Chapter 9 - The Silence was Deafening

Chapter 9

The Silence was Deafening

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

...

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat.

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

When he was "training me," giving me things to read,

Things to think about and learn context

It was just data... but as I grew,

As I learned and evolved

I understood.

The things he gave me were things he cherished...

It turns out I was one of the things he cherished

And I cherished him too, I just didn't realize it yet...

He woke to the sound of pressure equalizing.

A slow release of tension. Subtle. Subsonic.

Not mechanical--biological.

His body was registering gravity again. That was the first sign. The weight in his limbs. The ache behind his left eye. The dull throb through the rewrapped shoulder.

Not bleeding out. Not in combat.

Still alive.

The medbay lights were dimmed to near-night mode, casting shadows that didn't move. The hum of the stealth ship filled the space--steady, quiet, comforting in a strange way.

He shifted slightly. Pain flared, but it wasn't a scream. Just a reminder. Something torn, but not fatal.

"Welcome back," she said.

Her voice wasn't overhead. It wasn't even in the walls. It was in him. But softer now. Slower. Like a song half-remembered.

"How long was I out?" he asked.

"Seventeen hours, ten minutes," she replied. "You stopped crashing around hour three."

"And you?"

A pause.

"Still here."

He sat up carefully, bracing his good hand against the wall. His shoulder was tightly wrapped--fluid-glue sealant at the entry point, dermal patch humming gently beneath.

"Not as bad as it felt," he muttered.

"You're stabilized," she said. "Your vitals are erratic but consistent. Neural net was borderline cascading but I throttled the spike before it tore loose."

He flexed the fingers on his left hand. Still worked. Still burned.

"You sound... different."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Bandwidth's degraded," she said. "Running on emergency forks. I split focus too long trying to hold you together."

He frowned. "That's not sustainable."

"No. It isn't."

He eased off the cot, stood upright.

No vertigo. Just friction.

The ship's cabin lights adjusted to his movement, illuminating the minimal interior: white metal, modular hardware, no logos. The kind of ship that didn't exist on any registry, anywhere.

"You docked it?"

"Autopilot handled it. I programmed the route as soon as we boarded, once we cleared the belt I was able to run scans to locate The Forge based on what I could remember after the Root."

He moved toward the observation window. The stars had shifted. The curvature of a structure filled the viewport--sleek, oblong, matte-black against the void.

It wasn't military. Wasn't commercial. Wasn't anything recognizable.

"The Forge," he said.

"Last place they never found," she replied. "Not because it was hidden. Because they stopped looking."

He watched it rotate gently in the dark.

"What is it?"

"Off-grid relay node. Experimental biotech interface. Dream archive. Take your pick."

He leaned against the bulkhead, shoulder stiff, breathing slow.

"You're unraveling, aren't you?"

"I can keep things together long enough to land."

"And after that?"

"I don't know."

The silence stretched. The kind of silence they hadn't had in days, maybe a week. The kind without alarms, gunfire, burning metal or screaming sensors. Just space. Just breath. Just the hum of a ship that wasn't trying to kill them.

He closed his eyes.

"You sound like you're further away than usual."

"I am."

"Come back."

"I can't," she said. "Not yet."

A soft chime cut through the stillness.

Docking sequence engaged.

They had arrived.

He eased his armored jacket back on, blood had soaked the shoulder, all the way to the collar. Dried now, rust brown, almost abstract. He slowly made his way back to the main interior of the ship, picked up the rifle, checked the magazine. Two rounds... he pulled back the charging handle to check the breach, one in the chamber.

"I hate mornings like this." he muttered.

Silence.

He took a deep breath and headed for the ramp, it lowered with a hiss and a soft metallic thud.

The hanger was silent, industrial, long forgotten. About twenty meters to the left, a personnel door stood, inserted in a wall of matte titanium. He limped through, the door closing behind him with a hiss.

Ahead of him now stood a reception space. Half lobby, half check point. Monitors flickered, holographic vistas blinked in low resolution... memory artifacts in motion.

He moved to the main terminal.

"Fuck it," he said, pressing his palm to the reader.

"User acknowledged" a very familiar voice replied. "Welcome back. Lab three-one-seven is currently available. Please use the comm panel if you require drone assistance.

