The alley stank of iron and frost. Not the clean, clinical chill of a lab— but the kind that clung to rusted metal and tired concrete. Wei leaned against the wall of the derelict supply depot, his coat damp with mist and sweat, his heartbeat slowly beginning to even out. The world was quiet here—no sirens, no boots, no Hive scanners. Just smog-thick air and the occasional cough from someone still asleep behind a dumpster.
His fingers twitched, not from adrenaline now, but from residual tremors in his nervous system
The trait was syncing
Echo's interface floated faintly in his vision again—clearer than before. A data stream hovered in the corner of his left eye like a vitals readout. Pulse, temperature, sync level, and a blinking trait indicator
He focused on it and felt the connection deepen—something subtle, like pulling a rubber band gently tighter in his mind
[Trait Stabilizing… 19% → 20%] [Estimated Adaptation Time: 00:07:32]
Wei let his head fall back against the wall
The pain inhibitor was weak, yes: but it worked. His limbs weren't locked in tremors. The cold no longer bit into his nerves. The guilt sat a little further back in his chest, replaced by the steady hum of data and his own controlled breathing
For a long time, he just sat there. Letting the quiet wrap around him. Thinking
Lina would have hated what he just did.
She was always the moral one between them. Not soft—never that—but grounded. Anchored. She believed in thresholds, in humane science, in principles you didn't bend just because it was inconvenient. And yet she had built Echo, or at least contributed to it. She must have known what it could do—or suspected.
So why hadn't she told him?
His jaw tightened. No. That wasn't fair. She had been trying to tell him. And someone had made sure she didn't.
Wei exhaled through his nose. That thought kept returning. Like gravity. Like hunger.
They didn't just kill her. They removed her. Like a corrupted line of code.
And now he was wearing the thing they were probably trying to bury with her.
[Trait Adaptation Complete]
The system pinged again, cool and clinical.
Wei pushed himself up to his feet and rolled his shoulders, stretching his fingers. The world still looked the same- filthy, blue-gray, rusted; but his body moved differently now. More like a machine than a man. There was no pain in his joints despite the cold, and when he flexed his hand, his grip felt steadier
It wasn't much, but it was a start
The building across the street was condemned by Hive authority last cycle. The sign still buzzed faintly, half-lit. A red spiral painted on the metal door told him what he needed to know.
Safehouse.
Hive knew most of them existed. Let them, even. Like controlled leaks in a dam, it made the rest easier to watch.
He knocked in rhythm. Two, three, one.
After a long moment, the door unlocked with a click. A narrow-eyed man with a datacap implant squinted at him from behind cracked goggles.
"Medical?" the man asked.
Wei nodded.
"Bleeding?"
"No."
"Synch shock?"
Wei hesitated. "...First trait," he said.
The man raised a brow. That got attention.
"Come in."
Inside, the place was warmer- faintly. It reeked of boiled soy protein and old copper wiring. Makeshift med beds were lined against one wall. One was already occupied, a young woman twitching in sleep. Wei could see a low-grade QSI node behind her left ear, blinking red.
A failed sync.
The man who let him in sat him down and handed him a cracked interface slate.
"Tagren," he said. "Street-level triage, mostly for refugees and unlinked. You don't look like either."
Wei didn't answer. Instead, he pulled up his sleeve and tapped the side of his neck. Echo's sync point pulsed once, bright and sharp.
Tagren blinked.
"That's not a Hive-issue model."
"No," Wei said. "Prototype. Echo series."
Tagren froze.
"Echo? As in the one that liquefied three test subjects and got blacklisted by internal regulation?" He narrowed his eyes. "That Echo?"
Wei didn't flinch. "I need detox monitoring. System's stabilizing a Tier-0.5 pain suppression trait. I want to verify compatibility data. Neural load, drift range, burnout curve. Can you do that?"
Tagren just stared at him for a moment, then exhaled. "You Hive bastards really don't do things halfway, do you?"
"I'm not Hive anymore," Wei said, his voice quiet.
Silence filled the room.
Tagren pointed to the nearest bed
"Strip down to the waist. Sit still. Don't lie to me."
Wei obeyed
The monitoring system wasn't Hive-level tech, but it was competent. Enough to run a neural heat map and measure tremor frequency during a trait sync
As Tagren worked, Wei took stock of what he'd learned in the last twelve hours
QSIs were never supposed to work like this. They were supplemental systems, not modular weapons. A properly licensed QSI decoded your neurological pattern, matched it to your genome, and activated a single trait- your body's natural enhancement potential.
In rare cases, the result was spectacular. Regeneration. Electrokinetics. Neural computation
In most cases, it was something small. Slightly faster reflexes. Sleep reduction. Increased memory retention
But you got one. Just one
The codebase wasn't designed to allow for more
And he had just taken one from someone else
Worse- Echo had consumed it. Repurposed it. Rewritten it to match his own pattern. Not copied. Not simulated
Stolen.
