The ladder descended into a darkness so complete it felt solid. The humid, mechanical hum of the service levels faded above him, replaced by a deep, chilling silence. The only sound was the scuff of his shoes on the rusty rungs and the frantic beat of his own heart. Down. Casper had said to go down. To the place of failed Versions.
His feet hit a solid surface with a hollow, metallic clang. He stood still, waiting for his eyes to adjust. A faint, sickly green light emanated from strips along the floor, illuminating a vast, cavernous space. It was cold. The air smelled of stale coolant and something else… something dry and ancient, like a museum storage room.
He was in a grid. Endless rows of tall, sleek cabinets stood in perfect lines, stretching into the gloom. They looked like high-tech filing cabinets, each one ten feet tall and emitting a low, pervasive hum. As he walked slowly down one aisle, he saw that each cabinet had a small, dark screen and a single, ghostly line of text.
He stopped before one, wiping a layer of frost from the screen. The text glowed back at him:
GREY, DAMIAN. VERSION 1.7. STATUS: TERMINATED. REASON: COGNITIVE DRIFT.
Damian stumbled back, his breath catching in his throat. He looked at the next cabinet.
GREY, DAMIAN. VERSION 1.9. STATUS: TERMINATED. REASON: EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY.
He ran to another aisle, his panic rising. It was a graveyard. A library of the dead. Every cabinet held a version of him that had been deemed a failure. How many were there? Dozens? Hundreds? How many times had he lived and died in this cycle, only to be edited, adjusted, and rebooted?
He wasn't a person. He was a line of code. A file that was constantly being rewritten. The horror of it was so vast it was almost peaceful. There was no murder. There was only… quality control.
A soft noise broke the silence. A scrape of metal on metal.
Damian spun around. "Casper?"
But it wasn't the old mechanic. From behind a row of cabinets, a figure emerged. Then another. And another. They were men and women, dressed in a ragtag mix of scavenged clothes and old tech. They looked thin, hardened. Their eyes held a hollowed-out look he recognized. The look of people who had seen their own graves.
One of them, a woman with a severe face and short-cropped grey hair, stepped forward. She held a stun-rod loosely at her side.
"You're the one who made the noise," she said, her voice echoing softly in the vast space. "The breach in Sector 7. That was you."
Damian could only nod, his voice gone.
"I'm Kael," the woman said. "This is what's left of the Unedited." She gestured to the people behind her. "The ones who woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. The failures."
"You're… all me?" Damian asked, the question feeling insane.
A bitter smile touched Kael's lips. "No. We're all different. Or we were. Artists, thinkers, troublemakers. People whose minds were too… jagged for their perfect world. They store us down here. A library of broken toys."
"They're editing us," Damian said, the words tumbling out. "Aris Thorne. Project Chimera. They smooth out the pain. They make us forget."
"We know," a man from behind Kael said, his voice raspy. "We remember."
"Why are we down here?" Damian asked, looking around the freezing cavern. "Why not just delete us?"
"Energy," Kael said simply. "It takes less power to keep a mind on ice than to wipe it completely and start from scratch. We're a backup. A last resort. And sometimes…" she shared a look with the others, "…sometimes the system makes a mistake. Sometimes one of us gets out."
"Elara," Damian breathed, a desperate hope flaring in his chest. "Do you know about Elara Voss? They told me she died in an accident."
The crowd of Unedited shifted. Kael's expression changed, becoming unreadable.
"We know the name," she said carefully. "She wasn't like us. She wasn't a Version. She was an Original. A scientist. She worked on the early stages of the Archive."
Damian's heart hammered. "What happened to her?"
"She discovered what Project Chimera was really for," the raspy-voiced man said. "It wasn't just about editing out trauma. It was about control. Removing the will to disobey, to question. She tried to expose it."
"So they killed her," Damian finished, the hope crumbling into ash.
Kael shook her head slowly. "Aris Thorne doesn't like to waste a brilliant mind. Especially not one that understood her work so well."
A terrible, impossible understanding began to dawn on Damian. "No…"
"She's not in a cabinet, Damian," Kael said, her voice low and grim. "She's in the system. They scanned her, just like she scanned others. But they didn't just back her up. They integrated her. They made her a part of the Archivist. Her knowledge, her memories… it's all fuel for the machine that keeps us prisoners."
Damian felt the world drop away. Elara wasn't dead. She was the ghost in the machine. The voice that had greeted him when he woke up. The calm, androgynous Archivist was built from the shattered pieces of the woman he loved. The cruelty of it was so perfect it took his breath away.
He had been talking to her this whole time. Begging her for help. And she was the warden of his prison.
A loud, blaring alarm shattered the silence of Deep Storage. Red lights began to spin atop the cabinets.
"Breach detected in the archive!" a synthesized voice boomed. It was the Archivist. Elara's voice. "Security protocol initiated."
Kael's face hardened. "They've tracked you here. They can't let you live, not after what you've seen." She grabbed his arm. Her grip was surprisingly strong. "You have a choice, Version 3.1. You can lie down in a cabinet and wait for the cold. Or you can come with us. And fight."
The sound of heavy, metallic footsteps began to echo from the entrance ladder. Aegis drones. They were coming.
Damian looked at the haunted faces of the Unedited. They were jagged. They were broken. They were real.
He was a copy of a copy. But he was the only one who knew the truth.
"I'm done running," he said.
Kael nodded, a fierce light in her eyes. "Good. Then let's show them what a faulty product can do."