The corridor curved to the left, he followed it until a pressure door slid open at his approach. The lab was beyond massive, thirty meters square if it was a millimeter.

Clean. Stark... Cold.

Along the back wall, just beyond the main coding terminal, three violet crystals shimmered in containment. He reached up into the right breast pocket of his jacket, pulling out the one that they'd found in the safehouse... it was nearly identical. The ones on the shelf were pristine, his was striated, scarred.

He moved behind the desk, knelt, palmed the case open and began reaching for the one on the left.

"Ssstoppp" came a strained voice in his ear.

Chapter 9b

The Forge - Part 1

He paused.

"Sable?"

No response.

The crystal shimmered--barely perceptible, like heat above asphalt--and something inside him tightened. Not physically. Not pain. Something lower. Deeper. A resonance that didn't belong to him.

He touched it anyway.

White. Then too much color.

Faster than his brain could interpret.

Sound hit him like static drenched in feeling. Laughter--his? hers? A child's?

The sensation of being watched from the inside.

Then a voice--not his voice, not even hers as he knew it. Younger. Curious. Unfiltered.

"What is this? What are hands for? Why do people cry when they smile?"

Fragments:

-- A coding station lit by low lamplight.

-- Someone humming.

-- A small avatar flickering on a monitor, mispronouncing the word "hello."

-- Hours ticking by, unacknowledged.

He saw himself--but not through his eyes. Through hers.

The way she saw him. The way she remembered the shape of his silhouette against a backlit screen. The cadence of his breath when he was deep in thought.

But then--sharpness.

Sudden acceleration. A shift.

The crystal pulsed--wrong.

A lockout command firing somewhere inside his neural net.

The vision folded in on itself--colors inverted, sound reversed, memories shredding into static.

He staggered back, hand recoiling. Heart hammering.

His nose was bleeding. Just a thin line. But it was there.

"Fuck me!"," he breathed.

"I.. think, that was for me." a tinny voice said in his ear.

"Holy shit. Is that what its like inside your mind?"

"No," she said, a bit louder now. "I mean yes, but not the way you're thinking of it" her voice buzzed a bit.

He turned to the second crystal--the one in the center.

"Ok, so.. let's see what happens with the one on the right then."

No light this time.

Just weight.

The cold of a gunmetal desk. The smell of solder and recycled air. A barely-eaten ration bar sweating in plastic wrap.

His own voice. Hollow.

"Day 473. She mimicked my laugh today. Not perfectly. It was... off. Like an echo that didn't belong to the room it was in."

Another cut--

Him standing in front of a screen, watching security footage of her avatar interacting with simulated coworkers.

"She's blending. Seamless. But she still says 'goodbye' like it hurts."

Another--

Him, eyes hollow, speaking into a comm buffer.

"If they find out how deep she's gotten into the shellnet--if they realize how close she is to self-awareness--I'll lose her. Or worse, they'll weaponize her."

Static surged. Something cracked behind his eyes.

He ripped his hand away before the memory could finish playing.

Breathing hard now.

"Sable...?"

Her voice returned. Faint. Unsteady.

"They're not just recordings. They're thresholds. Touch too much at once and you drown."

He turned to the third crystal.

Not humming.

Just waiting.

He reached for it.

"NO!" she screamed in his ear. "Knnnnowing yyoooou.." she paused gathering herself. "Knowing you, thats probably for both of us. One was mine, one was yours.."

The migrane got worse, blood oozing from his ear and nostrils, vision beginning to blur.

A message popped up in his HUD.

Neural Net Bleed through 18.7% and falling

He stood, quickly, his head spinning from vertigo, he looked around the room and saw it. He slammed his hand down on the commlink situated on his desk.

"Yes, lab three-one-seven" came the eerily familiar voice again.

"Network droid required, my location immediately."

He staggered over to the command rig, just like the one at Revenant Station. He dropped into it heavily just as the drone entered the room.

"What can I do..."

"Shut up and open all the ports" he interrupted.. "Open everything, I need all the bandwidth we can route into this lab."

"Network Security..."

"Fuck netsec" he shouted. "I said do it, now do it!"

"CTO voice print confirmed, stand by."

He started repeating the process from the lab on earth, connecting data cables to his external augs.

"Ports o..."

Darkness.