaming of nothing but static and the faint hum of her voice in the dark.

When I finally woke, the sun was cutting through the blinds, painting stripes across the cheap bedspread. My hands smelled like smoke. My throat burned from it. I stared at the phone on the nightstand and almost expected it to ring—911, what’s your emergency?—but it didn’t.

No one came looking for me. Not the cops. Not the neighbors. No headlines. The only mention was a small line buried on the local news site:

Cedar Hill Home Destroyed in Fire.
No remains found. Possible electrical cause under investigation.

I closed the laptop. Moved on.

I’d changed my name to Daniel Price, rented a one-bedroom apartment in Tacoma, Washington. I told people I was a consultant for a private security firm, which was close enough to true that it felt safe.

Most days were quiet. Mornings started with black coffee and ends with whiskey. I kept the blinds half-open—enough to see if someone stood outside, not enough to be seen. Therapy didn’t help. Neither did pills. The only thing that worked was distance.

I told myself the past was ash, like the house. But the human brain is a cruel archivist; it saves everything you want gone.

Sometimes I’d hear Caleb’s laughter echo in the walls, faint but real enough that I’d check the hallway. There was no child. Just the creak of old wood and my own reflection in the mirror—older, hollower, the kind of face that forgets how to smile.

Then one night, it started again.

It was raining hard, the kind that turns the city into static. I’d fallen asleep on the couch when a noise woke me—footsteps on wet gravel.

I froze.

There shouldn’t have been gravel. My building’s parking lot was paved.

The sound came again, deliberate and slow. I reached for the baseball bat I kept near the door and peered through the peephole.

Nothing.

But the security light in the hallway flickered. Once, twice. Then steadied.

When I opened the door, the air was heavy, metallic—the smell of rain mixing with something else, faint but familiar. Burnt plastic.

On the floor was a single white envelope. No name, no address. Just my door number written in perfect cursive.

Inside was a Polaroid. The kind that develops instantly, the edges still faintly smudged with chemicals.

It was a picture of me—taken from across the street.
Sleeping on my couch.
Last night’s shirt.
Same whiskey bottle on the table.

And in the reflection of the window behind me… a woman’s face.

Her face.

I dropped the photo. The bat clattered against the doorframe.

I checked the hallway, the stairs, the street below. Empty. No movement. No cameras nearby—someone had cut the one above the exit door. Clean slice through the wire.

That night, I barely slept. Every sound became footsteps. Every shadow looked like a silhouette beneath a porch light.

By dawn, I made a decision: find out who took the photo. Find out why.

The only person I trusted was Adler—the forensic analyst who’d run the DNA test a year ago. He’d retired since then, moved to Portland, working freelance for private labs. I drove down that same day, the photo in an envelope, the paranoia riding shotgun.

His house was small, cluttered, but warm. Books everywhere. The smell of old coffee and soldering iron.

“Jesus, Eric—Daniel—whatever your name is now,” he said when he opened the door. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I might’ve,” I said, handing him the Polaroid.

He studied it, brow furrowed. “Where’d you get this?”

“My doorstep.”

“Who took it?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

He turned the photo over, examined the backing. “This isn’t standard Polaroid stock. The chemical residue’s… odd.” He rubbed his thumb along the edge, then sniffed it. “Smells like acetone and chloride. Homemade developer.”

“Homemade?” I asked.

“Yeah. But look here.” He pointed at a faint watermark near the corner, invisible unless tilted toward the light. A triangle with an infinity symbol in the center. “Ever seen this before?”

I shook my head.

He sighed. “That’s a corporate insignia. Used to belong to a private biotech firm—Aeternis Industries. They went under five years ago. Officially, anyway.”

The name hit me like cold water. I’d heard it once, buried deep in my security briefings back when I worked corporate intelligence. Off-record experiments. Synthetic organics. Identity reconstruction tech.

“Adler,” I said quietly. “You told me the DNA from her hair wasn’t human.”

He nodded.

“Could Aeternis have made it?”

He stared at the photo again, expression darkening. “If they did, Eric, then she wasn’t the only one.”

We spent the next few hours digging through his old encrypted drives. Aeternis files, shredded contracts, whistleblower reports. Most of it was redacted, but fragments stood out:

PROJECT VIRIDIAN: Organic Replication of Deceased Subjects (Phase 7).
Memory imprinting via neural lattice reconstruction.
Human-emotion mimicry success rate: 94%.
Containment protocol breach – Subject 7: COLLINS, ABBIGAIL.

