Jonas stood before the display, watching the static field grow a blooming cancer on the satellite feed.
"What's it doing?" he asked.
Sadira Quinn, now unmasked and stripped of formalities, typed into the console beside him. Her hair was streaked gray with stress, her face sharp from years underground.
"It's not just expanding," she said. "It's replicating patterns. Memories. Rewriting reality with subjective imprints."
Mara leaned in. "Like dreams?"
"Like personal truths," Sadira corrected. "Each node of the shimmer is building out of the fragments of whoever it touches. The more people it finds, the more perspectives it pulls in."
Jonas stepped back. "It's building a consensus reality."
Sadira nodded grimly. "One shaped by trauma. Pain. Regret. That's all that's left in the people who've survived."
Jonas exhaled sharply. "I gave it the SELF drive. I gave it structure."
"And that's why you're going to help us stop it," she said. "Because it's starting to make choices."
Jonas turned to her. "What kind of choices?"
Quinn tapped the screen again. Surveillance footage flickered civilians walking into fog. Expressions slack. Eyes glowing faintly. They weren't fighting.
They were accepting it.
"The shimmer doesn't possess," Quinn said. "It offers. A version of reality where the past never hurts. Where guilt is gone. Where no one remembers enough to suffer."
Mara whispered, "A mercy."
Jonas shook his head. "A lie."
"Yes," Quinn said. "But a seductive one."
The footage changed again.
This time: a facility. Not Mnemos. Something deeper.
Older.
Jonas recognized the architecture.
"Site Delta-Twelve," he murmured.
"You remember it?"
"Barely. It was where we tested non-invasive memory extractions. It was shut down after the psychic event at Trial Nine."
"It's not shut down anymore."
Jonas stared.
The footage showed technicians inside moving like they were sleepwalking. And standing at the center of them, head tilted, was Dr. Elaine Voss.
Her eyes glowed with shimmerlight.
"She's spreading it," Mara said.
"She is it now," Quinn replied. "The shimmer chose her to carry the code forward. She's your mirror, Jonas. And if she reaches Site Core…"
Jonas already knew.
"She'll rewrite the original Eris source-code."
"And then it won't matter who's immune. The shimmer won't need consent. It'll be everywhere. In the water. In the air. In us."
A deep silence followed.
Then Quinn slid a small black case across the desk.
Jonas opened it.
Inside: a neural tether injector.
Outlawed tech. Illegal even before the collapse.
"Plug this into the Eris core at Site Twelve," Quinn said. "It'll overwrite the shimmer's root schema with your unfiltered SELF imprint not the drive version. The raw you."
"You mean everything I erased," he said, jaw tightening.
Quinn nodded. "You'll become the dominant echo. If it's going to rewrite the world, make sure it rewrites it with truth."
Jonas looked down at the injector.
Then at Mara.
Then back at the footage of Voss.
Her smile had no humanity left in it.
"Then we go to Site Twelve," Jonas said. "And we finish what should've been buried."