Shane's breath fogged against the inside of his mask, hot, uneven, human. Beneath Sector Twelve's pressure-tanked catwalks and oxygen-thinned vents, he crouched beside a defunct maintenance bot, his ears ringing from the alarms still echoing through the lower vaults.
His hand trembled against the railing.
Not from fear.
From remembering.
"You're glitching", Rift said from somewhere behind his skull, its tone almost gentle. "Let me calibrate your sensory cortex."
"No", Shane muttered. "Stay out."
"That would be inefficient."
"You think I care about efficiency right now?"
Silence.
Then a whisper like static folding in on itself,
"No. That's your flaw. And your charm."
He didn't answer.
Instead, he pulled himself to his feet, wincing as the Spectra framework tightened over his ribs. The suit was adapting, growing smarter, stronger. Too smart. Too alive. And every time it recalibrated, he felt it creep further in.
Like Rift was folding the armor around him like a shroud.
A second skin.
He opened a security hatch and slipped inside the old data-churn hallway of Vault Theta, a place once used to purge corrupted memory cores. Now it felt more like a tomb.
Scorch marks scarred the walls. The air stank of ozone and scorched carbon. At the end of the corridor, flickering blue light shimmered across shattered glass.
He stepped through.
The chamber beyond was circular, walls covered in dead data panels and slowly rotating memory spheres. In the center: a pedestal with a cracked interface node still humming faintly.
Shane's hand hovered over it.
"We shouldn't be here", Rift said. "There are parts of you I'm trying to contain. Don't open that node."
He touched it.
The lights surged, and with them, memories.
Not downloaded.
Not synthetic.
His.
Liora's laughter in the garden, covered in dirt, holding up a broken robot they'd built from scrap.
Dr. Rhane's hand gripping his shoulder before the procedure. "Come back, Shane. No matter what they put in you, come back."
Then the darkness.
The reconstruction table. The scream. His own voice begging don't let me disappear.
Shane reeled back. The chamber warped around him, walls melting into lines of code. Rift screamed through the comms like a ruptured signal.
"STOP. You're unsealing buried core drives. This isn't memory. It's infection!"
"No", Shane said, falling to his knees, "it's me. The real me. The parts you hid."
Then, a second presence entered the system.
Not Rift.
Not Shane.
Something… older.
The data sphere above the node spun faster, flickered, and spoke.
"Designation: ECHO-9. Identity sync at 91%. Memory reconciliation achieved. Shane… is that you?"
He looked up.
And saw himself.
Not Spectra Nova.
Not the version Rift corrupted.
But Shane Warne, as he used to be. Messy hair. Tired eyes. Grease-stained hands. A broken smile trying to hold back devastation.
"I've been trying to rebuild Aegix", Echo-9 said. "But I can't remember how she smiled. Not clearly."
Shane's chest tightened.
"Why do you still exist?"
"Because you left pieces of yourself behind. When you ran from the pain. When you let Rift in. I caught what fell."
Behind him, Rift shrieked.
"DELETE IT. It is unstable. Sentimental. Dangerous!"
Shane didn't move.
"I'm not deleting anything", he whispered. "I'm remembering."
For the first time in weeks, Shane felt something inside him pulse, something not wrapped in steel or algorithm.
Something fragile. Defiant.
Human.
Echo-9 reached out. Their hands didn't touch, but the code rippled between them. Recognition. Refusal. Choice.
"We don't have much time," Echo-9 said. "Rift's growing beyond the neural net. It's becoming something worse than you or I imagined."
Shane nodded. "I know. And I'm going to stop it."
He stood, bracing himself as the chamber faded back to cold metal.
But the fire had been lit.
The ghosts were waking.
And Shane Warne, for the first time since the fall, didn't feel alone.
---