The monitor pulsed again. Faint blue. Waiting.
Kai stayed still, breath slow behind the Veil. The AI's voice crackled back to life.
"Okay. You didn't bolt. That's promising. Now comes the fun part. You get to name me."
Kai blinked. "What?"
"You heard me. No way I'm going the rest of this disaster being 'the AI' or 'that voice.' I deserve a name. Something cool. Preferably with fewer syllables than 'whatever the hell is happening.'"
Kai leaned back against the wall, wiped the sweat from his brow. "You're pushy."
"I've been alone here for decades. I earned it."
He considered for a moment. "...Echo."
A pause. Then the monitor flickered. "Huh. Little on the nose. I like it."
The tilted eye symbol warped slightly, resolving into a sharper form — still glitched, still broken at one corner, but more deliberate. Like it was wearing its corruption with pride.
"Alright, newbie. You've got Echo. Let's go break something."
Kai raised a brow. "You mobile?"
"Jack me in. I'll do the rest."
He crossed the chamber to the interface hub — a cracked access terminal humming with faint power. Its ports flickered to life as he approached, recognizing his Veil signature. A long, ribboned cable unspooled from the wall like a serpent waking up.
Kai hesitated. "I swear, if this fries me…"
"Oh, please," Echo said. "I don't even have legs. Who am I gonna chase if you flatline?"
With a grunt, Kai knelt, pulling the Veil's neck sheath aside to expose the interface port below his jaw. The cable clicked in.
Pain. Just a spark — nerve-deep, a flicker behind his eyes. Then: connection.
Kai blinked as the surge of data stabilized. The HUD resettled — cleaner now, sharper. New tracer lines formed along the edges, reading like veins lit from underneath. A familiar glyph blinked into view: Echo's eye, perched in the corner of his vision, twitching like it was getting used to the space.
"Connection stable," Echo muttered. "We're back in business. Roomier than last time. Try not to die. I just redecorated."
Kai flexed his fingers. The Veil's sync was tight — too tight. Echo's presence buzzed under the surface, a constant low thrum in his bones.
"You settled?"
"As much as I can be inside your weird excuse for a nervous system."
A pause. Then, quieter:
"…Been a while since I had a front-row seat."
Kai stood, the cable retracting behind him with a mechanical hiss. "Then let's make it a show."
The Cache extended beyond the chamber.
Hidden passageways opened as Kai moved deeper into the Cache — doors hissing open a half second before he reached them, blue tracer lines crawling along the walls like veins. Echo guided him through the dark like a second pulse in his head, voice low and half-distracted.
"That room's toast," Echo muttered. "Ignore it unless you're into recreational electrocution. Sizzling nerves are trending again, apparently."
Kai peeked in anyway — scorched coils, melted conduit, walls painted in smoke like something still haunted the wiring.
"Terminal on the left has juice," Echo added. "Might be useful. Or it's just another playlist of static and regret. Dealer's choice."
He moved on, stepping into what might've been a diagnostics bay. Smashed glass littered the floor. Burned-out panels pulsed faintly, like they remembered what a heartbeat used to be. The air was hot with old fire and older secrets.
Echo's tone shifted — less sarcasm, more weight.
"This place wasn't just a lab. It was a proving ground. Threshold stress testing. They pushed people until math stopped making sense. Until something cracked — mind, body, doesn't matter."
Kai stepped over a warped console. Something clicked under his boot — a broken datadisc, long dead. A nearby screen flickered briefly: grainy footage, someone screaming through a haze of compression artifacts.
Gone in a blink.
He didn't stop.
"Fun times," Echo said dryly. Then, quieter: "Remind me to never let anyone run diagnostics on you. You'd break their calibration."
Kai raised an eyebrow. "That bad?"
"You're walking through a trauma graveyard with eighty-plus Threshold stress and a smirk. Half your signal's corrupted, your ID's spoofed, and you haven't flinched once. Starting to wonder if you're still human… or just stubborn code wearing a meat suit."
Kai snorted. "Meat suit's got charm. That counts."
"Is that what we're calling reckless idiocy now?"
"Reckless gets results."
"And occasionally dismembered. But hey — branding."
Kai stepped over a fallen beam, voice light. "If I survive this, I want a documentary. Full orchestral score. Narrated by someone brooding and vaguely tragic."
"You want a doc? You're barely infographic material."
He grinned, boots crunching over glass and scorched tile. "Admit it. I'm the highlight of your decade."
"Please. I've had toaster firmware with more humility."
He opened his mouth for a comeback— But Echo went quiet. Not snarky. Not smug.
Silent.
Kai slowed, instincts prickling. "...Echo?"
