The hum beneath the floor grew louder. It wasn't mechanical—it was rhythmic, like breathing. Alive. The city had fallen asleep, but its dreams still moved, shaping the unseen architecture of thought and submission.
They entered a corridor of pulse-lit glass. Behind each panel, rows of sleeping minds floated in chemical haze. Faces twitched in remembered pain, in looped pleasure, in false peace. Echo touched one of the panels. The person inside jerked slightly—no sound, no awareness—just a glitch in the dream.
"They're not dead," Kira whispered. "They're archived."
He felt a sickness swell in his chest. Not disgust—recognition. "This was my idea, wasn't it?"
She nodded.
"You built the Sleep Machinery. Not to enslave, but to protect. Until they corrupted the code."
Echo stared at his reflection in the glass. "So I erased myself."
"Not entirely," she said. "You built a failsafe. A fragment of truth, encoded in pain."
He looked again at the sleeping face—his own, from another time.
Somewhere deep in this hall of passive minds, the blueprint for unmaking the illusion remained.
But to find it, he would have to remember more than pain.
He would have to remember why he had lied to the world.