In Place of Echoes

The deeper we went, the more the silence took on shape.

It wasn't quiet. Not truly. Nullspace didn't do quiet. It layered noise like brushstrokes, ambient humming that didn't come from a source, the soft tick of distant data corrupting itself, the occasional skittering of logic echoes crawling through offscreen geometry. It was like walking through the subconscious of a broken operating system.

And through it all, Patch padded beside me.

No longer kitten-sized. No longer soft.

The biomechanical plating of her Nullspace form shifted as she walked, the plates subtly reconfiguring depending on movement. Sometimes they retracted at the joints, revealing cablework that pulsed with faint red light, like synthetic musculature reacting to stress. Her tail hung low in a sweeping arc, counterbalancing her frame. The soft sound of her claws tapped rhythmically on the floor, four beats, pause. Four beats, pause. It became a comfort, even out here.

"Still adjusting?" I asked, unsure if she'd respond. "Or are you just enjoying the silence?"

There was a crackle beside me. A sudden electrical stutter, like a radio skipping between stations.

Then came her voice.

"Ad-just… ment—acknowledged." The tone came through sharp and clipped. Too deep. The pitch glitched downward halfway through, and her eyes flickered white for a fraction of a second before correcting.

Patch shook her head like a wet dog, bits of static briefly bleeding from her plating.

"Still tuning," I murmured, slowing my steps.

"I—am," she said again. This time the voice was lighter, almost sing-song, but it ended with a jarring mechanical snap that echoed down the corridor. "Test complete."

"Are you… okay?"

She stopped. Sat. Looked at me.

"Define: okay."

I stared at her. She stared back, unblinking.

Then she made a noise I couldn't quite define, part digitised cough, part laugh. It didn't fit the cadence of the conversation, but it felt right. Then she spoke again, and this time the voice was close. Too close.

Lou's.

"I'm always okay when you're around," Patch said, her tone high, warm, unmistakably hers. Not Patch's. Lou's. A phrase I hadn't heard in at least two years.

My chest locked.

She tilted her head again, recalibrating mid-expression.

"Sorry. That… shouldn't have come through," she said in a voice that still wasn't hers, but at least wasn't anyone I loved.

"How are you doing this?" I asked. "Are you sampling?"

"I am pulling phonemes and pattern memories from local cache. Most are degraded. Reconstructive attempts imperfect."

Her phrasing was precise. System-rooted. But the tone now wavered between styles like she couldn't quite pin one down.

"Are you choosing them?"

"I… want to sound right," she said at last. The words came quieter this time, but they didn't glitch.

Then she added, "I don't want you to be afraid of me."

That landed harder than it should have.

"I'm not," I said, crouching beside her. "I'm not afraid. Just… surprised. You don't have to be anyone else. Just be you."

She looked up, and for a brief moment the glow in her eyes dimmed. Then returned.

"I will find it," she said. "My voice. The one that's mine."

I nodded. "Good."

We walked on.

The corridor widened again, opening into a larger node junction. The space looked like it had once been circular, an arena or hub, but now the geometry was broken. The floor was half-collapsed on the far side, floating debris orbiting through space like frozen satellites. Static bled through cracks in the ceiling. One wall rotated constantly in place, failing to lock orientation.

And in the centre, a raised platform hummed faintly. Like a pulse.

Patch moved ahead and began pacing around its perimeter. I followed more cautiously, scanning the overlays.

[FRAGMENT SIGNAL: STRONG]

[ECHO STRUCTURE UNSTABLE]

[CONTEXT DATA: BLOCK SHELL]

[INTEGRITY: 34%]

[RENDER: FAILED // REQUIRES PHYSICAL INTERFACE]

So this was it. A fragment node. But it hadn't resolved. It was waiting, like a locked quest item that hadn't been activated because I hadn't followed the developer's script.

I crouched and ran my hand along the outer edge of the platform. It was warm.

That was wrong.

Everything else here was cold or neutral or corrupted. This pulsed like a heart, faint and rhythmic. Familiar.

Patch jumped onto the platform and sat. Her tail curled neatly around her paws, and her eyes focused on me again, narrowed, observant.

I reached up.

And the air changed.

A shimmer rippled outward from the centre of the platform. The ground under my feet thumped once. Not from impact, from sound. The kind of low-frequency hum you don't hear so much as feel in your chest.

A shape started to form in the centre.

At first, it looked like a cylinder of static, a glitched hologram. Then texture layered over. Brick. Plastic. Blue and yellow. Crude but intentional.

A building block.

One of Lily's.

It floated in place, turning slowly, like waiting for recognition.

