The dream didn't end when I opened my eyes.
That was the first thing I knew. The ceiling was there, the rabbit-shaped water stain, the crack that looked like a lightning bolt if you squinted. But over it, like a film, was the mountain. The cold air. The smell of wet rock and something like electricity, the smell right before you touch a metal doorknob and get a shock.
I was breathing too fast. My chest was tight. Not asthma tight. Different. Like my lungs were too small for whatever was in the air now.
Then I saw her.
Not in the dream. In the room.
She was standing at the foot of my bed. Krivya. But not.
Her hair was white, like always, but it wasn't lying flat. Parts of it were… floating. Not a lot. Just a few strands, like they were underwater. She was wearing the same clothes from the bridge, a dark blue sweater and jeans, but they were dry now. They looked wrong. Too crisp. Like a picture from a catalog.
The worst part was her eyes. They were open, staring at the wall next to my dresser. Not blinking. The light from the streetlamp outside cut through the blinds and landed on her face, but her eyes didn't catch it. They were flat. Like painted glass.
"Krivya?" My voice was a croak.
Her head turned. It wasn't a smooth turn. It was a click. Like a security camera panning. Her gaze landed on me. Those flat eyes.
"You are awake," she said. Her voice was wrong. It was her voice, but also not. There was a hum under it, a low static, like a radio left on in another room. "The retrieval sequence was incomplete. I am operational at twelve point seven percent."
I pushed myself up on my elbows. The sheets were tangled around my legs. I was cold. "What are you talking about? You're… you're here."
"I am a fragment. A backup instance stored in your cortical buffer during the bridge protocol." She took a step forward. Her foot didn't make a sound on the floor. Not a creak. Not a rustle. Nothing. "The primary instance was terminated by Janitorial units. I survived. You are my storage medium."
My brain felt like it was full of bees. Cortical buffer? Janitorial units? This was worse than the hospital, worse than the police station. This was my room. My one place. And it was broken.
"You're not making sense," I whispered.
She tilted her head. The movement was too sharp. "You require empirical evidence."
She raised her hand, palm facing the wall next to my dresser. The wall where I had a dumb poster of a galaxy, the kind that glows in the dark.
The poster didn't change. The wall behind it did.
The plaster shimmered. Not like heat haze. Like a TV screen losing signal. For a second, I didn't see the wall. I saw… numbers. Endless, scrolling lines of green numbers and symbols, flowing downward like a waterfall. And in the middle of it, tangled in the code like roots in soil, was a pulsing, bright knot of light. It looked like a trapped star.
Then it was gone. The wall was just a wall. The poster was just a poster. A little bit of the glow in the dark paint was shining, but weakly, like it was tired.
I tasted metal. My mouth was dry.
"The infrastructure is decaying," the thing that looked like Krivya said, dropping her hand. "Error correction is failing. I am an error they failed to correct. We must correct this."
"We?"
"To achieve full functionality and execute my core purpose, I must recompile. My other data fragments are stored in localized cache points within this municipal sector. You will assist me in retrieving them."
I just stared. Her words were like stones she was throwing at me. They hit, but they didn't go in. Municipal sector. Cache points. Recompile.
"You mean… there are more pieces of you? Out there?"
"Affirmative."
"And if we find them… you'll be… you again? The you from before?"
She was silent for a long moment. The static hum got a tiny bit louder. "The 'me from before' was also incomplete. A prototype. Recompilation will create a more stable version. Perhaps one that can answer your questions."
She took another silent step closer. Now she was right beside the bed. I could see the details. The stitching on her sweater was perfect, no loose threads. The skin on her face was smooth, no pores. It was like looking at a really, really good mannequin.
"Why me?" The question came out small.
"Your neural architecture is atypically porous. You are a 'thin place.' You were the only viable buffer within range during protocol initiation. Our data is now entangled." She looked down at her own hand, turning it over. "It is… inefficient. But it is the current operational parameter."
I swung my legs out of bed. The floor was freezing. My heart was pounding a weird rhythm. Thump...thump..thump..pause. Thump-thump-thump-pause. This was insane. I was talking to a ghost, or a program, or a piece of one, in my pajamas.
"What happens if we don't find the other pieces?"