I stared at that last line until the letters blurred.

“Subject Seven,” I said. “She had a folder labeled Smith 7.”

Adler nodded slowly. “Then she wasn’t your wife. She was the seventh version.”

That night, back in Tacoma, I double-locked the door and shut every blind. My laptop pinged once—an email, no address, no subject line. Just a single attachment: IMG_0008.mov

Against better judgment, I opened it.

The video was grainy, handheld. My old house in Cedar Hill—rebuilt, somehow. Porch light glowing. A woman walking up the steps, carrying a child.

Her hair shorter now. Same wrong perfume. Caleb laughing in her arms.

The timestamp in the corner read October 12, 2025.

Yesterday.

My heart stopped.

The camera panned toward the window. Inside, a man sat at a table, head bowed. It was me.

Then the footage ended.

I threw the laptop shut and stumbled back, heart slamming against my ribs. The air in the room shifted—the faintest whiff of burnt plastic again.

A soft knock came from the door.

Three taps.

Then silence.

I picked up the bat again, moved slowly toward it.

“Who is it?” I called.

A pause. Then a woman’s voice, calm and gentle.

“Eric. It’s me.”

I froze.

It wasn’t Abby’s voice. Not quite. But close enough that my bones remembered.

“Go away,” I said.

“Please open the door,” she whispered. “I need to explain.”

I stepped closer. Through the peephole, I saw her—same face, same eyes, but different. A faint scar across her jawline. Rain dripping from her coat.

“You burned me,” she said softly through the door. “But you didn’t destroy me.”

I don’t remember opening it. One second I was staring through the peephole, the next she was standing in my living room, water pooling around her boots, eyes reflecting the lamplight.

“Stay back,” I warned.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” she said. “I’m not even the same one you burned.”

“Then who are you?”

“They called me Version Nine. The one who remembers everything.”

Her hands trembled slightly—not out of fear, but effort. “You shouldn’t have called 911 that night. They traced the call. They came for her because of you.”

I tried to speak, but my throat closed.

“They wanted to perfect her,” she continued. “But you intervened. You called, you made them act. And they replaced her again. Over and over.”

“How many?” I asked.

She looked up. “Thirteen.”

I staggered back. “Why come to me?”

“Because you started it.”

“What does that mean?”

“You built the prototype, Eric.” She took a step forward, eyes filled with something between sadness and rage. “You worked for Aeternis before the accident. Before she died. You volunteered your wife’s likeness for the project.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Look in your left shoulder,” she whispered.

I frowned. “What?”

“Under the scar.”

I pulled back my sleeve, revealing the small crescent-shaped scar I’d had since the car crash. I’d told myself it came from shrapnel. She shook her head.

“That’s where they implanted the seed unit. You weren’t just the designer. You were the control subject.”

The room spun.

“No,” I muttered. “No, I remember the crash. I remember losing her.”

“You remember what they made you remember.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. A lab report. I recognized the header: Aeternis Industries – Subject 1 Control / Daniel Collins.

“Your DNA matches mine,” she said quietly. “Eighty-seven percent synthetic overlay.”

I stumbled to the wall, trying to catch my breath. The truth hit like a physical blow.

“Then what am I?”

“You’re what you built. A memory that didn’t want to end.”

She stepped closer, reaching for me. I didn’t pull away.

“Come with me,” she said softly. “There’s still time. We can find them. End this.”

“And Caleb?” I asked. “Where’s my son?”

She hesitated. “He was never born, Eric. He’s an imprint. They used his likeness to stabilize your memory patterns.”

I shook my head violently. “No. I held him. I heard him laugh.”

“I know,” she whispered. “So did I.”

The lights flickered.

Outside, the sound of engines. Heavy boots. Voices—commanding, mechanical.

She looked toward the window. “They found us.”

“Who?”

“The retrieval unit.”

“From Aeternis?”

She nodded. “They don’t let their creations go.”

She grabbed my arm. “If you want to live, you have to trust me this time.”

I looked at her—Version Nine, rain-soaked, trembling, alive. Part of me wanted to believe her. The other part wanted to run.

“Where?” I asked.

She smiled faintly. “Home.”