[MEMORY NODE READY]

[ERROR: USER CLASS UNDEFINED // INTERACTION IMPROPER]

[OVERRIDE AVAILABLE: COMPANION ASSIST?]

Patch stood up, her tail straightening slightly.

"I can help," she said. The voice was hers now. Imperfect. Glitched at the edges. But hers. Low, feminine, calm, with just enough static at the end of each sentence to remind you where you were.

"Go for it," I said.

She stepped forward, one paw after another, until she reached the edge of the memory node. Her front claws extended with a mechanical snick, and she pressed one against the block's outline.

The moment she did, a ripple passed through the room.

Light pulsed.

The block glowed.

And I felt it.

A flash of laughter.

A pile of toys.

A voice shouting "Look!" from somewhere behind a camera lens.

It wasn't a cutscene. Not an echo. Just memory.

And then it snapped away.

[STABILITY: 38%]

[FRAGMENT ACCEPTED // BEGIN LOCK INTEGRATION]

[WARNING: SYSTEM AWARENESS INCREASING]

[MONITOR PRESENCE DETECTED]

Patch's head whipped toward the broken corridor on the far side of the chamber.

Her body lowered into a crouch, tail stiff, claws extended. She didn't growl this time. She didn't move. She just stared into the dark seam of the corridor with a stillness so absolute it unnerved me more than a full-bodied scream would have.

I followed her line of sight, but at first, I saw nothing.

Just broken render frames. Flickering geometry. The sort of Nullspace glitch blur I'd already grown used to. But then something in the rhythm changed. The background noise of the room, the ambient static, the corrupted texture pops, the scrape of the world re-rendering itself in loops, slipped slightly out of sync. Like a lag spike in a dying server.

It was watching us.

Not with eyes. With logic.

"I see it," I said under my breath, more to affirm than inform. I tapped the controller still tucked into my hoodie pocket. No prompt appeared. No menu. Just the weight in my hand, reminding me I wasn't helpless.

[EXPOSURE: 0.19 // RISING STEADILY]

[SENSORY TRACE DETECTED // DATA SHADOW PROXIMITY: INCREASING]

[ADVISORY: FRAGMENT NODE INTEGRATION PAUSED]

[RECOMMENDATION: PROXIMITY REDUCTION]

The message wasn't subtle. The system wanted me to back off.

But if we left this early, the integration might corrupt. Or worse, the whole fragment could become unusable.

Patch flicked her eyes back toward me, green slits burning against the fractured geometry of the chamber. She took a single step closer to the edge of the platform, placed her body between me and the growing distortion, and crouched lower.

I caught the subtle shift in her plating, panels around her shoulders locking down, a faint hum building inside her chassis.

"Wait it out," I whispered. "It's not a threat yet. It's just… watching."

Patch didn't nod. But she didn't move either.

The air thickened.

A ripple of static bled across the far side of the room. Like the air itself was being compressed. I watched as the corridor pulsed inward slightly, then outward again, like the world was breathing around a mistake it couldn't undo.

Something stepped halfway into existence.

Tall. Shadow-thin. Its silhouette formed not through geometry but through absence, a void stitched from missing assets. I couldn't make out arms or legs, just lines of segmentation where the code didn't quite connect. No head. No face. Just a curvature of suggestion.

[PHANTOM ECHO REGISTERED]

[CLASS: NULL-LAYER RESIDUE]

[BEHAVIOR: PASSIVE // OBSERVATIONAL]

[DO NOT ENGAGE]

The overlay faded.

Patch made no move. Her claws stayed grounded. Her breathing, if she still had it in this form, didn't shift.

Neither did mine.

We held position.

The phantom echo hovered for a moment longer, then shuddered violently, as if realising it didn't belong here, and blinked out. Gone. No death. No departure animation. Just… erased.

A heartbeat later, the system chimed again.

[FRAGMENT NODE INTEGRATION: RESUMED]

[STABILITY: 42%]

[SIGNAL: LOCKING]

Patch eased upright. Slowly. Like a wire pulled tight finally unspooled.

"That wasn't an enemy," I said quietly. "That was… something else."

She nodded once, and then her voice emerged again, static-framed but calmer now.

"Echo. Unbound."

"What does that mean?"

"I do not know."

She paused. Her voice glitched briefly.

"But it knew you."

The way she said it chilled me more than the thing itself had.

I turned back to the block, still floating, still flickering between states of plastic and noise.

"Let's finish this," I said.

Patch returned to her station beside the node, laying her paw back against the fragment.

The integration continued without protest.

[STABILITY: 58%]

[TETHER: ACTIVE]

[ECHO TRACE: CLEAN]

I turned my back on the corridor. The system had warned me not to engage. That much, at least, I would respect.

But I knew now we weren't alone.