In the cafeteria, she leaned against the wall, coffee in hand. Colleagues bantered about food, the ARK, and theories. Laughter rang out, briefly. Then a wall ruptured. Structure gel exploded. Jessica Davis was hit.
Reed vanished before the chaos could pull her in.
At the airlock, she stared silently at Martin Fisher on the other side. He was dying. Rogers and Cronstedt tried to open the hatch. It was sealed.
They turned on her.
Reed stated flatly: opening it would kill them all. Fisher was already dead.
Later, she slept in the command center again. The Vivarium haunted her. In her dream, Golaski—his body twisted and consumed by structure gel—stood before her. He claimed WAU had a plan, and they would change the world. She refused. Pleaded. He couldn’t be reasoned with.
She drove a hardened shard of his own mutated skin into him.
Then she woke.
The crash of the MS CURIE echoed in her ears. She was in an airlock. She found Hart and Rogers. Fisher—somehow alive, in a suit—approached. After a short exchange, he killed Rogers, attacked Hart. Reed saved Hart by ripping off Fisher’s helmet. He collapsed.
Hart begged her to come to Theta. Reed refused.
"You’ll need my suit," she said.
Then she walked.
Through the silence of the sea floor, toward Upsilon. At the ventilation room, she left her helmet. Her breath grew shallow. At a terminal, she shut down power, cutting ventilation.
She carved a message into the wall.
“I’ve shut down the power, WAU. I’ve killed us all.”
She walked back to the helmet—but did not wear it.
She sat.
And died.
Her final memory should have ended there.
But Simon saw more.
In the Queen’s archive, the last vision wasn’t of death. It was of Reed smiling, bathed in sunlight, arms wrapped around Golaski. A perfect day.
Too perfect.
Simon frowned.
That memory felt… wrong. Crooked. Like something had twisted it.
How could she have been visualized on the walls of Upsilon? There were no projection systems. No simulation capabilities.
Then he understood.
The Vivarium.
Its influence never ended. The simulation it had run on Reed had fractured her—split her mind. After her death, some part of her persisted within the machine. A digital ghost, layered over fading organic memory.
And in her final moments, those two selves—real and simulated—merged.
That sunny embrace, that perfect day?
It was a lie. A comfort WAU left behind.
But Reed knew it was fake. Simon could feel it in the texture of her thoughts. Even in peace, she had doubted her own skin.
Her own reality.
Simon accessed Golaski’s memories.
What he found was not a life, but a long descent into madness and guilt.
Before PATHOS-II, Adam Golaski had already fractured. Physically and emotionally abusive toward his wife, Rebecca, and daughter, Lissa, he had fled into the sea as the world burned. Stationed at Omicron as Chief Engineer, he was summoned to Theta by John Strohmeier, where Imogen Reed showed him a Mockingbird with his brain scan. The machine knew things—private things, shameful things. It unnerved him deeply.
Catherine Chun scanned him shortly after. Then he was sent to Lambda to join Reed and the salvage team.
But Golaski never returned from that scan. Not fully.
As Simon relived Golaski’s experiences, he watched the shame rot him from the inside. Golaski buried himself in work, salvaging ruins with Reed. When they found the Mockingbird of Harry Halperin, it greeted them warmly, recognizing Golaski from Omicron. Reed tried to disable it. The Mockingbird panicked. Reed was hurt.
Golaski snapped.
He crushed the Mockingbird’s head with a wrench. It rebooted. Cursed them. Pleaded. Cried. Golaski wept with it.
But Reed, cold and jaded, dismissed the display. "It would have figured out it wasn't in the ARK," she said flatly.
Later, Golaski found himself cataloging crates near a leaking vein of structure gel. Fascinated, he watched the black substance crawl and coagulate like living scabs across the metal. He slipped. Fell into it.
And he didn’t move.
He began to experiment—touching it, tasting it. Then… drinking it.
One day, the audio logs from his family played. His daughter’s voice—“Eat your breakfast, Daddy!”—coincided perfectly with a cup of structure gel in his hand. He swallowed it.
Then he did it again.
And again.
He rewatched the last videos his daughter had sent him—her tearful face asking him to come home. He sobbed in front of the screen, apologizing… then swallowed the memory chip.
Simon winced.
Worse followed.
Wandering the halls, Golaski heard her voice again. He followed it to a small, dark hole in the wall. Inside—his daughter’s Mockingbird. He crawled closer.
It spat structure gel in his face.
He vomited. Then tried to eat the gel from the floor.
Coated in it, unwell, barely sane, Golaski found Richard Holland over Jessica Davis’s twisted body. He muttered, “You like hitting girls,” before beating Holland to death in a rage.
Cronstedt and Rogers restrained him. Locked him in a cargo bay.