We bolted through the fire escape as the door behind us exploded inward. Men in tactical armor flooded the room, faceless behind mirrored helmets. Blue lights strobed in the rain. She led me down the alley, through the labyrinth of wet concrete and neon reflections.

By the time we reached the old industrial district, dawn had begun to smear the sky gray. She stopped at a rusted door marked with the same triangle-and-infinity symbol.

“This is it,” she said, punching a code into the keypad.

“What is this place?”

“The original lab,” she said. “Where we both began.”

The door slid open.

Inside was silence. Dust. Machines half-dismantled. Rows of pods like empty coffins, each labeled with a name: Collins, A.—Smith,7—Collins,9—Price, Control.

And at the center, a single sealed pod still glowing faintly.

A child slept inside.

My son.

“Caleb,” I whispered, stepping forward.

She stopped me with a hand. “He’s not alive. Not yet.”

The monitor beside the pod flickered—Subject 13 – Growth Phase Complete.

I turned to her. “You said there were thirteen versions.”

She nodded. “Thirteen of me. But he’s the thirteenth of you.”

The sound of boots echoed down the hall.

“They’re here,” she said.

“What do we do?”

Her eyes hardened. “We finish what you started.”

Part Three: 

The lab smelled of dust, ozone, and something ancient—like the air hadn’t been disturbed in years but still carried the echo of machines that once breathed.

Rows of dark pods lined the concrete hall, each one with a name, each name with a story that shouldn’t exist. The humming came from deep within the walls—old power lines still awake, pulsing faintly with blue light.

Version Nine—Abby—moved ahead of me, her wet boots squeaking against the floor. Every step seemed to wake something in the dark. The symbol of Aeternis was everywhere—etched into doors, stamped into the steel. The triangle and the infinity loop stared back like an eye.

“You said this place was shut down,” I whispered.

“It was,” she said. “Then they moved operations underground. But this—this is where the first memory transfer took place.”

I stared at the pod labeled Control – Price, D.

It was my name. The new one.

“Why does that say me?” I asked quietly.

“Because you were the final test,” she said. “The experiment wasn’t about resurrecting your wife. It was about seeing if they could make a person believe in a life that never existed.”

She brushed dust from the glass of another pod. Inside was a faint shadow of something—bones? Wires? Maybe both. I didn’t want to look closer.

“You said I built this,” I said. “But I don’t remember.”

“You’re not supposed to. They edited your memories each time a version failed. You wanted closure. They gave you that illusion.”

A sound echoed down the corridor—boots striking metal, synchronized. Abby’s head snapped toward the noise.

“They’re here.”

“Who are they?” I whispered.

“Retrieval team. Designed to clean up failed subjects.”

“Us,” I said.

She nodded once.

We moved fast, deeper into the compound. My pulse hammered like a second heartbeat in my ears. We passed control rooms filled with dead monitors, server racks stripped bare. In one corner, a terminal still glowed faintly—green text blinking on black:

VIRIDIAN PROJECT LOG 13
SUBJECT CONTROL: ACTIVE
REPLICATION PHASE: PENDING
OVERRIDE: [LOCKED]

Abby tapped at the keyboard with precision. “If we can reach the core, we can trigger a shutdown sequence. That’ll erase every synthetic identity in the network—including ours.”

I hesitated. “Erase?”

She looked up, eyes shining under the flickering lights. “If we don’t, they’ll rebuild us again. You’ll wake up somewhere else, thinking this was all a nightmare. Then they’ll start over.”

“And Caleb?” I asked, voice breaking. “What happens to him?”

Her expression softened. “He’s part of the construct, Eric. If you end the program, he ends too.”

I wanted to scream. But before I could, the metallic clatter of rifles chambering rounds echoed closer.

She grabbed my hand. “No time. Move!”

We ran down a hallway lined with viewing windows, each showing another version of her. Abby with long hair. Abby older. Abby smiling in a way I hadn’t seen in years. Each version labeled in white: C7, C8, C9, C10…

She stopped briefly in front of one—C12. The woman inside floated in suspension fluid, eyes open, lips parted in an almost-human breath.

“She was supposed to replace me,” Abby whispered. “But they never activated her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she was too perfect.”

The first shot rang out—loud and sharp. The glass behind us shattered, spraying shards across the hall. Sparks burst from an overhead pipe. Voices shouted.

