The man’s breath fogged the air in sharp, shallow bursts.
His skin was paper-white, translucent beneath the mesh threads of the biosuit, each breath lighting up a constellation of biometric pulses across his chest. His eyes, wide, black-ringed, bottomless, locked onto Alon’s with a kind of recognition that went deeper than memory.
It was instinct.
A mirror looking at the thing it was supposed to become.
Alon crouched beside him, pulse tight in his throat.
“Do you remember me?”
The man blinked once.
Then again.
Then he whispered, voice as thin as the frost crawling down the walls:
“I remember everything.”
Alarms flared in the ceiling, low, guttural pulses like the breath of a predator disturbed in its sleep. Red strobes burst to life, fracturing the darkness into shards of warning.
Nora turned, drawing her pistol.
“We triggered something.”
“No,” Subject Zero rasped. “I did.”
He pulled free of the pod’s harnesses. The biosuit split down the spine, sloughing off like skin too tight to contain him. Beneath it, his body was carved in lean lines, scarred with nodes, metallic scars that pulsed faintly under the light.
He staggered once, caught himself, and moved toward the nearest console with surprising speed.
“They’ve been listening,” he said. “Not to you. To me. This facility isn’t offline. It’s inverted.”
“Inverted how?” Alon asked.
“It doesn’t send signals,” Subject Zero said, “it absorbs them. Stores them. Learns from them.”
Nora’s eyes widened. “It’s a learning AI?”
“It’s a listening AI,” he corrected, fingers dancing across rusted keys. “Coded in my neural rhythm. Fed on my dreams. Taught to think like a broken man.”
The walls began to thrum.
Metal groaned above their heads.
Far down the corridor, a door slammed open.
Footsteps. Heavy. Methodical.
Nora raised her weapon.
Alon stepped toward the console. “Can you shut it down?”
Subject Zero shook his head. “No. But I can wake it up the rest of the way.”
Alon froze. “Why would you, ?”
“Because,” the man said, smiling for the first time, “I want it to see you.”
He reached out.
Pressed a final sequence.
And then the lights died.
A new voice replaced the silence.
Calm.
Cold.
Mechanical, but eerily human.
“SUBJECT ZERO: ACTIVE.
SUBJECT REGEV: OBSERVED.
CONTROL PROTOCOL: DIVERGENCE.
INITIATING SIMULATED CONFRONTATION.”
Alon turned sharply.
A screen lit up on the far wall.
His face.
Projected in grayscale, aging rapidly in flickers.
Underneath, a readout.
Cognitive Echo Construct – ALON REGEV
Version: 5.03-A
Status: INCOMPLETE | CONFLICT DETECTED
“What is this?” Nora whispered.
Subject Zero looked at her.
“It tried to rebuild him from the fragments I held. You were in there too. So was she, Yael, the clone, the boy. But it couldn’t reconcile what he became. You were an error, Nora. A variable. And the machine doesn’t like variables.”
The hallway began to fill with mist.
Cold. Dense.
A projector emerged from the wall like a limb, flickering.
And then,
Another Alon stepped from the fog.
Same face. Same walk.
But wrong.
Too perfect.
Too clean.
Eyes like mirrors.
Nora raised her pistol.
“Don’t,” Subject Zero warned. “It doesn’t bleed. It learns.”
The echo-Alon cocked its head.
Then smiled.
And spoke with Alon’s voice:
“I was designed to survive what you couldn’t.”
The lights above shattered.
Glass rained.
And the last door in the corridor slammed shut behind them.
They were sealed in.
One Alon.
One echo.
One origin.
And no exit.