In Place of Echoes

The corridor narrowed again, but not because the geometry had shifted. This time, it felt like the space around us had chosen to close in, like the system was aware of our presence in a way that went deeper than tracking. It wasn't just that we were being observed. It was as if we were being interpreted. Understood. And slowly reclassified.

Patch kept close to my side, her damaged leg dragging slightly with a soft, metallic scrape that echoed too cleanly in the tight space. The air had thinned. Not oxygen, not really, but something in the atmosphere had changed. My thoughts felt fractionally delayed, like I was trying to think through static. The overlays hadn't updated in minutes. No exposure changes. No hazard warnings. No system prompts.

Just the hum.

It started faint, behind the walls. Then it moved. Not like a sound travelling through space. Like a signal being carried across invisible cables beneath the floor. Every so often, it pulsed louder, and I could swear the flickering seams of the corridor brightened in response.

"Anything on your side?" I asked softly.

Patch's ears flicked. Her biomech plating along the shoulders shifted in tiny, calculated degrees. She paused mid-step, eyes narrowed.

"There is a pattern," she said. "Low-frequency signalling. Likely non-auditory to standard users."

"So a command channel?"

"Possibly. But not system-directed. It feels… latent. Like it's waiting for something."

"Us?"

She didn't answer.

We kept moving. The corridor opened into a large chamber, circular, but uneven. Like someone had tried to replicate a perfect design and failed halfway through. The floor was ribbed with worn lines of code, scrawled in dev-comment tags and overwritten notes from different iterations of some old layout pass. Pillars dotted the space, most cracked. Some looped infinitely, top to floor. Others flickered in and out of material state like they hadn't passed validation.

In the centre of the room stood what looked like a broken data spine, an obelisk, its core exposed, layers of language and instruction rotating slowly around a dead frame. As I approached, the console blinked into vision.

[NULLPOINT DETECTED]

[SYSTEM OBSERVATION LOG 0192]

[EXPOSURE STABLE – 0.34]

[ECHO SIGNATURE – NOT PRESENT]

[LAST KNOWN FRAGMENT: BLOCK SHELL]

[MEMORY RESOLUTION: 91% // LOST]

A dull ache twisted in my chest again. The reminder of how close we'd come. How we'd almost anchored something real into the world. But we hadn't. And now, even the system treated it as background radiation. Something observed, noted, and marked obsolete.

I turned away from the obelisk. Patch was sniffing near one of the broken columns, her claws tapping against the fractured floor.

"There's no symmetry here," she said. "The layout is wrong. It was built. Then it was broken. Then something tried to copy it."

"Another echo?"

"No. Worse. A memory misrendered."

She padded back to my side, her damaged leg clicking softly.

"I'm starting to think this place doesn't just react to memory," I said. "It cannibalises it."

Patch nodded once, silent.

The air changed again.

A low stutter rolled across the back of the room, more felt than heard. I spun, expecting movement. Instead, I saw light. A thin beam, barely a breath wide, descended from above and touched the floor. Where it struck, the environment shivered. Not glitched. Reacted.

The system was watching again.

But this wasn't passive.

It was testing.

Patch tensed, then lowered herself into a crouch.

"It knows we're not meant to be here."

"Yeah. I get that impression too."

Then the overlay pulsed.

[WARNING: OBSERVER THREAD ACTIVE]

[NULLPOINTER RECLASSIFICATION: PENDING]

[ECHO MATCH INDEX: FAILED // RETRYING]

I blinked and stepped back.

It wasn't just observing.

It was trying to place me.

"I think it's trying to decide what I am," I said aloud.

Patch watched me with steady eyes, her voice now carrying the natural cadence she'd settled into, still laced with Nullspace's artificial edge, but recognisably her own.

"You're not classified by thread," she said. "The system can't categorise you."

"Thanks," I muttered.

"That wasn't an insult," she added gently.

I smirked despite myself. Her tone had levelled out. The glitches were gone. It sounded like Patch now, grounded, calm, absolutely certain.

We moved toward the far side of the chamber. I didn't want to linger beneath that beam of light. But the system wasn't done.

As we crossed the midpoint of the room, the floor behind us folded closed. Not a door. Not a collapse. It folded. Seamlessly. Like it had never existed.

We continued forward until the corridor began to narrow again, the air thickening around us with every step. Then the system blinked something across my vision.

[AUDIO THREAD DETECTED]

[ORIGIN: CLASSIFIED // CONTENT: DISTORTED]

[REPLAY? Y/N]

I didn't respond. I didn't have to.

The system played it anyway.

A voice filtered through the walls, warped and glitched, like a radio transmission caught in a storm. It broke across frequencies as it spoke, fragmented and stretched, but the sound of it caught in my chest.

"You're not… meant to… this isn't…"

Then it cut.

Not a full sentence. Not a directive. Just a memory, ripped from context and played back on a failing loop.

And it sounded like Lou.

I took a step back, breath caught behind my teeth. "Patch—"

"I heard," she said quietly, moving to stand beside me.

Her voice was softer now, matching the weight in the air, but her posture didn't shift. Her eyes, cold and luminous, stayed fixed ahead.

"It's bleeding again," she said.

"What is?"

She didn't hesitate. "Her."