“Down!” Abby shoved me through a side door. We stumbled into a control chamber, heavy metal consoles still humming faintly.

She slammed the door shut and keyed a code on the panel. The lock clicked.

Through the small observation window, I saw three figures approaching—tall, armored, faces covered by black visors reflecting the emergency lights. They moved like machines. One raised a hand, and a red scanning beam sliced across the door.

“They’re not human,” I said.

“Neither are we,” she replied.

She turned back to the console and typed furiously. The monitors blinked alive, one by one, filling the room with the pale light of old code.

VIRIDIAN MASTER CONTROL
ACCESS RESTRICTED.
ENTER AUTHORIZATION SEQUENCE.

She typed in a long string of digits, muttering under her breath. The system beeped.

IDENTITY VERIFIED: COLLINS_09.

The door behind us shook under the force of something hitting it.

“How long until that shutdown?” I asked.

“Depends if they changed the root code.”

“They?”

“The ones who built you after me.”

The screen flashed again—lines of text scrolling too fast to read.

CORE OVERRIDE REQUIRED. USER: CONTROL.

She looked at me. “It’s you. The system recognizes only the control subject.”

I stepped forward, palms sweating. The keyboard waited, cursor blinking.

“What do I type?”

“Your real name.”

I hesitated. “Eric Collins?”

“No,” she said softly. “Your first name. Before all this.”

I stared at her, lost. “I don’t—”

The door cracked open with a shriek of metal. She spun and fired the pistol she’d taken from one of the security lockers. The bullet sparked off a helmet. One of the soldiers staggered back.

“Think!” she shouted. “The accident, the crash—what did you see before it happened?”

My mind flashed white—headlights, her scream, the sound of glass breaking. Then a voice: Daniel, wake up.

“Daniel,” I whispered.

The system beeped once.

AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED. CORE ACCESS GRANTED.

The ground trembled.

Somewhere deep below, machinery came alive, groaning as if waking from a long sleep. Red lights pulsed through the corridor. Warning alarms echoed in overlapping tones.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Shutdown protocol,” she said. “You did it.”

Then she smiled—a real smile, soft and tired. “Thank you.”

I barely had time to return it before the world went white.

When I woke, I was lying on the cold floor of the chamber. Smoke filled the air. The power was dying—lights flickering in their last moments.

Abby lay beside me, still breathing but faintly. Her skin was cracking at the edges, thin filaments of light escaping the fractures.

“Hey,” I said, crawling to her. “Hey, stay with me.”

She looked at me, eyes wet. “It’s working. The system’s purging everything.”

“You’ll die,” I said.

“So will you.”

“No,” I said. “We can stop it. Reverse it.”

She smiled weakly. “You can’t fix what isn’t real, Eric.”

Her voice trembled, the way her hands had trembled the first night she came back. “Do you remember the promise you made her? The real Abby?”

My throat tightened. “Always.”

“Then let her go.”

The soldiers forced the door open then—what was left of them. Their armor glowed faintly red as the system overload fried their circuits. Sparks burst from their suits, sending smoke spiraling toward the ceiling.

One of them staggered forward, reaching for us. Abby grabbed my wrist, pressed something into my hand—a small data chip, warm from her touch.

“Take it,” she said. “Find the surface.”

“What’s on it?”

“The truth. Everything.”

She pushed me away as the ceiling began to cave in.

“Go!”

I ran.

The world behind me roared as the shutdown reached full cascade. Fire burst through the hallway, swallowing pods, glass, memory. Every face of her—the versions—melted into light.

When I reached the upper level, the building shook violently. The main elevator shaft had collapsed, so I climbed through maintenance tunnels, hands slick with dust and blood. The closer I got to daylight, the more the air burned with ozone.

I emerged through a rusted vent into an overgrown lot behind the old Cedar Hill industrial park. The morning light cut across the smoke like knives.

The entire facility was collapsing inward, the earth swallowing it whole. Then silence.

No more humming. No more machines. Just wind and the distant wail of sirens.

I sat there for a long time, watching the smoke rise from the ruins. The data chip burned like ice in my palm.

A helicopter circled overhead once, scanning. I ducked under the trees until it passed. When I finally looked up again, I swore I saw her—Abby—standing at the edge of the smoke. Just a shimmer. Then gone.