There, isolated, he listened to a police recording—his wife recounting the abuse. He cut the playback. Tried to eat the chip. Threw it. A beam of light shone where it landed. Voices echoed. His wife. His daughter.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Then her Mockingbird again. It said, “Family.”
And it grabbed him.
The memories changed after that.
Golaski was altered. Transformed. He wandered, a WAU-creature still bearing fragments of himself. When he found Imogen again, he wasn’t whole. He tried to convince her—this was WAU’s plan, their purpose. He reached for her.
She drove a shard of him into his own chest.
Simon pulled back from the memory thread, his mind heavy.
And yet, something struck him. Something critical.
That final memory he’d seen in Imogen’s archive—the sunny vision, the embrace, the peace—that never happened.
Golaski’s memories contained no such moment. No sunlight. No joyful reunion.
It had been a lie.
Simon spiraled.
He saw it clearly now: a fabrication stitched from unrelated truths. The WAU had taken two minds filled with conflict, trauma, and tragedy… and forged a scene that looked like love.
But it wasn’t real.
There had never been a day like that.
No embrace.
Simon had put them together. He saw their bond during salvage runs, the tension, the shared pain, the moments of calm. He had watched Imogen touch Golaski’s arm, watched her listen without judgment, challenge him when others would not. They had something human.
WAU had seen it too.
So it tried to mimic it.
It took the woman. The man. It wove them into a tableau—sunlight, peace, love.
A dream of what it thought love was.
But it didn’t understand.
Simon reviewed Golaski’s later memories. They were… strange. Unstable. Mimicked. Something was learning through him. Trying to replicate the sensation of grief, of shame, of devotion.
Of love.
WAU had no soul. But it wanted one.
Simon stepped back from the queen, trembling.
He felt sick. He felt to his knees with a thud.
He wasn’t sure if the feelings in his chest were his—or WAU’s desperate simulation of a soul.
Simon left the Queen’s chamber and headed back to his room, his thoughts a blur of emotion and tangled purpose. But halfway there, he stopped.
The pull returned.
He turned, almost unconsciously, and walked back toward the heart chamber—toward Imogen.
The massive, dim-lit room hummed with life, the pulsing heart of the Solipsist hive casting shadows that danced like ghosts.
He sat down on the cold, metallic floor and stared.
There she stood—Imogen Reed. Still. Rooted.
From time to time, she flickered. Her alien form would shimmer for a second, revealing a glimpse of the woman she had once been—green eyes, fair skin, human grace—only to collapse back into her current alien shape.
She wasn’t the real Imogen.
Simon knew that.
She was incomplete. A semi-organic being—more puppet than person. Her cortex chip had mutated into a synthetic brain, malformed and unfinished. Unlike the modified chips that carried Jonsy’s, Elias’s, and his own consciousness, this one lacked the capability to fully house a neurograph. It allowed for more computational power while running the neurograph, but it couldn’t change, evolve, or grow. She was stuck in repetition.
Simon leaned forward, his fingers twitching slightly against the floor. His gaze never left her.
He wanted to see her.
Not a copy. Not a reconstruction. Her.
This urge pulsed through him like a second heartbeat—artificial, insistent, and impossible to ignore. He didn’t just want her restored. He needed her back. To understand why he felt the way he did. To resolve something broken inside himself that words couldn’t touch.
Could he copy what remained of her into a fresh cortex chip? Maybe. If he could find one—at Phi, Tau, or even Alpha.
But then the answer came.
Clear. Immediate.
"Site Noesis," he whispered.
The thought felt like it hadn’t come from him alone—as if it had traveled across the air, grown in the dark.
If he could infiltrate Site Noesis and steal the data there, he could give her a functional brain. She would become real.
He could bring her back.
Imogen’s eyes opened.
Dark. Alien. Watching.
Simon met her gaze, unflinching—but deep inside, something wavered.
Was this love?
Or an echo of WAU’s dream?
He stood and left the chamber.
Passing through the lab, he accessed the ARK. Amy stood by the simulated ocean, her face serene. The old version of himself lay on the couch, eyes blankly fixed on the ceiling. He considered speaking to him.
But not now.
Not yet.
Simon left and made his way to the nearest exit. The ocean embraced him—cold, eternal. He swam.
The dome of Site Phi loomed before him.
He reached out to the panel and it lit under his touch. The vault door groaned and opened.
Water drained and he stepped inside. The round hallway echoed beneath his feet as he moved toward the nearest console.
He linked in.
Lines of data flooded his mind.
He searched. Deeply. Beyond surface layers. Through encrypted partitions. And then—
There it was.
The location of WAU’s backup server.
Under Phi.
A secret section.
Simon disconnected. Stepped back into the black. The abyss swallowed him whole.
