The lights dimmed to blood-orange. Every surface on Adra-9 seemed to ripple, as if reality itself had been drawn into shallow water. Rotham stood at the edge of the Core chamber—his breath steady, the Memory Code stabilized behind his eyes, but the pressure of the Eye was rising.
"It's rewriting again," Selin's voice warned, barely audible. "But not the station… you."
Rotham looked at his hands.
They flickered.
One moment pale, another moment synthetic. Then someone else's entirely.
It's not erasing me now. It's replacing me.
The Eye's influence wasn't brute force. It was subtle. A slow corrosion of identity through suggestion, mimicry, and echo. It offered peace through dissolution—removal from the burden of memory. Of guilt.
But Rotham had already chosen: he would anchor. Not vanish.
He triggered the Echo Reversal Protocol — a last-resort defense encoded into the original Core design. A dangerous gamble. It would amplify his restored identity through the Code's network, creating a resonance strong enough to purge the Eye's infiltrated patterns.
"This'll either fry the system… or burn it out of me," he muttered.
The countdown initiated.
Echo Reversal: 10… 9…
The chamber quaked. Walls warped. Echoes of voices from long-dead lives screamed and whispered through the comms.
"You can't hold it," the Eye spoke through them. "You are us."
"No," Rotham replied. "You're just the noise. I'm the voice that remembers."
3… 2… 1…
The pulse exploded.
Invisible waves surged out from the Core, passing through every corridor, every data node, every corrupted thread in Rotham's mind. The Memory Code flared white-hot, pouring concentrated identity back into his neural net. Faces—Selin's, his father's, his own—flashed in rapid succession.
The Eye shrieked, its presence forced backward, fragmenting.
And then…
Silence.
Rotham collapsed to one knee, his vision blurred but his own. The station was quiet now. Stable.
Selin's voice returned, more coherent than it had been in hours.
"You did it. The Eye's signal is gone. The echoes are... ours again."
But Rotham didn't smile.
Because in the brief instant before the Reversal ended… he saw something beyond the Eye.
A dark corridor.
A signal still waiting.