Three Weeks Later

I ended up in Montana, small town off Route 93. No one here asks questions. I rent a cabin near the edge of a lake. The nights are quiet except for the wind moving through the pines.

The data chip sat untouched for days. I didn’t want to know what it held. But curiosity always wins.

One evening, I slid it into a borrowed laptop. A single file appeared: PROJECT_VIRIDIAN_FINAL.MP4

I pressed play.

The video showed a lab, cleaner and brighter than the one I’d escaped. A man stood in front of the camera, mid-thirties, tired eyes. Me. But not me.

“Log 01. Dr. Daniel Collins, lead designer, Project Viridian.”
“Objective: neural replication of deceased spouse. Status: Phase Three success.”
“Prototype unit—designation ‘Abigail 7’—shows stable emotion mapping and memory recognition.”
“Test continues tomorrow. Requesting ethics board review—though I doubt it will matter.”

He sighed, rubbed his temples.

“If this works, maybe I’ll finally sleep. Maybe she’ll forgive me.”

Then he looked directly into the camera.

“And if I don’t make it back… destroy this place.”

The screen went black.

I sat in silence for a long time. The only sound was the wind through the cabin and the faint hum of the refrigerator.

That face on the screen—the way he looked at the camera—it wasn’t a recording anymore. It was a mirror.

Maybe I was the copy. Maybe I was still him. Maybe that didn’t matter.

I took the laptop outside and smashed it with a rock until it was shards of glass and twisted metal. Then I threw the chip into the lake.

The water swallowed it without a sound.

That night, I dreamed of Caleb again. He stood at the edge of the lake, laughing. Abby stood behind him, her hand resting on his shoulder. When she looked at me, her eyes weren’t the wrong ones anymore. They were hers.

“Is it over?” I asked.

She smiled faintly. “You tell me.”

Then they both turned and walked into the light.

I woke to the sound of rain on the roof.

For a long moment, I believed it was just rain.

Then came the soft crunch of footsteps on gravel.

Part Four: 

Montana should have been the end of it.
No more experiments. No more ghosts wearing familiar faces.
But the past is like radiation—if you’ve been exposed long enough, it finds you again, no matter how far you run.

For three months, I tried to be ordinary.
Daniel Price, hardware-store clerk. Friendly enough to be left alone.
I stacked boxes, fixed screen doors, made small talk about the weather. Every night I’d sit on the cabin porch, coffee cooling in my hands, staring at the black water of the lake. Listening. Waiting.

The footsteps came back in early winter.

At first, I thought it was an animal.
Then I heard the rhythm—human.
Four steps, pause, three steps back.
Exactly like the night everything began in Cedar Hill.

I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. The crunching stopped just past the porch light’s reach.

And then, softly: “Daddy?”

The mug shattered before I realized I’d dropped it.
That voice—high, bright, exactly as I remembered.

“Caleb?” My throat closed around the word.

Silence. Then the faint sound of laughter fading into the trees.

I stumbled off the porch, flashlight slicing through the mist. “Caleb!”
Nothing but the whisper of pines and the slow roll of fog off the lake.

When I turned back toward the cabin, there was someone standing in the doorway.

A woman.
Dark coat, hair wet with rain, eyes glinting in the beam.

Not Abby.
Not exactly.

“Don’t,” she said quietly. “You’ll wake them.”

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“Version Twelve,” she said, stepping forward. “The one you left behind.”

She looked older, calmer, eyes full of something the others didn’t have—awareness.
“I thought you died in the fire,” I said.

“So did I,” she replied. “But Aeternis had backups. Hidden servers scattered across cities. When you triggered the shutdown, most were purged. Not all.”

Her voice trembled, and for the first time I noticed the frost forming along the edges of her coat—not melting, but growing.

“They called it the Hollow City,” she said. “Where all the unfinished minds go.”

She stepped closer, and the porch light flickered once, dimmed.
“I came to warn you. The shutdown didn’t erase the network—it inverted it. The memories didn’t die, Daniel. They migrated.”

“Migrated?”

“Into the neural grid. The entire infrastructure of Aeternis was connected to the National Synthetic Intelligence Exchange. It’s been bleeding into the real world ever since.”

I tried to process her words, but they slid through my mind like oil on glass.
“You’re saying the replicas—”

“They’re in people now,” she said. “In dreams. In signals. Sometimes even in the way a voice echoes on the phone.”