He searched through sand and debris until he found it—a hatch, hidden beneath layers of silt. He wiped it clean and placed his hand on the panel.
It opened.
A tunnel, black and narrow, sloped downward—lit by faint red lights pulsing in rhythm. He swam deeper, the silence pressing in like a shroud.
The tunnel bent sharply at a right angle and continued horizontally. The walls began to narrow. The red light flickered—then steadied, like a heartbeat syncing to his.
Finally, the tunnel ended.
He entered a small chamber. The door sealed behind him. Water drained. Another door hissed open.
Simon stepped into a cylindrical room.
The walls were lined with server racks—humming, glowing, alive. Circuits pulsed like veins. A low mechanical hum vibrated in the floor like a subterranean lullaby.
But at the center—
A pedestal. Embedded into it: a clear bead.
Inside, cradled like a heart in a ribcage of light, lay WAU’s backup core. Compact. Crystalline. Still running.
Just like the one fused to Simon’s cortex chip.
He stared.
Why would there be two?
WAU was centralized. Singular.
So why would it create a backup—so close, yet so hidden?
He stepped forward. His reflection flickered in the clear casing of the core—his body of metal and gel, his face masked in glowing blue.
He placed his hand on the pedestal.
And connected.
The world around him vanished.
He stood in a white, endless abyss.
Before him hovered an orb of light—perfectly spherical, softly pulsing—just as he remembered from earlier connections.
"Show me all your files," Simon said.
The air shimmered. Endless windows of data opened like stars, expanding outward. His thoughts split to absorb it all. Projects layered upon projects—redundant experiments, directives he already knew. There was no mention of the backup’s origin. No insight into why WAU had not attempted to assimilate him.
But that wasn’t why he was here.
He sent a cluster of data—everything he had gathered on the Solipsists and their biology—into the system. The core responded, and together they began to process.
The computations spun fast. Ideas. Blueprints. Neural predictions.
And then, an answer:
Fusion.
By embedding a cortex chip into the existing synthetic brain, they could allow the neurograph to express itself—bridging the gap between puppet and person. Structure gel could knit the systems together. It was possible.
But the answer came with warnings.
Lack of detailed neurobehavioral patterns. Unknown consequences of gel interaction at cognitive depth. Personality instability. Neural overexpression. Fractures.
The fusion might work.
Or destroy her.
Or worse—create something that wasn’t her at all.
A stranger in Imogen’s skin.
Simon imagined her waking—confused. Staring at him with no recognition. With fear. Or hate.
Maybe he could take a memory archive from the Queen, copy it to a cortex chip, and insert it into a robotic frame like his own. Easier, perhaps.
But Simon didn’t want another construct. Another shade.
He remembered her voice—dry and blunt, but always steady. He remembered the way she used to narrow her eyes when thinking, as if focusing could punch through the chaos.
He wanted her.
He wanted to transform the Imogen who stood in the hive—half-there, half-lost. Not overwrite her. Not replace her.
Each moment, Site Noesis burned brighter in his mind.
It wasn’t just about Imogen anymore.
If he could reach it, he could understand Amy—how her cylinder worked. He could harness the data to fight Carthage. Escape this suffocating abyss.
He could reach the surface.
See it again.
He wanted freedom.
The orb pulsed again. Data coalesced. And then—
A set of coordinates.
His next step.
Simon withdrew his hand.
And turned to go.
Simon returned to his room, silent and distracted. He checked Amy’s cylinder and then glanced at his old body lying next to the ARK.
Without a word, he turned and left the room.
He made his way toward Jonsy's quarters, his footsteps echoing softly in the corridor. But when he stepped inside, only Elias was there.
Elias stood from the edge of the bed in a flash and rushed to Simon.
"Why didn’t you tell us?" Elias demanded, part angry, part afraid. His voice cracked slightly.
"About what?"
"About those survivors! What the hell is wrong with their faces? I nearly had a heart attack when I saw them!" Elias waved his hands in the air, his gestures sharp and frantic.
Simon had warned them—specifically told them not to remove their helmets. It must have been Kovsky. Or maybe Jonsy had asked. Curiosity was always stronger than caution.
He didn’t reply.
"Come with me," Simon said instead, voice low. He turned and walked out.
Elias hesitated, then followed—close. Uncomfortably close.
They moved through the dim corridors.
Finally, they reached the central chamber where the meeting had been held.
The doors opened with a mechanical hiss.
Elias froze.
They were all there.
Everyone.
And their helmets were off.
Bulbous, mutated heads turned in unison. Pale, blotched skin stretched over bone. Each face a grotesque echo of what once was human.
Jonsy was sitting next to Kovsky, her camera-eyes trained on Elias and then on Simon