That broke every rule in the book
It wasn't even possible- or at least it wasn't supposed to be. If Echo could do this with a Tier-0.5 support trait, what would it do with a Tier-1? Or something stronger? Was he stuck with this one or would it be replaced by another?
Wei flexed his hand again. Still no tremor
"What's your neural echo index at?" Tagren asked without looking up
Wei blinked. "Six-point-two baseline."
Tagren paused. "That's high."
"I know."
"Did it spike post-integration?"
Wei nodded. "Six-point-eight. Stabilized within six minutes."
The medic let out a low whistle.
"You're either a freak or the system is lying."
Wei didn't answer
He'd always had a high neural load index. Lina used to joke it was because he never turned his brain off long enough for it to cool down. But now it felt like a curse turned asset. Something Echo could feed on
Or worse- something Echo could grow inside
By the time the scan was complete, the results were stable. No drift. No hemorrhage. No signs of rejection.
Tagren handed him a printed summary
"You're lucky," he said. "You shouldn't be alive with that interface active. Whatever Echo is, it's not just another QSI. It's something else."
Wei took the paper
"I know."
"You gonna tell me how you got it?"
"No."
"Of course not."
The silence hung between them.
Tagren shook his head. "You're not the first person who walked in here scared of their own system, but you're the first one who looks like he understands exactly what he's doing."
Wei stood
"Understanding and control aren't the same thing."
Tagren snorted. "They are for people like you."
Wei stepped back out into the morning light. The city was awake now. Neon flickered faintly in the haze, and skycars hummed between the towers like metal bees. Above it all, the Hive's central spire stabbed through the smog like a needle into the sky.
He looked at his hands
They no longer trembled
His mind was quiet. Sharpened.
And somewhere beneath the silence, Echo pulsed.
[Trait Sync: 22%] [Memory Integration: Partial] [Potential Trait Slots: 1/—]
He didn't know what the dash meant, but he knew this much:
This wasn't just a fight for answers anymore
This was the beginning of something bigger.
And someone at the top didn't want him alive to see it through
He turned away from the tower and walked into the waking city
-----
The city didn't sleep it just blinked more slowly when the sun came up
The farther Wei walked from the Hive's inner sectors the more visible the difference became. Corporate towers faded into jagged mid-rise blocks then into sprawling alleystreets of bolted metal and grimy synthglass billboards hummed with endless AI chatter targeting ads to his retinal signature. Not knowing Echo had already scrambled his ID signature on a subquantum level
His feet moved on muscle memory. The body knew how to act even when the mind hadn't caught up. He followed the tram line east until it curved beneath the shadow of an abandoned QSI diagnostics tower, an old testing site that had been shut down after a fire most people thought it was empty
Wei knew better.
He slipped between the fences and past a corroded servo-door left unlocked by someone who thought they'd covered their tracks better in the dark- surrounded by silence and carbon scorch-marks he pulled up Echo's menu
[System Integrity: Stable]
[Trait: PULSE-TYPE MODULATION: PAIN INHIBITION (LVL 1)]
[Adaptation Depth: 43%]
[Potential Trait Slots: 1/--]
That dash still bothered him. Most QSIs listed a clear cap- one slot. Wei had heard rumors of two, but he didn't believe in fairytales unless they were right in front of him. Echo's omission meant one of two things: either the system hadn't finished parsing his neural pathways, or it had no hardcoded limit
The first was risky. The second was terrifying.
Wei exhaled and leaned against a support beam. The interior of the testing tower was gutted, half-collapsed, open to the sky in places where the fire had torn through. Old monitors lay cracked across the floor. He recognized the model Lina used to calibrate signal latency with them
He touched the edge of one, fingers curling slightly. Still cold.
Memories weren't always loud. Sometimes they slipped in on the quietest days. Lina in her gray coat, stylus between her teeth, mumbling about noise-filtering algorithms. Her laugh after she found him asleep on a pile of interface cables
He swallowed it down
Opened the diagnostics again
Echo, unlike any system he'd ever worked with, didn't need external prompts. It adjusted itself. The moment he thought of a question, it began assembling data overlays: visual representations of his autonomic function, synaptic flare rates, trait imprint harmonics
It even had a side module labeled:
[ARCHIVE: Partial Personality Sync Detected]
Wei didn't touch it.
Not yet.
Instead, he toggled into a dormant sector of the menu, hoping to find something useful, and got more than he bargained for.
[Echo Core Log 5: LIN.A_USER/Access - Retained Fragment - Classified - Redacted]
It was a video file, corrupted. Echo had tried to stitch it together, but half the visual feed was just blue static. Lina's face appeared only once- drawn, tired, talking too fast in a whisper
"They say the Hive doesn't control trait emergence. That the system adapts to the user. That it's random. That genetics and early exposure shape the path. But what if that's not true? What if they're not choosing traits but denying them?"