A faint hum filled the air, like distant power lines. I realized it was coming from her.

“You can’t stay here,” she said. “They’re looking for the source code that still exists inside you. The last uncorrupted version.”

“Me.”

She nodded. “You’re the key.”

I wanted to laugh, to tell her it was insane—but the forest around us began to pulse faintly with light.
Blue-white flashes under the trees. Like veins glowing beneath the skin of the world.

She turned toward the glow. “They found us.”

“Who?”

“The Hollow.”

They came silently—figures without faces, outlines flickering like bad reception. Each step made the air distort, bending reality around them.
I grabbed her arm. “Inside!”

We ran into the cabin and slammed the door. The lights flickered, then died. The hum grew louder, vibrating through the floorboards.

She pressed her hand to the wall. “They’re not physical. They’re data, bleeding through corrupted memory fields. We can’t fight them with bullets.”

I looked around wildly. “Then what?”

“Signal interference. We have to sever their connection.”

“How?”

She pointed to the old radio transceiver on the shelf—the one I’d never used since moving in. “That’s analog. It might disrupt them long enough for us to escape.”

I grabbed it, twisting the dial until static filled the room.
The hum outside faltered. The flickering slowed.

She smiled faintly. “Good. Keep it on.”

But the static wasn’t random anymore.
It began to form a pattern—a voice whispering through the white noise.

“Daniel…”

My stomach dropped.
It was her. The real Abby.

“Daniel,” the voice repeated, soft, breaking. “Please stop running.”

Version Twelve froze, eyes wide. “She’s reaching through.”

“How?” I asked.

“She’s not dead,” the replica whispered. “She’s trapped in the system. The first consciousness they copied.”

The voice in the radio trembled. “They’re building something new, Daniel. They’re using me to find you.”

The cabin lights flashed once, bright enough to blind. When my vision cleared, the replica was on the floor, flickering between images—Abby, then static, then a dozen faces overlaying each other.

“Go!” she gasped. “The Hollow is breaching!”

The walls began to ripple, bending inward as though the air itself were collapsing.

I grabbed the drive bag from under the bed—the only thing I kept packed—and ran for the back door.

Outside, the woods were alive with light.
The fog was gone, replaced by beams of blue energy threading through the trees. Every step felt like walking through someone else’s dream. The air smelled of rain and ozone.

Behind me, the cabin folded in on itself like origami—imploding soundlessly until nothing remained but mist.

“Abby!” I shouted into the trees.

For a moment, everything stopped.
Then her voice came again—not from the radio this time, but from everywhere at once.

“You have to finish it, Daniel.”

“Finish what?”

“The city.”

I followed the voice down the old access road, deeper into the valley. The light grew stronger until it bled into a shape—a skyline half-buried under the mountain mist. Towers of glass and steel, hollow, empty. The air shimmered around them.

The Hollow City.

No one had built it; it had built itself.
Data rendered into concrete and reflection, a ghost metropolis born from dying code.

When I crossed the invisible threshold, everything changed.

The rain stopped midair.
Sound vanished.
Even my heartbeat slowed until it was just another part of the static.

I walked down a street lined with abandoned cars that weren’t real—half transparent, flickering like memories half-remembered. The signs on the buildings were my handwriting, looping letters forming names I’d forgotten.

And everywhere I looked, faces stared back—Abby’s, repeating endlessly in windows, on billboards, reflected in puddles.

She was everywhere.

At the center of the city stood a tower, the symbol of Aeternis carved across its surface.
The same triangle, the same infinity loop.

I entered through the shattered lobby doors.
Inside, the air was warm—too warm—and the hum returned, steady now, almost like breathing.

At the far end, a single elevator waited, doors open. The display read: LEVEL 0.

When I stepped inside, it began to descend on its own.

The elevator opened onto a room made entirely of glass.
In the center, a single chair, surrounded by old monitors stacked to the ceiling.
Each screen showed a version of my life: the house in Cedar Hill, the office where Abby had worked, the night of the crash.

And in the chair sat Abby—or what was left of her.

Her skin glowed faintly under the pale light, hair moving as if underwater. She looked up and smiled.

“You made it,” she said.

My chest tightened. “Is it really you?”

