The screen stayed black.
No sound. No static. Just the faint hum of the old monitor and the shaky breath rattling out of Finch beside me.
Maya stood frozen by the door, arms crossed, her brow furrowed—recognition fighting with dread, her whole posture strung tight like a pulled wire.
"That voice," I muttered, barely above a whisper.
Finch didn't respond at first. He sat forward, his pupils wide, chest still rising too fast. His gaze didn't waver from the screen. Like if he blinked, whatever phantom had spoken might disappear forever.
The silence stretched. The screen didn't flicker. The room was so quiet I could hear Finch's heartbeat across the table.
"I don't know who he is," I said again, the words slow, hesitant. "But I've heard him. Not face to face. In the flashes. The ones from the sphere. It's like... it's buried in the static. A voice in the background that doesn't belong."
I exhaled slowly. "Like an echo stitched into a dream that was never mine to begin with."
Maya's expression tightened. "A memory induction?"
I nodded slowly. "Not a memory—an imprint. Something fed into me. Back when Helix was rewriting our heads like hard drives. His voice was part of the noise."
Finch finally spoke, quiet but certain. "I know that voice too. He used to walk the upper corridors. Nobody ever said his name. He didn't wear a badge. Just showed up when something big was happening."
"You knew him?" Maya asked.
Finch shook his head slowly, the lines around his mouth tightening. "Not exactly. Knew of him. Enough to feel the shift in the room when he walked through. Hamilton could bark orders, but this guy? People stopped breathing when he passed by. Even Hamilton flinched when he was around."
His knuckles went white on the edge of the desk, gripping it like it was the only thing keeping him grounded. Maya stepped forward, her voice quieter.
"Lucas, what did you see?"
I leaned back, the weight of the question dragging through me. "I don't know. I couldn't see him. Not really. The feed—whatever's in my head—it's all scrambled. Just fragments. Static and noise. Like someone took memories and smashed them into broken reflections."
I paused, pressing two fingers to my temple. "But the voice… It was clean. Like a knife through fog. Cold. Controlled. Like it wasn't supposed to be remembered, but it refused to stay buried."
I lowered my hand. "This wasn't just another lab tech. Whoever that was... he was running things. The one who watched everything from behind the glass. The one you never saw coming."
I turned to Finch.
"You said you saved that file."
"I did," he whispered. "I—I don't know why it cut. It was working before. I checked it twice."
Maya crossed to the terminal, started typing. Her fingers moved fast, precise.
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to recover cached data. Sometimes fragments stick around even after deletion. With luck, we might be able to recompile enough to form a partial feed."
Finch leaned in beside her, already opening directories.
We didn't sleep. None of us.
Finch worked nonstop, fingers trembling on the keyboard as he cycled through data fragments, filter strings, and cross-referenced personnel logs pulled from old Helix archives. Maya handled security, triple-checking the perimeter, rerouting surveillance, encrypting comms. I sat on the edge of the desk, watching both, the tension braided into my muscles like wire.
Hours passed.
Then:
"Got something," Finch said. "Corrupted, but partially playable."
The screen flickered. Grainy footage rolled. Blurred shapes. A lab corridor. Tiled floors soaked in harsh white light.
We leaned in.
The feed jittered, skipping between distorted frames. Screams echoed—high-pitched, panicked—rising beneath the hiss of corrupted audio. Some were short, sudden bursts. Others dragged long and ragged, layered over images of motionless figures in containment chairs.
Names appeared momentarily on the corner of the screen. Subject tags. Some marked as EXPIRED, others as ESCAPED. Most blinked out before we could read them.
One feed jumped to a narrow hallway outside a sealed room. A figure—tall, broad-shouldered—stood facing away from the camera. He moved without urgency, observing the rooms through thick glass, hands clasped behind his back.
Then another cut. His back again, this time in an office lined with monitors. A silhouette. Barely more than a shadow pacing in front of flickering readouts. The voice continued, overlapping itself like a broken loop: calm, precise, surgical.
An overhead angle showed restrained subjects in metal chairs—flickering like broken memories. Muffled audio. Garbled commands. The same voice beneath the distortion, still eerily calm.
"That's him," I said. I didn't know how I knew. But I knew.
They froze the feed at the last intact frame. The camera panned just enough to glimpse the man's profile—half in shadow, face distorted by scan lines and digital decay.
What was visible: cropped white hair, a hardened posture, that cold, unreadable stare. He wasn't looking at the camera. Just past it. Like he already knew someone would be watching.
"Do we have a name?" Maya asked.
Finch squinted. "Hold on… cross-referencing now."
His fingers danced across the keys. The system chirped. Blinked. Loaded. Then stalled.
"No full match," Finch muttered. "Just fragments. Metadata tags, scrambled audio logs, location markers that don't line up. Whoever he is… he was wiped. Or someone made damn sure of it."
Maya leaned closer. "So we still don't have a name?"
Finch shook his head. "No. Just a face—if you can call that static mess a face. The system's ID sweep keeps bouncing off the distortion."
"He's something above that," Finch said. "The kind of person you bring in when protocols get rewritten."
I kept staring at the screen.
The static rolled again. Another frame blinked. This time—a test subject screaming.
I knew that scream. It was mine.
But I couldn't remember why.
Then more names flashed. A new list, partially corrupted but still legible in places—ESCAPED SUBJECTS.
Maya leaned in. "These ones… they got out."
Finch scrolled down slowly, eyes squinting as corrupted characters jittered across the screen. "Some of these ID numbers match the tags from earlier. They slipped containment. Cadmus lost them."
A beat passed.
"Cadmus doesn't just lose things," I said, my voice low. "If they escaped, you can bet Cadmus has been hunting them ever since. Quietly. Ruthlessly."
Maya stood straighter, her eyes sharpening. "Unfinished assets in the wild are liabilities. Cadmus wouldn't ignore that. Not unless something made them too dangerous to retrieve."
I stepped closer to the monitor, scanning the flickering list. "Then that's our in. They'll be looking for them—and if someone's trying to resurrect Helix, these survivors might be the key. Witnesses. Test cases. Loose threads no one accounted for."
Finch began typing faster, fingers flying across the keyboard. "If I can isolate one of these subjects—just one—and get a signal trace, maybe an old facility log or a resupply ping…"
"We follow it," I said. "Wherever it leads."
"Even if it's bait?" Maya asked quietly.
I nodded once. "Especially if it is."
Finch gave a slow breath, eyes narrowing at the mess of symbols crawling across the screen. "Then let's find the ones who didn't die in those chairs."
"And maybe one of them," I added, "remembers more than I do."
Author's Note:
If you're enjoying the story and want to read ahead or support my work, you can check out my P@treon at [email protected]/LordCampione. But don't worry—all chapters will eventually be public. Just being here and reading means the world to me. Thank you for your time and support.