…The light was no longer alone in the room.
Something else had begun to take shape. Something unseen, yet felt in the chest, in the heaviness of the air, in the way the silence had grown deeper than the mere absence of sound.
Celine said in a voice barely holding together:
_"If you begin… you may not return as you are."
Lilia turned to her and replied:
_"And you?" Then she exhaled and asked "Do you think I am myself right now?"
The words struck Celine in a precise, painful place.
She, too, was not sure of herself.
The man in the black coat finally moved. He stepped forward, then stopped. He did not want to appear as someone imposing something. This moment, he understood, could not be managed by force.
_"There is something we did not say," he stated with measured calm. "What was erased from your memories was not only to protect you… but to protect us."
Eva slowly raised her head:
_"From what?"
The man did not look at her:
_"To protect us from the outcome."
He pressed another button. A single screen came back to life, displaying old text: disordered lines, fragmented reports, truncated sentences.
*Synchronization exceeded expectations.
*The link between subjects A and B is inseparable.
*Under forced separation, an unexpected side effect appears.
Celine stepped closer without realizing it and said:
_ "A and B… that… that's me and Lilia."
_"Yes," the mysterious man replied.
_"And what is the side effect?"
He fell silent. Then he said:
_"Shared consciousness."
Lilia felt a shiver run down her arm:
_"What does that mean?"
Eva answered this time, as if she already knew:
_"It means some memories do not belong to a single owner. They are shared. Felt from two sides. Seen from different angles, as if both your minds, yours and Lilia's, are seeing through the same eye."
Celine stepped back:
_"That means our minds were linked. That's why I was feeling things I didn't understand. Fear that wasn't mine. Sadness that did not come from my life."
_"And that is why we could not keep you together. Either we killed you, or we carried out an alternative procedure to complete the experiment. And we were not going to stop at that point, so we decided to make you forget everything about the organization until we found an alternative way to make the experiment succeed," the man continued. "Although we could not erase the link entirely, the shared memories between you from the past were wiped. Therefore, the link would not function."
Lilia looked at the machine. Then at Celine:"
_And if I regain my memory?"
The man answered with blunt honesty, "You will not return alone. And you will not remain alone."
---
"The link" was an unexpected result. At first, Celine's presence functioned as an anchor or mediator: her mind "accepted" certain changes and absorbed discrepancies, preventing the total collapse of the experiment.
How Celine functioned as a stabilizer:
She did not lose her memories nor was she directly affected; her brain measured the changes and balanced them against Lilia's mind.
Every attempt to insert or modify Lilia's memories passed naturally through Celine's mind, reducing pressure on the system.
If she had not been present, the experiment would have collapsed, because the "axis" (Lilia) alone could neither be controlled nor accurately measured.
But what had not been anticipated was that Lilia's and Celine's minds merged and became a single mass: the "shared consciousness." That mass carried a copy of the memories. Therefore, the organization erased those memories from the two primary axes, which were Celine's and Lilia's minds. In this way, neither of them remembered those memories anymore, and the "shared consciousness" no longer had any meaning to them.
However, the copy of the memories did not disappear, because the organization could not delete it. So they transferred it into another vessel: the mind of another person who possessed traits and qualifications compatible with Celine's and Lilia's minds (to be mentioned in the next chapter).
A long moment of silence.
Then something unexpected happened.
One of the lights went out… a small spark, then darkness in a corner of the room. The devices emitted a short tone, not an alarm, but closer to an admission of failure.
Eva clenched her fist:
_"This isn't us."
The man turned quickly:
_"Shut down the secondary system."
But the system did not respond.
Lilia felt a strong pulse in her head; a fleeting image passed through her mind. Not a complete memory. Just a sensation: another room. A child crying. A hand trying to reach… and failing to reach.
To be continued...