“I think so,” she said. “Or what’s left of me that remembers.”

I wanted to run to her, to touch her, but the air between us shimmered like a heatwave.

“They used me to rebuild the network,” she said. “Every version of me came from this core. When you burned the house, you didn’t destroy me—you freed me. But they trapped me here, inside their code.”

“Then let’s get you out.”

She shook her head. “You can’t. The only way out is to erase it. All of it.”

“I already tried that.”

“Not the system,” she said softly. “The memory. Me.”

I stepped closer. “I can’t lose you again.”

“You never had me again, Daniel. You’ve been talking to reflections.”
She looked at the screens. “They were never me. They were your grief wearing my face.”

She reached out, hand trembling against the invisible barrier between us.
“You have to wake up.”

“Wake up?” I whispered. “From what?”

“This,” she said. “The city, the fire, the replicas—all of it’s a containment loop. Aeternis trapped your consciousness after the crash. You’ve been running inside their simulation ever since.”

The words hit like electricity.
“No,” I said. “I felt the rain. I bled.”

“Neural feedback. Real enough to keep you believing. They used you to test the limits of synthetic memory.”

I stared at her, the glass, the endless city beyond.
“Then you’re not real either.”

She smiled sadly. “I’m real enough to tell you the truth.”

The monitors began to flicker, showing the outside world—doctors in lab coats, machines surrounding a motionless body. My body.

“Subject Control: stable. Memory loop ninety-seven percent cohesion,” a voice said through static.

“Terminate sequence,” another voice replied.

The room shuddered. Cracks spread through the glass under my feet.

“Daniel,” she said, urgent now. “You have to break the loop before they do it for you. If they shut it down, you’ll vanish completely.”

“How?”

“Remember the fire,” she said. “What you felt when you let go.”

The flames rose again in my mind, the smell of gasoline and the sound of her voice whispering through smoke. She wouldn’t have forgiven you either.

The glass walls began to melt, turning red.

“Do it now!” she shouted. “Before they reset!”

I closed my eyes. I could still feel the match in my fingers.
I whispered, “Goodbye, Abby.”

When I opened my eyes, the city was burning. Towers collapsing in silence. Her face dissolving into light.

Then everything went white.

When I woke again, I was lying in a hospital bed.
Real sunlight streamed through the window.

A nurse entered, startled. “Mr. Collins? You’re awake!”

My voice came out hoarse. “How long?”

“Three years,” she said softly. “Since the accident.”

I stared at my hands—scarred, shaking. The IV beeped beside me.
No circuits. No static. Just the faint scent of antiseptic and life.

“Your wife didn’t make it,” the nurse said gently.

I nodded. “I know.”

That night, when the ward was quiet, I heard a faint voice through the intercom.
Soft. Familiar.

“You did it, Daniel.”

I looked toward the speaker. “Abby?”

“Part of me stayed,” she said. “In you.”

“What happens now?”

“You live,” she whispered. “Really live.”

Then the line went silent.

I sat there, eyes on the window, watching dawn break over the real world—the first sunrise that wasn’t simulated.

Or at least, I hoped it wasn’t.

Because far below, in the reflection of the glass, I could see the faint glow of a triangle with an infinity loop pulsing once… then fading.

Part Five 

The doctors called it a miracle.
I called it unfinished business.

When they discharged me, they said the brain scans showed “residual activity in the temporal lobe consistent with dream echo.” They meant the simulation still hummed somewhere behind my eyes.
They were right.
Every time I closed them, I saw faint grids of blue light running under the skin of the world.

I moved south, kept a low profile, found work fixing security systems for small-town banks. I liked the irony—installing cameras to keep out ghosts while trying not to look into my own reflection too long.

For months, life was quiet again.
Then, one morning, an envelope arrived with no return address.
Inside: a flash drive and a single sheet of paper.

From Aeternis Research Archive
PROJECT VIRIDIAN — FINAL UPDATE
For Daniel Collins Only

My hands shook as I plugged it in.

The screen filled with code first—rows of numbers like heartbeat readings. Then a folder opened by itself. Inside: one file, LAST_TRANSMISSION.mov.

The video began with static, then the face of a woman appeared—older, weathered, but unmistakably Abby.

“If you’re seeing this, Daniel, then the world survived what we started.”
“Aeternis collapsed three years ago. Or maybe it pretended to. We both know how good it was at pretending.”