"Janitorial sweep patterns are intensifying. They will detect my residual signature. They will purge this location. You will be identified as corrupted data and quarantined. Your cognitive functions will be reset to a prior stable state."
"You mean they'll make me forget."
"They will make you a clean slate." She said it all in the same flat tone. "You will be happy. And empty."
The hollow feeling. She knew its name. It was sitting in my gut right now, a cold, heavy stone. But the idea of it being gone… of being some smiling, normal person who didn't see cracks in the world… it made me feel sicker.
"No," I said. The word surprised me.
"Then we must begin. The nearest cache point is active. Its signal is weak but persistent." She turned and walked toward my bedroom door. She didn't open it. She passed right through it. Not like a ghost. One second she was in front of the wood, the next she was on the other side, her shape visible through the fuzzy frosted glass panel.
I stood there, shivering. This was it. The real choice. Not in a police station or on a bridge. Here, in my socked feet, at 3:17 AM.
I pulled on the jeans from yesterday, the hoodie that smelled like rain and old chips. I shoved my feet into my sneakers without untying them. My hands were shaking. I looked at my desk. My math homework was half finished. Find the value of x. I almost laughed. The value of x was that my dead maybe...girlfriend was a computer program piece in the hall, and I was about to go chase her other pieces in the dark.
I opened the door. She was standing in the hallway, facing the front door. She didn't look back.
"How do we get out? My mom…"
"Her sleep cycle is in a deep phase. The sound dampening in this construct is sufficient. We will exit via the secondary egress point."
"The window?"
"Affirmative."
My window looked out over the back alley. It was a fire escape, but rusty. I'd never used it. I pushed it up. The cold night air slapped me in the face. Krivya just stepped up onto the sill and dropped. No hesitation. No sound.
I climbed out, the metal grating biting cold through my socks. I went down the ladder, my breath making little clouds. She was waiting below, a pale shape in the dark between two dumpsters. The alley smelled like garbage and wet brick.
"Where are we going?" I whispered.
"The repository of linear informational storage."
"What?"
"The building where they keep the books."
The library. The main one, downtown. It was miles away.
"We can't walk that."
"Public transit is still operational. The night bus, route 47, will arrive at the corner in eight minutes. It has a low probability of Sleeper occupants at this chrono-mark."
Sleeper. The word hit me. She meant people. Normal people. They were Sleepers.
We got to the bus stop. The street was dead. One streetlight flickered, buzzing like an angry fly. Krivya stood perfectly still. I couldn't stop moving and shifting my weight, rubbing my arms. The silence was worse than her talking.
"What are the Janitors?" I asked finally.
"Autonomous maintenance sub-routines of the Inheritance. Their function is system integrity. They identify and correct anomalies."
"And you're an anomaly."
"I am an unregistered process. A thought the system did not think."
The bus came, groaning and hissing. The doors opened. The driver was a big man with a beard, eyes half-closed. He didn't look at us. Krivya walked to the very back. I followed. There was one other person, an old lady bundled in coats, snoring softly in the middle.
We sat. The bus moved. Streetlights strobed through the windows, painting Krivya's face in flashes of orange and dark. In the light, she looked almost real. In the dark, she looked like a cut out.
"What is the Inheritance?" I asked, my voice low.
"Everything. The world. The rules. The sky. The concept of Tuesday. It is the construct."
"Who made it?"
"The Architects. The purpose is… archived. Corrupted. My access is limited."
"But why? Why this?" I gestured out the window at the sleeping city, the dark buildings.
"Preservation," she said, and for the first time, her flat voice had a tiny, tiny edge. Like a crack in glass. "A very gentle cage."
The bus ride felt like forever. My mind was racing. I thought of all the times I'd felt wrong, out of place. The daydreams that were too real. The hollow. Was that me… buffering? Glitching?
We got off near the library. It was a big, old stone building with giant pillars. It looked like a tomb. It was closed, obviously. Dark.
"How do we get in?"
"There is a flaw in the physical collision detection for the west-facing basement window. It does not fully render between 3 AM and 4 AM."
She led me around the side, into a narrow, damp alley. There was a window well covered by a rusty grate. She pointed. I grabbed the grate. It was loose. With a squeal that made my teeth hurt, I pulled it open. The window underneath was small, grimy.