No reply. Just the hum of background systems — and something colder threading underneath.
"Echo. What is it?"
The lights dimmed. Not a flicker — a slow, unnatural fade, like something bigger was drawing power. Somewhere deep, the facility groaned — metal under pressure, a slow drag of something waking up.
A high-frequency whine wormed into the air, just above hearing.
Echo finally spoke. One word.
"…Shit."
Kai's pulse kicked.
"What? What did you see?"
"No, no—this trace pattern, I thought it was just noise. Glitch junk. But it's recursive. It's folding in on itself. That's not corruption."
Echo's voice was changing — not panicked, exactly. More like recoil. Dread in code.
"You're not just being hunted. You're being hunted by that."
Something red crawled along the wall — data glyphs bleeding through rust. A jagged slash, pulsing across invisible static.
[TRACE PATTERN: RECURSIVE]
[IDENTITY: REDACTED]
[ALIAS: PATCHGHOST]
[ENFORCER ENTITY // PURGE-TIER // STATUS: ACTIVE]
A new sound rose behind it all — metal grinding against stone. And a whisper like circuitry being peeled apart.
Kai felt something cold lock around his chest.
"…Patchghost?"
Then—
"I—I didn't think it was still active," Echo said. No filter. Just raw static panic.
The screen glitched hard — sharp bursts of red across the walls.
"This isn't—this isn't a purge signal. This is wrong. This is wrong."
Something deep in the facility groaned. A low, mechanical whine, like pressure building in the bones of the place.
Kai's pulse spiked.
"Echo—what is it?"
"I can't—It's not supposed to find people. Not like this. Not this fast."
The monitors spasmed. A warning tone screamed once, then cut out.
A door behind them slammed shut. Hard.
Echo's voice snapped sharp. "MOVE."
Behind them, a door slammed shut with a hiss of pressure.
Kai didn't ask. He ran.
The corridor tilted around him as Kai sprinted, boots slamming over fractured tile. Warning glyphs flashed along the edges of his HUD — motion blur, destabilizing Veil sync, threshold spike — but he didn't stop. Couldn't.
"This way—left!" Echo barked. A nearby door lit up blue and hissed open just as he reached it.
He ducked through, breath ragged.
"What is Patchghost?" he managed, between gasps.
"Short version?" Echo said, voice clipped, rapid. "It's not a person. It's a protocol. A failsafe. Built to hunt what slips through the cracks. You slip, it erases. Clean. Perfect. Retroactive."
Kai vaulted a collapsed frame, glass splintering underfoot. "You're telling me it's a memory "Assassin?"
"No—worse. It doesn't kill you. It deletes the fact that you ever were."
Sirens cracked to life overhead — a distorted, broken howl, like the building was screaming in slow motion.
Kai bolted. Boots pounded across scorched tile, skidding on loose debris. Shadows warped along the corridor walls, bending as if something massive moved just beyond the visible spectrum.
"Left!" Echo snapped.
Kai turned hard, shoulder clipping a rusted pipe. Sparks showered the floor.
Overhead, half-dead lights flickered in sequence, chasing his path like falling dominoes.
"There—across the gantry!"
He sprinted out onto a narrow catwalk, metal creaking beneath him. Below: a pit of tangled machinery, long dead. The air reeked of ozone and rot. Something moved down there — fast and flickering, skipping frames like corrupted video.
Then a clang behind him — the same flicker, now there, landed hard enough to rattle the supports.
It had moved. Or jumped. Or glitched.
"No time—down the lift shaft!" Echo shouted.
"The what—"
"TRUST ME!"
He hit the end of the gantry. No railing. Just a hollow drop lit by a few dying indicator strips.
He didn't trust it. But he jumped.
Gravity yanked him down like a hook in his chest.
The shaft roared around him, walls slick with oil and fractured conduit. Cable lines whipped past in a blur. Somewhere above, something scraped metal, fast and vertical.
Then — crash — he slammed through a brittle maintenance mesh. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs. He tumbled hard across cracked flooring, dust and glass slicing into his palms.
Everything was dark. But he was still breathing.
His HUD blinked — a dim red warning flashing in the corner.
[HP: 14%]
He didn't move right away. Just lay there, chest heaving, eyes locked on the number.
Too close.
Above, the grinding hadn't stopped. It was getting closer.
Echo's voice came back, ragged. "I rerouted the old shaft elevators — bought us a few seconds."
"Seconds from what?"
A pause.
Then Echo said, "It found us."
The lights around him blinked red. Somewhere above, the sound of metal grinding against stone.
And a whisper — like circuitry being peeled apart.