A burst of static, then:
"Echo wasn't meant to copy traits. It was designed to see them, map them, compare imprint patterns. It worked better than we expected. Too well."
Another flash.
"I think they're afraid. Not of Echo failing, but of what happens if it works."
Then it cut off.
Wei sat there, breath frozen in his chest
Echo was never meant to be a trait thief
It was meant to be a trait reader. A kind of spectrometer for genetic potential. A mirror for the unseen.
That changed everything.
He let the menu dissolve and stood slowly, stretching the stiffness from his shoulders. The implication was clear: if the Hive could deny traits or manipulate their emergence, then the entire hierarchy built around trait scarcity was a lie
No, not a lie. A system.
A cage.
And Echo was the first broken key.
A distant noise made him pause. The shift of gravel under boots. He scanned the shadows and moved behind the nearest support strut. A moment later, two figures entered the room from the far hall.
Civilian-clothes. QSI ports behind the ear. Armed.
One of them paused and knelt beside an old terminal. The other scanned the walls with a holotab
"Signal bounced through here last night. Prototype node signature. Hive wants it contained."
"You think it's Echo?"
"They think so."
"Didn't they scrap that thing?"
"Apparently not."
Wei didn't breathe. He'd scrambled Echo's location marker when he fled. How had they traced him here?
Then he saw it. The technician's tab pinged again.
[UNSTABLE SYNC SIGNAL DETECTED]
The trait.
The syncing wasn't done. He'd left a data trail in the neuroelectric field.
He checked the menu again
[Trait Sync: 43%]
[Risk of Detection: Elevated]
Wei cursed under his breath. He needed to get out. Now.
He slipped between the beams and into the lower sublevel, feet silent on dust-coated stairs. The old emergency generator tunnels weren't far. He could loop back into the underrail system and disappear
As he moved, he couldn't shake the words from Lina's log
What if they're not choosing traits but denying them?
Maybe he hadn't been born unworthy.
Maybe he'd just been silenced before he could begin.
Maybe they all had.
He dropped low beneath a rusted power conduit, hearing the faint hiss of steam bleeding through cracked pressure seals. Echo pulsed once in the back of his skull- not alarmed, just alert. Aware.
His footsteps slowed. He counted each breath and kept his fingers on the seam of the wall where the access tunnel curved downward. He remembered this place
Long before the fire, this floor had been used for baseline neurofeedback training. He and Lina had once stood here watching a subject scream his lungs out while the machine tried to convince his brain he was somewhere safe. At the time Lina had turned away. He kept watching, stomach rolling over.
They had logged it as a partial success
The tunnel opened into a black void, only partly illuminated by dying wall strips. He pulled out the emergency chemical torch from his coat and snapped it. It hissed to life, casting sickly green light across old Hive logos now blistered and peeling from the heat of abandonment
He moved forward, slow and quiet. Echo suppressing his biometrics like a predator masking its scent
There were things to do before he could run again.
First, he needed to find someone who could explain why Lina had clearance into classified Echo modules
Second, he needed supplies- neural stabilizers, nutrient scaffolds, portable field sync support tech
Third, and most important, he needed to learn what Echo really was
He didn't trust the logs. Not entirely. And Lina's voice, while familiar, had been clipped. It felt curated.
Was she protecting him?
Or was she afraid of what he would become?
Beneath his coat, the sync node pulsed again
44 percent.
Still climbing. Slowly.
He ducked under a steel brace and found himself staring at a shattered server cage. Racks bent like ribs. Copper wiring curled and oxidized. But the core panel was intact. Its manual interface untouched.
That was odd.
Someone had left this here on purpose
He jacked in the old way, hardline magnetic teeth clamping onto the exposed ports, and watched Echo sync
It blinked once
And flooded him with archived command strings
[ALERT: COMPILED DEBUG PACKAGE DETECTED]
[RUN LOG: SYSTEM TEST 7.5 - EVENT COLLAPSE CONVERGENCE MODULE]
His vision doubled a moment as Echo threaded the sequence into his visual cortex
Images, maps, charts projected onto airwaves and wet data
Lina's voice again, from another log
"If they realize the QSI isn't stabilizing the convergence node, it means the whole Hive structure could destabilize. The hierarchy. The trait monopoly. Everything."
Wei watched in stunned silence as lines of Hive neural trait mapping unraveled in front of him, each one built from assumptions, statistical averages, artificial scarcity built into the firmware
Echo didn't read the user
It revealed them.
If traits weren't given, but suppressed...
Then the people at the bottom weren't unlucky.
They were being kept there.
On purpose.
He staggered backward, pulling the jack free. Brain buzzing like it had swallowed a gridline.
Above, the lights flickered again. Faint tremors shook the ceiling.
They were tracking him still.
Too much power had been drawn for too long
The Hive would zero in soon.
And when they came, this time it wouldn't be scouts
It would be Reclaimers.