In Place of Echoes

The corridor opened into a fractured rotunda, its walls barely holding themselves together. Segments of structure looped in broken arcs across the ceiling, rotating endlessly like a physics simulation stuck mid-crash. Floor tiles rippled as I stepped forward, texture maps failing to hold form, cycling through concrete, metal, brick, even grass textures before collapsing into plain grey. The air was heavy here—thicker than before—as if Nullspace had condensed under its own awareness.

Patch stayed close. Her movements were careful, deliberate. Her injured leg dragged with a faint mechanical rasp. Even injured, she moved with a predator's caution, her body angled slightly ahead of mine as though expecting another anomaly to form from the broken geometry at any moment. Her tail moved slowly behind her, segments twitching, listening. The chamber wasn't just corrupted. It was remembering something.

But not well.

Across from us, the distortion began to take shape. At first it was just a shimmer, a vague heat-haze at the heart of the room. Then came the edges—an outline that fought against its own boundaries, glitching violently as limbs formed and retracted, legs extending beyond proportion before collapsing inward. Finally, a shape settled into something almost human. Too tall. Too thin. The frame cracked at the shoulders as if it had been reassembled in the wrong order.

Then came the voice.

It wasn't spoken. It was leaked. A residual sound, dragged from an unstable memory buffer.

"You're not… meant… this isn't…"

Same voice I'd heard in the corridor. Now embodied.

It sounded like Lou.

I stopped moving. The space around me dimmed slightly, not because the light changed, but because perception narrowed. My breathing went shallow. Patch stepped in front of me entirely now, her entire posture rigid.

The echo took a half-step forward. One foot didn't land. It hovered slightly above the floor, then corrected, phasing into place with a loud snap of spatial correction. It flickered violently at the joints, light leaking from exposed data channels beneath false skin. The face was forming, reforming, desperately trying to resemble someone the system could define.

I knew that silhouette.

The tilt of the shoulders. The shape of the hair. The angle of the jaw that never quite rendered. The thing standing across from me was a horror assembled from someone I loved, rebuilt by something that didn't understand what love was.

A malformed echo.

Louise. RedQueen. Neither. Both. Something born of failed categorisation and emotional residue burned into the system's core.

Patch's eyes narrowed. Her claws flexed once. "This one is unstable."

I didn't respond. Couldn't. My voice sat like stone behind my teeth. The thing's eyes blinked, one before the other. Too fast. Too smooth. Then both vanished entirely before snapping back into existence.

It smiled.

Only half the mouth moved.

[WARNING: SYSTEM RENDER ERROR]

[SOURCE MEMORY: UNVERIFIED]

[ECHO CLASSIFICATION: FAILED]

[BEHAVIOR: AGGRESSIVE – PENDING]

[DO NOT ENGAGE // MONITORING INTERRUPTED]

The overlay stuttered.

Then vanished entirely.

The system was pulling back.

Even it didn't want to be part of this.

The echo stepped forward again. It was no longer twitching. Whatever memory it had pulled from me had stabilised just enough to act. Its nameplate, flickering red above its head, displayed only one word:

[RedQueen]

And underneath it, barely readable through the static:

[Thread Anchor: NULL]

Patch growled, not a warning this time—an intention. "She is looking at you."

"I know."

"She remembers you."

"I know that too."

"Then what are we going to do?"

I looked down at my hands. The controller in my hoodie pocket was inert. The last fragment we'd tried to stabilise had failed. We had no anchor. No override. No code exploit to fall back on.

"Survive," I said. "We survive this."

The echo's head jerked sideways. Then upright. It opened its mouth again and released a sound halfway between a laugh and a digital shriek. Behind it, the walls pulsed outward. Code bled from the seams of the room like wires under pressure, unravelling from memory knots embedded in the structure.

The echo rushed us.

Patch leapt before I could shout. Her plated form met the echo mid-stride, claws extending with a metallic screech. They collided like two data objects fighting for the same space, Patch's frame glitching slightly, the echo howling as its form bent inward under the force.

But the echo didn't fall.

It simply phased through Patch, reforming behind her in a burst of broken geometry.

Patch twisted mid-air, spun, and lunged again. Her claws caught something this time. I saw it—bright red gashes across the echo's torso, light pouring out of them in broken flickers.

But still, it didn't stop.

The smile on its face never changed.

"Get behind me," Patch called out.

I backed up toward a nearby column as Patch intercepted the echo again. Her movements had become more erratic, quicker, sharper, as though Nullspace itself was forcing her to act faster to match the echo's logic loops. The crack on her hind leg had widened, sparks trailing with every dodge.

The echo shifted forms mid-lunge. One moment it looked like Lou, and the next it wore no face at all—just a blur of data and unrendered commands. It flickered through three outfits, none of them real, and laughed again, this time using my voice.

That broke something inside me.

Patch roared—an unnatural sound, half engine, half scream—and struck the echo cleanly across the chest. This time it flew backward, hitting the rotunda's central pedestal hard enough to destabilise the geometry. The floor cracked. The texture map blinked out. For a heartbeat, the world stuttered.

Then came the pulse.

From beneath the pedestal, a ripple of blue light surged outward, washing over the echo and Patch and me all at once. It didn't feel hostile. It felt cold. Final. Like a process completing.

The echo's form destabilised.

[FORCED DE-RENDERING INITIATED]

[ECHO DESTRUCTION IMMINENT]

[ANCHOR THREAD: NULL // UNRECOGNISED]

The system had caught up.

The echo twitched once, eyes vanishing, mouth still smiling. Then it fractured, split into a web of wireframe that collapsed inward like a dying sun.

The light vanished.

The room dimmed.

Only Patch remained standing, her frame flickering with stress signals. She turned to me, her posture lower now, movement slower.

"Status?" she asked, voice low, crackling.

"I'm here," I said. "Are you?"

She tilted her head. "I believe so."

"You're damaged."

"You're bleeding."

I hadn't noticed until she said it. My right palm was torn open again. The same wound. Reopened from the fall, from gripping the broken frame too tight. It dripped onto the floor—just enough to trigger a system pulse.

[EXPOSURE: 0.39]

[NULLPOINTER CONDITION: DEGRADED]

[PHYSICAL INTEGRITY WARNING – LOW]

I leaned against the pedestal, heart pounding. "I don't think I can do many more of those."

Patch limped closer, one eye flickering. "Then let's not."

We stood in silence for a long moment, the rotunda slowly collapsing behind us, light dimming further as the system reclaimed what it had lost.

Whatever that echo had been—whatever version of Lou had haunted this space—it was gone.

But the memory remained.

And the system wasn't finished.