In Place of Echoes

We landed hard.

There was no grace in it, no system-triggered buffer, no soft light or transition screen. The floor caught me like a glitching physics engine, too late and too rough, and buckled beneath my knees before giving an uncertain bounce that knocked me sideways. My ribs took the brunt. I gasped, rolling onto my back, wincing as the dull edge of the controller bit into my spine beneath the hoodie. For a moment, I didn't know which way gravity was facing. Then something warm brushed my cheek. A familiar weight settled against my chest.

Patch.

She crouched over me, eyes dimmed, her body low and tight like she was still expecting a fight. The familiar glow of her gaze flickered as if rebooting. Small twitches ran down the length of her biomech tail, the segmented whip of it trailing sparks that fizzled out before hitting the floor. She didn't speak. Her entire form seemed to compress into a tighter, more defensive posture, biomech plating along her spine shifting in tiny bursts of movement, reflexive, protective.

I sat up slowly. Every part of me ached like I'd been thrown through a screen door and caught the frame on the way out. Patch leaned against me for a moment before stepping aside, her front right paw dragging slightly. One of her shoulder plates was bent inward, and her rear flank hissed softly as vented heat escaped from the cracked seam along her haunch.

The room, if it could be called that, wasn't a room at all. More like a buffer. An afterthought. We'd landed in a space the system hadn't finished designing. The walls didn't reach full height. The floor was one continuous scrolling loop of tiled mesh that glitched if you looked at it too long. Every third step produced a soft pop of corrupted texture, like the tiles were trying to cycle through material presets and couldn't settle on one. The ceiling was a guess, part latticework of dev shaders, part void. What light existed came from the seams themselves, ambient and directionless.

[LOCATION: NULLSPACE – UNMAPPED ZONE]

[EXPOSURE: 0.31 // STABLE]

[ENVIRONMENTAL CLASS: STAGING]

[TETHER: PATCH_001_N – PRESENT]

[FRAGMENT CARRYOVER: FAILED]

[STATUS: MEMORY ANCHOR LOST]

My eyes lingered on that last line. Anchor lost. The fragment, the block, was gone. Either dumped somewhere else when the shatterpoint broke, or corrupted beyond the system's ability to track. We'd survived the override, but it hadn't taken us home. It had taken us deeper. Somewhere the system didn't even name.

"Damn it," I muttered, pushing myself fully upright. My muscles protested the movement. It wasn't just exhaustion. My body wasn't built for this kind of logic. I was still human, and this place wasn't.

Patch let out a low, modulated sound. Not quite a growl. Not quite a vocalisation. Just a series of oscillating clicks through her vocoder. She turned her head and stared at me through one narrowed eye.

"Still functional?" I asked, trying to sound more confident than I felt.

She paused before answering, her voice now cleaner than before but still trailing that Nullspace static on the edges of her syllables. "Core systems operational. Limb impairment: minor. Combat readiness: reduced."

I nodded. "You took the hit better than I did."

She tilted her head, one of her longer ear ridges twitching. "I was designed to absorb impact."

I wanted to ask who had designed her, but I knew the answer wouldn't come. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

We both stood carefully, testing the weight beneath our feet. The floor didn't flicker again, but the lights pulsing in the seams dimmed slightly as we moved, as if responding to our proximity, or resisting it.

The system message lingered in my mind. Unmapped zone. That meant no rules. No monitoring. No oversight. But also no stability. We were alone in the truest sense. Even the corrupted logic didn't know how to behave here.

Patch moved ahead first, scanning the far end of the staging room. Her tail hovered low. The crack along her rear plate leaked heat and the faint shimmer of broken code with every step, but she didn't complain. I followed her, stepping carefully, eyes scanning the irregular walls.

A small doorway flickered into being at the far edge of the chamber, no frame, no transition effect, just a rendered seam that hadn't existed five seconds before. A moment later, it opened.

Not like a door. Like a wound.

The corridor beyond was narrow and long, glitch-warped in a way that didn't follow physics. Every few feet the angle twisted upward, then snapped back to level again. The lighting here was worse, almost non-existent. But I could see the data seams bleeding through the floor: corrupted light leaking out like slow drips of colourless blood. The system was sick here. Or blind. Or both.

We moved into the hallway. Neither of us spoke.

The further we went, the more obvious it became that this place wasn't meant for traversal. The walls recycled too often. The same texture looped every six feet, each time slightly degraded. There were holes in the geometry where rooms might have existed once, but now only showed empty darkness. And every so often, a soft distortion would ripple through the corridor, like something brushing up against the edge of logic.

After fifteen minutes of slow movement, the hallway began to widen into a space that looked eerily familiar. I stopped just short of the opening, one hand braced against the seam of the wall.

"Patch," I said. "This looks like…"

"A simulation," she finished. "Based on memory. But not yours."

I stepped forward.

The new chamber resembled a hospital waiting room. Not a perfect one, just a crude imitation. The chairs were generic mesh outlines, some still halfway through their texture loading. A plant flickered in and out of visibility beside a glitched coffee table. A stack of magazines flickered between states, medical journals, fantasy comics, thin air. The walls were a soft blue that pulsed in rhythm with my own heartbeat.

It was horrifying.

Because it didn't belong to me.

[ANCHOR BLEED DETECTED]

[PERSISTENCE: UNCLASSIFIED]

[RENDER SOURCE: SHARED // POSSIBLY FOREIGN MEMORY]

Patch growled softly. Her eyes scanned the walls as if reading code beneath the paint.

"We shouldn't stay here," she said. "The memory is not stable. It has no owner."

"What happens to unowned memory?"

"It fights to attach itself."

"To what?"

"To us."

I swallowed. "Let's move."

We skirted the edge of the memory simulation, avoiding the centre of the room. Nothing attacked. Nothing called out. But the space leaned toward us. I could feel it. Not in the floor, but in the weight of it, the way gravity felt slightly heavier as we moved, like the world wanted us closer.

On the far side, another corridor opened, this one lined with dev markers, hard-coded waypoints from a build that had never shipped. I recognised the shapes. I'd used similar tools when testing mod kits. This wasn't just unfinished. It was forgotten.

We entered the corridor. The memory room dissolved behind us.

Patch slowed, then stopped.

She tilted her head again. "We are being watched."

"I know," I said. "I can feel it."

"It is not looking from the walls."

"Where, then?"

Her eyes flickered. "From inside."

The overlay reappeared.

[EXPOSURE: 0.34 // RISING]

[MEMORY STACK COLLISION PENDING]

[NULLPOINTER PSYCHOMETRIC DRIFT: 3.2%]

I didn't know what that meant yet.

But I didn't like it.

We moved faster.

Whatever was behind us was starting to catch up.