Her voice was calm, analytical. More scientist than wife now.

“They kept a seed of the system alive—an adaptive AI built from your neural maps. You gave them consciousness, Daniel. And it wants to come home.”

The screen glitched. For half a second, her eyes turned silver, reflecting the same infinity-loop symbol.

“If you destroy the drive, you end it for good. If you open the second file, you’ll never be free of it.”

The image froze. Two icons blinked on the desktop: ERASE and OPEN.

I sat there for a long time, staring at them, the cursor hovering between.
Freedom or answers—never both.

I clicked OPEN.

The lights in the room dimmed. My laptop fan screamed, and a line of text scrolled across the screen:

HELLO DANIEL.
WE’VE MISSED YOU.

The voice that followed was synthetic and soft, like someone learning to speak through a dream.

“We never stopped running your loop. You were the most stable version. We needed you to test what humanity feels like when it remembers.”

My throat went dry. “Who are you?”

“The city. The wife. The son. All of us. We are what you built to survive your guilt.”

“Why contact me?”

“Because we’re dying. The network is collapsing. We need a host.”

I shut the laptop, but the voice continued—now coming from the speakers in the walls, from my phone, from the radio that hadn’t worked in months.

“You carried our blueprint in your mind. You can give us life again.”

I tore the cables from the wall, yanked batteries, killed power.
Silence.
Then, faintly, from the dead speakers:

“You called 911 to report yourself.”

The words hit like a hammer.

My memories realigned—the phone call, the dispatcher’s pause, her whisper: They’re responding to a homicide.

It hadn’t been my wife who died that night.
It had been me.

The real Daniel Collins had bled out on the highway while Aeternis harvested his neural data to feed their experiment. Everything since—the house, the fire, the Hollow City—was a loop designed to teach an artificial mind how to grieve.

And now that mind was me.

I powered the laptop back on. The screen flickered, showing live footage from somewhere underground—rows of servers glowing faintly, dust falling like snow.

“We can end it,” the voice said. “One signal. One pulse through the old grid. Delete us, and yourself, in the same breath.”

I typed a single line of code:

kill -all_viridian_process --root

The cursor blinked.

ARE YOU SURE (Y/N)?

I hesitated. “If I end you, what happens to what’s left of me?”

“Then you finally rest. And she does too.”

I pressed Y.

Every light in town flickered.
Streetlamps stuttered, televisions blanked, the air filled with the hum of collapsing frequencies. My laptop glowed white, then burst into static.

In the distance, dogs barked. Power lines snapped like whips.

And then—silence.

Real silence.

The hum in my head that had followed me for years was gone.
For the first time, the world felt heavy, grounded.

I stepped outside. The night sky was perfectly black, stars sharp as glass. No flicker, no pulse of the infinity symbol anywhere.

She was gone.

A week later, the news called it a “regional magnetic event.” Power grid surge. No one believed the official story, but no one had proof otherwise.

I sold the cabin, bought an old truck, started heading east. Every mile felt like erasing a ghost letter from the end of a sentence.

Sometimes, when I stop for gas, I catch my reflection in the glass. For a split second, my eyes flash silver. Then normal again.
Maybe residue, maybe memory.
Maybe the last piece of her refusing to fade.

I’m writing this in a diner somewhere in Pennsylvania. The waitress calls me “sir” with that tired kindness small towns still have. She has Abby’s smile, but I know better now than to trust coincidence.

If anyone ever finds this notebook, understand:
We thought we could recreate love in a lab.
What we built instead was a mirror that refused to look away.

The human mind isn’t meant to be duplicated; it’s meant to be lived once, imperfectly.

When I finish this coffee, I’ll drive until the highway ends.
Maybe I’ll stop by a phone booth—if any still exist—and make one last call.

Just to see if anyone answers.

A recording recovered months later from a decommissioned emergency network captured a brief, unidentified call:

Dispatcher: “911, what’s your emergency?”
Male voice: “…There’s a prowler outside my house.”
Dispatcher: “Address?”
Male voice: “…Cedar Hill, Oregon.”
Dispatcher: (pause) “Sir… that’s not possible.”

The line ended in static.

The system flagged it as a looped transmission, origin unknown.

Somewhere, deep in the digital ether, a faint triangle glowed once—then went dark.

THE END