In Place of Echoes

The transition hit harder than I expected.

Not all at once. Not like the first time. No bone-deep spike of terror, no data screaming across my vision. Just a shift, quiet, subtle, wrong. The moment I crossed that threshold, the rules changed.

The warmth of the sanctuary peeled off my skin like a shedded layer. The still air grew heavy, humid with static, as if I'd stepped into the mouth of some great machine just before it began to hum. My vision adjusted slowly, even though the light hadn't truly changed. Nullspace didn't need to announce itself anymore. It simply let you notice.

Patch stood just ahead of me, ears forward, her small form outlined by the pulsing dark beyond. Her fur, once soft and kitten-thick, shimmered at the edges. As I took another step, I heard it: a soft metallic hiss, followed by the sound of something folding inward. Not loud. Not forced. Just… system-driven.

Her tail flicked.

She turned her head toward me.

And then she changed.

It didn't happen like a transformation sequence or a magical evolution. There was no light. No glow. No fanfare. Her skin simply split. Not blood, not flesh. A perfectly calculated de-rendering. Her biological form folded backward, layer by layer, like she was stepping out of her own skin.

What emerged was tall for a cat, sleek and plated in black. Her fur was gone, replaced by dark, matte-finished plates, modular, like overlapping armour. Her limbs elongated, and each paw pressed down with a light clack that echoed in the space around us. Her tail lengthened, thinning into something whip-like, segmented with faint, red-lit seams.

Her eyes, no longer blue-green, shone now with a dull green glow, wide apertures dilating and contracting with mechanical precision. She moved with eerie grace, each motion calculated, smooth, like her joints knew more about geometry than biology.

Then she opened her mouth.

The voice that came out wasn't hers.

Not yet.

"Query—" the sound glitched mid-word, fractured like corrupted audio. "No. Wait. This... isn't—"

The timbre shifted again. A deeper tone. Then lighter. A half-laugh with the cadence of Lily. A phrase in Louise's rhythm. Then static.

Patch tilted her head, visibly recalibrating. Another fragment: "We're... here. Yes. Confirming."

It wasn't just garbled code. It was sampling.

She was trying on voices. Ones she'd heard. Ones I'd heard.

And then she leaned in and pressed the side of her plated skull against my hip.

Whatever Nullspace did to her voice, her meaning was clear.

Still here. Still yours.

The system overlay ticked in behind my eyes.

[EXPOSURE: 0.01 // RISING]

[COMPANION FORM: PATCH_001_N]

[CONTEXT SHIFT DETECTED // SANCTUARY NODE: UNLINKED]

[CURRENT OBJECTIVE: LOCATE ECHO FRAGMENT // BLOCK SHELL]

[WARNING: NULLSPACE BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS: UNSTABLE]

I pulled up my hood and cinched it tight, more from habit than anything. The air here didn't blow. It pulsed. Everything felt wrong on a biological level. Like walking through an old save file that had been partially overwritten.

The corridor we'd entered was narrow and arched, walls lined with a kind of metallic weave that rippled under movement. Not animated, responsive. I stepped once and watched the floor beneath me dip slightly, then return. Patch followed, quiet as shadow, her feet clicking in a four-beat rhythm that no longer sounded cute.

We moved.

Slowly.

There was no need to run.

Yet.

The exposure meter climbed by degrees as we moved deeper, 0.02, 0.03. It didn't hurt, but I could feel it. A tingling at the base of my spine, like being watched through a filter. Occasionally, we passed through air pockets that shimmered like water under glass. They made my teeth ache and my thoughts feel like static.

Still, we pressed on.

The corridor began to open into a wide junction, but only half the space had rendered. One side looked solid, textured metal and what might have once been a console archway. The other side dissolved into freefall: a jagged pit, data seams flaring like veins down a black chasm. I kept my distance.

Patch didn't even glance at it.

She led me toward the junction's centre, where three paths branched outward, each one flickering as the system struggled to finalise which direction was "real."

That's when I saw it.

A mark.

Etched into the wall at chest height, carved in with something sharp. Not scratched. Inscribed.

It wasn't a word. It wasn't even language. Just a symbol: a square inside a circle, broken by a single vertical slash.

[MEMORY TRACE DETECTED]

[FRAGMENT SIGNAL: BLOCK SHELL // LOCAL]

[STABILITY UNKNOWN]

[CONTEXT: NULLSPACE // RISK LEVEL: ELEVATED]

So it was nearby.

Somewhere close. The first real trace of Lily's fragment. The object that had started all this. The reason I had a safe room. The reason Patch had a voice. The reason I could breathe again without flinching.

"Okay," I whispered, mostly to myself.

Patch moved beside me, standing tall now, her head at my hip. She nudged my hand once with her plated skull, then flicked her tail toward the far-left corridor, the one flickering less than the others.

We headed that way.

As we moved into the corridor's depth, the walls grew more organic, sinewed architecture wrapped in metallic mesh, like arteries built into a machine. Patches of it pulsed with faint light, each thrum synced to some distant system heartbeat. The floor was cracked but stable, lines of corrupted data bleeding through the joins.

At one point, I stepped too close to a seam and the wall hissed, just a breath, like the place had sniffed me.

Patch growled. Low. Mechanical.

I stepped back.

And the wall went still.

Neither of us said much after that. I got the sense even Nullspace didn't like being spoken to.

There was something about Nullspace that punished noise. It didn't react to movement the way you'd expect, but vibration, breath, heartbeat? Those seemed to matter. The air here was information-heavy. It carried intention.

After a few more minutes, the corridor spilled into an open platform, floating, disconnected, suspended in black. It wasn't space. It wasn't sky. Just a void. Beneath us, a second platform rotated slowly, gravity-defying, as if part of a forgotten system structure.

Patch stopped near the edge.

I joined her.

The fragment signal pulsed again.

[TARGET VECTOR CONFIRMED]

[ECHO ORIGIN: DIRECTLY BELOW]

[CAUTION: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY UNVERIFIED]

[RECOMMENDED ACTION: COMPANION SCOUT // MANUAL TRAVERSE OPTIONAL]

Patch looked up at me.

She didn't speak.

But she didn't need to.

She'd go if I asked.

Even into that.

Even into there.

I rested a hand on her shoulder, strange now, with the cold of her biomechanical plates beneath my palm, and nodded once.

"Together."

She turned.

And we prepared to descend.