In Place of Echoes

The console responded differently now.

Not faster. Not flashier. Just… confidently. Like the room had stopped questioning whether I was supposed to be here.

I ran one hand across the surface, tracing the faint seam lines between tiles. Where the system had once resisted input, hesitated, stumbled, it now accepted contact as a given. Not that I had admin rights. But I had presence. In a system this tightly controlled, that alone was power.

Patch followed me across the room with slow, deliberate steps. Her paws made the faintest tap-tap on the cleaner sections of flooring, her tail curling upward behind her like punctuation. When I stopped, she did too, then flopped onto her side with all the grace of a sleepy toddler. A half-stretched paw batted lazily at the corner of a flickering panel as if she knew something was about to happen, but couldn't be bothered to chase it yet.

I crouched beside the console and opened the newly revealed tab:

Memory Echo Management.

The interface was crude, more dev overlay than player UI, but its structure was intuitive. A list of system entries indexed by fragment references, each tagged with a short string of data. Most were locked. Two blinked faintly. One of them I recognised immediately:

[FRAGMENT_01 // BLOCK SHELL // ORIGIN: LILY]

[STATUS: ANCHORED]

[STABILITY: 47%]

[TETHER: PATCH_001 // FEEDBACK ACTIVE]

The second one was new.

[ECHO ENTRY DETECTED: NULLSPACE_ORIGIN // CLASS: PARTIAL // AUTHENTICATION: PENDING]

[RISK: HIGH // MANUAL OVERRIDE RECOMMENDED]

[VIEW? Y/N]

I hesitated.

There was no detail. No context. Just that it was from Nullspace, it hadn't stabilised, and the system wanted me to make a choice.

Patch stood up. She wandered to my side and sat without a sound. Her posture was too upright. Her tail twitched once, then went still. She stared at the screen with full attention.

I ran a finger over the confirmation pad.

"Let's see what the system thinks a memory looks like."

I tapped YES.

The lights dimmed.

Not abruptly, and not all the way, but enough that the edges of the room softened. A thin haze rolled outward from the console like spilled smoke. Patch stepped backward, tail low, ears tilting. I stayed still.

At first, there was only static. A whisper of audio, garbled and low. Then, movement. A shimmer on the far wall. Lines of architecture bending into an unnatural angle, like the room was folding inward on itself. I reached out instinctively, but nothing touched back.

The shimmer resolved into a window.

Not a real one. A construct.

Inside it, I saw something flickering: an environment, unfinished, glitching. A kitchen. Ours. Not a perfect replica, just jagged outlines and colour blocks, memory trying to remember itself.

In the centre of the room was a child-sized shadow, arms spread, spinning. The figure flickered like a bad frame render, its motion skipping as though recorded on failing tape.

"Block fortress!" a voice cried, but the pitch was wrong, too flat. No tone. Just syllables.

The image stuttered.

Then corrected.

And I saw her.

Lily.

Not her, exactly. But a construct. A puppet made from echoes and neural backscatter. Her face never quite resolved. Her shirt flickered between two textures, both from different years. The way she moved, too clean, like she wasn't built for gravity. But her laughter. Even broken, it reached me.

Patch let out a sound low in her throat.

I didn't realise I'd fallen to my knees until I felt the cold bite of stone through my jeans. The image rippled again.

"Dad, look! The block fortress has a secret exit!"

The camera, my memory, shifted. I saw hands. Mine. I was recording. A birthday, maybe? Or a Saturday morning. The memory didn't care about specifics. It only wanted the feeling.

But that wasn't what came next.

The construct of Lily turned toward me, toward the camera, and froze.

Her head tilted.

And the echo corrupted.

A stutter.

Then another.

And then she snapped forward, frame by frame, closer than she should've been. Her eyes, white voids, opened too wide. Her mouth stretched as if screaming, but no sound came. The lights in the room dimmed further. Behind her, the block fortress began to bleed.

Literal red.

The system failed the rendering.

[MEMORY STABILITY COMPROMISED]

[ECHO DETECTED: NULLSPACE TYPE]

[WARNING: CLASS III FRAGMENT OVERLAP]

[RENDER COLLAPSE IMMINENT]

I reached out, not knowing what else to do, and grabbed the edge of the console.

Patch shrieked.

Not a meow. Not a glitch.

A real, high-pitched kitten scream, raw and afraid.

The memory window shattered.

Glass that wasn't glass rained outward, then reversed direction, pulled back into the console like it had been deleted on fast rewind. The lighting returned. The haze lifted.

I was on the floor.

Patch was in my lap, pressed tight against my chest, her whole body shaking in tiny waves.

Her claws were out, but not against me.

She'd grabbed on.

It took a long moment for either of us to breathe normally again.

When I did, I cradled her tighter and whispered, "Not again. I won't let that happen again."

The console made a low sound, something between a sigh and a whimper, and displayed a final message:

[ECHO ENTRY REJECTED]

[FRAGMENT CONTAMINATED]

[PURGING REQUIRED FOR STABILITY INTEGRATION]

[RECOMMENDATION: PHYSICAL RECLAMATION]

I stared at it.

"Physical reclamation," I repeated aloud.

It wasn't enough to see echoes. I had to find them. Reclaim them. Stabilise them not in simulation, but in the field.

Patch looked up at me, eyes wide, tail trembling.

It had cost her something too.

Not just code.

Not just memory.

She'd felt that.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead, then checked the inventory overlay. The fragment count had changed.

[FRAGMENT INDEX: 01/01]

[NEW OBJECTIVE: RECOVER MEMORY FRAGMENT – SOURCE: BLOCK SHELL // NULLSPACE ZONE]

[REQUIRED FOR EXPANSION: TRUE]

[WARNING: NULLSPACE RISK LEVEL: HIGH]

[COMPANION STABILITY: DEPENDENT ON LINK INTEGRITY]

Patch chirped softly, voice thin.

I nodded.

We had a purpose now.

Not just to survive.

To build. To protect what we had.

And to find what we'd lost.