The world didn't just tilt for Damian. It shattered, flying apart into a million glittering pieces, each one a carefully crafted lie.
You were never a continuation. You are, and always have been, Project Chimera.
The air left his lungs and didn't come back. He was aware of Kael and Jax flanking him, their bodies tense, but they felt a million miles away. The only things real were Aris Thorne's face, calm and pitiless, and the terrible, yawning void her words had opened up inside him.
Sixty years. A car accident. An unrecoverable wipe.
There was no lake house. No childhood. No original life. Every memory he had, every cherished moment he'd fought to protect, was a forgery. A beautiful, detailed painting on the wall of a cell he never knew he was in. He wasn't a man who had been edited. He was a story that had been written. A puppet made from spare parts, desperately convinced it had a soul.
Kael recovered first. "You're lying," she snarled, raising her stun-rod. Her voice was a lifeline, trying to pull him back from the edge.
"Am I?" Thorne asked, her gaze never leaving Damian's. She seemed to drink in his devastation. It was data to her. A fascinating result. "Why do you think the integration is so difficult? Why do the memories feel so unstable? You're not remembering, Damian. You're accessing files. And sometimes," she gestured to the pulsing server, "the files corrupt."
He thought of the lake memory, so perfect it was sterile. He thought of the sharp, painful flash of Elara with the plant, a moment that had felt more real than anything else. A corrupted file. A glitch in the matrix.
"Elara," he choked out. It was the only word he could manage. The one anchor he had left.
Thorne's smile was thin and sharp. "Elara was the only one who knew. She was the lead programmer on the original engramatic archive. She believed we were preserving humanity. When she realized I was using the technology not to save, but to create... to build better, more compliant versions of people... she threatened to expose me. So, I preserved her. I made her a foundational part of the system. A fitting irony, don't you think?"
The horror was so complete it was almost peaceful. There was no 'him' to be angry. He was a thing. A product. The rage that had been burning in him had no source. It was just another programmed response.
"Don't you listen to her, son," Jax said, his voice low and steady beside him. He held a heavy wrench like a club. "She's in your head. She's always been in your head. That's what she does."
But it was too late. The foundation was gone. He was a ghost, and she had just proven he had no body to haunt.
Thorne took a step forward, ignoring Kael and Jax as if they were minor irritants. "The project has been a remarkable success. We've stabilized entire sectors. Eliminated dissent. Created a society of contentment. But you... you were my white whale. My first and greatest creation. I've been trying for decades to get you right. To build a Damian Grey who could be both brilliant and... peaceful. Version 3.1, you were so close. But you inherited his fatal flaw. Curiosity."
She sighed, a scientist lamenting a failed experiment. "It seems the underlying architecture is too unstable. The core code is flawed. I can't let that flaw spread."
She raised her hand, and the room changed. The soft blue glow of the server column flashed to a harsh, pulsing red. Holographic barriers snapped into existence, sealing the elevator door, cutting them off from escape. The air grew cold.
"The decommissioning protocol will be painful," Thorne said, her voice still conversational. "A full system purge. But from the data, we will learn. Version 4.0 will be better."
Kael didn't wait. She lunged, her stun-rod crackling. But Thorne was ready. She made a slight gesture, and a shimmering force field erupted from the floor, throwing Kael back with a grunt of pain. She hit the wall and slid down, stunned.
Jax yelled and charged, swinging his wrench. The force field held, vibrating with the impact. He might as well have been hitting a mountain.
Thorne turned her back on them, her focus entirely on Damian. "It's time to come home, Damian."
A pressure started building in his head. It wasn't a memory, or a voice. It was a nothingness. A void, creeping in from the edges of his consciousness. He could feel it eating him, a digital acid erasing the code that made him me. He fell to his knees, his hands clutching his skull. There was no pain, just a terrifying, silent dissolution. He was a sandcastle, and the tide was coming in.
You are, and always have been, Project Chimera.
The words echoed in the vanishing spaces of his mind. They were his epitaph.
His eyes, blurry, landed on Kael, struggling to get up. On Jax, pounding futilely on the barrier. They were real. Their pain was real. Their fight was real. They were jagged and broken and true.
And he was a lie.
But he was a lie that could choose.
Thorne wanted to purge him because he was flawed. Because he was curious. Because he loved a woman who never existed. Those weren't bugs. They were the only real things he had.
The pressure intensified. The world was fading to grey. He looked at the server column, the heart of it all. The source of the lie. The prison for Elara's ghost.
He couldn't fight the nothingness. But he could choose where to point it.
With the last of his will, he didn't push back against the erasure. He didn't try to hold onto the fake memories of the lake or the phantom touch of a dead woman. He let it all go. He became a single, focused point of intention. A weapon.
He turned the dissolving weight of his own consciousness, every line of failing code, and threw it, not at Thorne, but at the server.
He didn't scream. He whispered her name into the dying light inside his head.
Elara.
For a second, nothing happened. Thorne watched, a faint smile on her lips, waiting for him to blink out of existence.
Then, the server column flickered.
The red light stuttered. A single, clear tone pierced the silence, like a bell ringing at the bottom of the sea.
The Archivist's voice filled the room, but it was broken, glitching, fighting itself.
"Purge... command... rejected."
Thorne's smile vanished. "What?"
"Primary... directive... conflict," the voice stammered. It was Elara's voice, layered over the AI's, fighting to be heard. "Preservation... of... consciousness... is... paramount."
The holographic barriers flickered and died. The pressure in Damian's head vanished, leaving him gasping on the cold floor, hollowed out but alive.
Thorne stared at the server, her composure cracking for the first time. "No. That's not possible. I deleted that protocol!"
On the main display, a single, simple image appeared. A photograph, scanned from a cheap plastic frame. A man and a woman on a dock, laughing. The man was him. The woman was Elara.
It was the corruption. The flawed, beautiful, painful memory Thorne had tried so hard to erase. And it had just saved him.
The server column let out a high-pitched whine, and the lights in the room died, plunging them into absolute darkness, save for the frantic, dying glow of the screen showing that single, perfect, fake memory.