In Place of Echoes

The platform beneath our feet began to vibrate, gently at first, like the hum of a distant generator, but it was unmistakably growing. Not shaking from stress. Pulsing with purpose. The system was awake now, and it had noticed us.

I checked the overlay.

[STABILITY: 74%]

[TETHERING LOCK: IMMINENT]

[EXPOSURE: 0.22 // CLIMBING]

[NOTE: LOCAL NULLSPACE BEHAVIOR IS BECOMING UNPREDICTABLE]

"How long do you think we have?" I murmured, voice low.

Patch didn't speak right away. She was staring into the dark where the phantom had appeared earlier, her eyes glowing a steady, mechanical green. Her tail hovered, motionless. The soft, almost imperceptible whir of her internal components was the only sound for several seconds.

"Not long," she finally replied, the words laced with a whisper of distortion. "Something is… interested."

Her phrasing made the hair on my neck rise. Not watching. Not hostile. Interested. Like a hand had hovered above a keyboard too long. Like the system was weighing a decision and had yet to reach consensus.

I stepped back from the block. It was still hovering above the platform, slowly rotating. Each revolution sent a low-pitched vibration into my chest like the beat of a subwoofer two floors away. The memory, Lily's memory, was becoming heavier. More solid. And I could feel the cost of anchoring it. The room didn't want it here. The system didn't want me touching it. Every second that passed was a challenge to its control.

"Patch," I said, carefully. "We might need to move fast."

She nodded once. "Acknowledged. Scanning ahead. Rear quadrant distortion increasing."

She took a step forward, claws clinking against the floor like dull ceramic on sheet metal. Her plating adjusted again, panels along her spine lifting slightly, exposing red-lit circuit channels that hadn't been visible before. I'd seen war machines in games with less presence.

[FRAGMENT NODE STABILITY: 78%]

[EXPOSURE: 0.25 // ELEVATED]

[NULLSPACE HARMONICS: DEGRADED]

[SYSTEM ALERT: MONITORING AGENT OBSERVING SILENTLY]

I squinted at the last line.

Observing silently?

I scanned the edges of the room. Nothing moved. The rotating debris on the far side of the chamber continued their slow orbits, unaffected. A distant static hiss rolled through one of the broken ceiling tiles. The floor trembled again, but this time the pulse came from outside the chamber, off-angle. A corridor we hadn't entered.

Then came the sound.

Not a bang. Not footsteps.

A crackle.

Like a VHS tape mid-rewind. A stuttering burst of half-audible fragments, then silence. Another burst. Static. Then a syllable. Glitched.

"...blo…ck…"

Patch turned fully toward the middle corridor now, one we hadn't even glanced at before. Her entire stance changed. Defensive. Aggressive. Poised.

"Did you hear that?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, simply.

It came again. A stutter. Then a glitch-stretched phrase that sounded too much like,

"L…i…ly…"

I felt it in my teeth.

The lights overhead dimmed again. The floating debris slowed, the orbit pausing as if the physics had been manually overridden. Something had paused the world around us.

And that's when I saw it.

At the far edge of the room, in the deepest part of the corridor, a shape emerged.

It didn't step.

It resolved.

Not into place. Into memory.

The system didn't build it out of models, it pulled from a corrupted library of moments and tried to turn those into geometry. A hunched figure. Too long. Thin arms dragging behind it. A face that flickered between three different presets in rapid succession. Hair that shimmered, then vanished, then returned in impossible colours. And eyes, eyes that hovered, unanchored to the face, blinking asynchronously.

[DATA TRACE IDENTIFIED: NULL-TETHERED MEMORY FRAGMENT // CORRUPTED]

[SOURCE: USER "LILY"]

[ECHO TYPE: MALFORMED // BEHAVIORAL CLASS: UNSTABLE]

[WARNING: UNBINDABLE // INTERVENTION PROTOCOLS BLOCKED]

It was the system's equivalent of a monster.

Not because it wanted to be.

Because it couldn't not be.

I took a step back, nearly stumbling off the platform. "Patch…"

"Echo is not whole," she said, her voice now sharp, solid. "System tried to rebuild her. Failed."

"She's… it's using her memory."

"Yes. The moment we interacted with the fragment, it began compiling."

She crouched lower. "We have seconds."

The creature stepped fully into the room. Its left leg bent backward at the knee, then re-bent forward mid-stride. Its arms clipped through the floor. No sound. Not really. Just a dragging distortion in the ambient data around it. A ripple of presence.

"Do we run?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

Patch's claws extended. "If we do, it will follow. It's tethered now. It remembers you."

The block behind us flared.

[STABILITY: 91%]

[FINALISING MEMORY LINK…]

[ANCHOR POINT NEARLY ESTABLISHED]

[WARNING: CONTAMINATION RISK IF TETHER INTERRUPTED]

Then came the final warning.

[MONITOR SIGNAL: ECHO MUTATION DETECTED]

[EXPOSURE: 0.29 // CRITICAL THRESHOLD NEAR]

[DEFENSIVE ACTION RECOMMENDED]

Patch hissed.

And the creature screamed.

It sounded like Lily, for half a syllable. Then like me. Then like static. It launched forward, glitching in mid-lunge.

I barely saw Patch move. She threw herself into its path, the force of her weight driving it sideways across the floor in a spray of rendering artifacts and compressed model debris. The sound of the collision was digital chaos, binary vomiting itself into the air in one terrible burst.

They tumbled across the room. I ran to intercept.

Patch rose first, back leg glitching, one of her plates cracked. Sparks arced down her shoulder. The echo stood next. Its arms reset. Its eyes blinked independently again. And then its mouth split into a smile I hoped to never see again.

I pulled the controller from my pocket. Nothing came up. Not yet.

Patch darted sideways, drawing the echo away. "Now," she called. "Find the thread."

I dropped to one knee beneath the memory platform and scanned. There, written beneath a layer of flickering dev texture:

[ // manual_return = true IF anchor && node_stability > 90% ]

I didn't have admin rights. But I did have logic.

I pressed the controller to the seam and thought one word.

Yes.

[COMMAND ACKNOWLEDGED]

[RETURN SEQUENCE ACTIVATING]

[SANCTUARY LINK DETECTED // PATCH_001_N]

[OVERRIDE: NULLPOINTER CONFIRMED]

[WARNING: DESTINATION CORRUPTED // PATHWAY UNSTABLE]

[EMERGENCY ROUTING ENGAGED]

The platform erupted in cascading logic, not a doorway but a shatterpoint. Code fractured under pressure, lines of light cracking like glass across the air, which itself seemed to invert, compressing inward, then snapping violently outward as if the world had made a decision it couldn't reverse. We weren't pulled free. We were thrown sideways, a failed relocation, not out of Nullspace but deeper into its broken logic. The override hadn't saved us. It had redirected us into something worse, somewhere unstable. Somewhere wrong.

The echo dissolved mid-charge, its unanchored form collapsing as its scream fractured into silence, vanishing in the void of whatever came next.

Patch hit me mid-air, body tense, protective even in freefall.

And then together, we were falling into another error.