In Place of Echoes

The silence in the debug room was not like the silence in Nullspace.

There, silence had teeth. It stalked. It followed. It pressed against the back of your skull and whispered promises you didn't want to hear.

Here, the silence simply was.

It hung in the air without weight, the way an old quilt might rest on your shoulders. Warm enough. Worn, but not hostile. The kind of quiet you didn't notice until you realised you weren't flinching anymore.

I sat with my back to the wall, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. The floor had warmed slightly beneath me, no longer the cold concrete texture it had pretended to be when I'd first arrived. Patch, still small, still flickering faintly, was curled between my knees, her breathing slow, her little body rising and falling with the same rhythm as the console's pulse light across the room.

I hadn't moved since the system had acknowledged her name.

Patch.

Even thinking it felt strange. Not because it didn't fit. It fit perfectly. But because it had become her, not the other way around. The system had pulled the name from somewhere, from her, from me, from the moment with Lily, and wrapped it around this fragile thing like a title it hadn't been allowed to assign until now.

Patch.

She sneezed.

Not a system warning. Not a logic spike. Just a kitten sneeze, high-pitched, unexpected, immediately followed by a flustered shuffle and a half-roll that landed her awkwardly in my lap with one leg curled over her ear like she'd been caught mid-sprint.

I smiled, more with the eyes than the mouth.

She chirped again, then began grooming a spot near her shoulder, her tongue passing cleanly through her fur this time, no visual glitch, no missing polygons. She was stabilising.

So was I.

That thought landed hard.

I hadn't taken stock of myself properly since this all began. Not emotionally, that was its own storm, but physically. My body was a mess. My hand still ached, the ragged bandage soaked through. My spine burned with tension. My stomach had stopped growling and now just sat like a knot of old rope, dry and sour. I'd broken too many normal rhythms. Food. Water. Sleep.

And bathroom.

Yeah.

That too.

The system hadn't exactly paused to accommodate my need to piss in the last ten hours. There hadn't been time, or space, or even the right mindset. It was all just panic. Survive. Run. Bleed. Repeat.

But now?

Here?

I shifted, muscles creaking like old floorboards. Patch looked up with a quiet mrrp, eyes blinking unevenly, then tucked her head under my forearm with the kind of trust you couldn't program.

"Alright," I muttered, mostly to myself. "Let's see what we're really working with."

I rose to my feet slowly, limbs protesting every inch. Patch hopped free and padded after me in that awkward, too-fast way kittens do when they haven't quite figured out their centre of gravity. Her rear legs outpaced her front paws twice before she adjusted, skidding slightly across the smoother section of floor near the wall.

I walked the perimeter of the room again, more methodical this time. The walls were less abstract than before, still wrong in places, still stitched together with procedural seams and half-finished geometry, but they didn't move. Not in that sick, crawling way the Nullspace corridors did.

A panel near the rear flickered as I passed it. I stopped, doubled back, and placed a hand against the surface. It was warm. Faintly responsive. And when I pushed gently, the seam flexed inward just enough to reveal what looked like... a vent?

No. Not just airflow. A faint stream of warm air emerged. Dry. Neutral-scented. Not burnt or blood-slick or machine-cooled like the rest of Nullspace. Actual warmth.

Patch stepped forward and immediately flopped against it like she'd been waiting for it all her life. She rolled onto her side, legs splayed in a half-yawn, half-stretch, her belly flickering briefly as the textures caught up to her enthusiasm.

She looked at me. Blinked.

And sneezed again.

"Right. Call that heat covered."

I kept walking. A few paces later, something changed beneath my foot, the floor dipped. Not sharply, just a slight depression. When I stepped back and knelt to inspect it, I found a circular seam with faint grip lines along its edge.

A hatch.

No markings. No panel. But it wasn't sealed. I pressed my fingers against the edge and lifted.

It hissed.

Not in warning.

Just hydraulics.

Inside, there was a recessed chamber, shallow and clean, lined with flat, gray material that pulsed gently under the surface. A strip of text hovered above it for just a second:

[UTILITY NODE UNLOCKED // COMFORT FUNCTIONALITY: LIMITED]

[SANITATION MODE: ACTIVE // DRAIN ENABLED]

I stared for a second.

"Are you kidding me?"

Patch looked up from her vent-bed and chirped in confusion.

"No. Not you. Just... the toilet. The actual toilet." I shook my head. "Debug logic. Of course that's what gets rendered."

It wasn't much. But it meant the system was responding to me now, or rather, to us. It was willing to meet me halfway.

Basic heat. Clean disposal. Maybe even hydration if I could force another interaction or find a hidden panel.

This place wasn't just stabilising. It was adapting.

To me.

Patch padded closer as I closed the hatch again and leaned back against the wall beside it. She sniffed the edge of the seam, then sneezed for a third time and headbutted my shin like it was my fault she was allergic to cold code.

"Yeah, yeah," I muttered, crouching beside her. "I get it. Still broken. But not bad, right?"

She butted her head under my hand again. The purring came instantly.

The console across the room pulsed once more, slower this time. A soft glow spilled out beneath it, not blinding, just enough to cast long shadows. Patch and I both turned to look.

Something was coming.

Not danger.

Not now.

But something new.

And maybe, just maybe, the beginning of a way forward.