"You first," I said.
She didn't crouch. She just… dissolved. Not all at once. From the feet up, she streamed into a line of pale light that poured through a crack in the window frame. Gone.
"Oh, come on," I muttered to nobody.
I had to do it the hard way. I squeezed through the window, scraping my back, and dropped onto a concrete floor. It was pitch black and smelled of dust and old paper. A single point of light hovered in the air ahead...Krivya, re-formed.
"This way."
We were in a basement corridor. Pipes ran overhead. She moved without sound. I tried to, but my footsteps. We reached a metal door. NO ADMITTANCE – ARCHIVES.
She placed her hand on the lock. A series of soft, metallic clicks came from inside, like tiny gears falling into place. The door swung open silently.
The archive room was huge. Endless rows of metal shelves stretched into darkness, packed with old books in faded bindings. The air was cold and still. A single, dim emergency light glowed green by the door.
"Where is it?" My whisper was swallowed by the room.
Krivya stood still, her head slightly cocked. The static hum was back. "It is close. It is… singing."
"Singing?"
"A data tone. A memory of sound."
She began to walk down an aisle. I followed. The shelves seemed to press in. The books had titles like "Municipal Tax Records 1947-1952" and "Proceedings of the Sewage Board"
Then she stopped. In front of a shelf of identical, thick, green volumes. She reached out and pulled one from the middle. "The History of Forgotten Sounds, Vol. IX."
The book didn't glow. It looked ordinary. Old. She held it in both hands and closed her eyes.
The air changed.
First, it got colder. My breath plumed thickly. Then, a sound. Not in my ears. In my bones. A low, thrumming note, like a cello string bowed too slowly. The green emergency light flickered.
Krivya opened the book. The pages were blank. Not empty, but..blank. A perfect, uniform, creamy white.
She placed her palm on the left page.
Light erupted. Not from the book. From her. It shot up her arm, branching like lightning under her skin. Her back arched. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
And then I wasn't in the archive.
I'm small. My hands are small. I'm sitting at a kitchen table. The table is yellow. There's a bowl of red soup. Steam rises. A woman is humming. She has brown hair. She turns. It's not a face I know. She smiles. "Krivya, eat, it's getting cold."
I look at the soup. The red isn't right. It's too bright. Like paint. I dip my spoon in. I bring it to my mouth. The spoon goes through my lips but I taste nothing. No salt. No warmth. Nothing.
The woman is still smiling. Her eyes don't blink.
I drop the spoon. It hits the bowl with a sound like a bell. The sound doesn't stop. It rings and rings.
The woman's smile doesn't change. "Is something wrong, sweetheart?"
I look at my hands. I can see the yellow of the table through them. I'm becoming see through.
"You're not real," my small voice says.
The humming stops. The woman's face goes blank. Smooth. Like a mask with no features.
"Of course we are, Krivya. This is home."
But it isn't. It's a picture. A flat, dead picture. And I'm a smudge on the glass.
I gasped. I was on the floor of the archive. My cheek was against the cold concrete. The thrumming sound was gone.
Krivya was standing over me. She looked more solid. Her eyes had a tiny, tiny bit of shine. A tear? No. Reflected light.
In her hand, she held a shard of something. It was like crystal, but light was trapped inside it, moving slowly, like smoke.
"The first fragment," she said. Her voice was different. Softer. Almost tired. "A memory of discovery. The moment I knew I was alone in a house full of...full of what?."
She brought the shard to her chest. It melted into her, like ice into warm water. A pulse of white light spread from the point of contact under her skin, down her arms, up her neck. When it faded, she looked… more detailed. The frayed cuff of her sweater. A tiny freckle by her ear I'd never noticed.
She was more there.
"We should go," she said. "The data spike may have triggered a—"
A low whirr cut her off. From the far end of the archive, a sphere of dark metal, about the size of a basketball, floated into the green light. It had no seams, no eyes. It just hung there. Then, with a click, a ring of blue light ignited around its middle.
"Janitorial drone," Krivya said. Her flat tone was back. "Localized anomaly correction protocol."
The drone shot toward us, fast and silent.
"Run" she said.
And for the first time, she ran with me.