The sparks spoke.
Not in words—not yet—but in pulses, flickers, and surges that moved like whispers just out of reach. Ash noticed it the third time his HUD flared without prompt, reacting not to anything physical, but something deeper. Something he couldn't measure with any sensor he'd built.
It happened again while calibrating the rudimentary arc lens on his palm rig.
The wire sparked, twisted—and bent toward him.
It shouldn't have.
No magnetic current, no residual charge.
And yet the filament moved… like it was listening.
Ash didn't flinch. He simply placed the tool down, slow and steady, and muttered, "Okay… now we're dealing with something else."
He checked the readings. EM field was stable. Temperature steady. No sign of foreign interference or localized radio pings.
And yet—
The spark jumped again, this time toward his wrist like a moth seeking a flame.
---
The next morning, he woke to find the garage's emergency lighting turned on—despite no power source being connected.
His prototype power cell had drained completely.
But it hadn't exploded. Or melted.
It had evolved.
He held it in his hand, examining the faint hum in the material. The energy signature had changed. No longer strictly electrical. It carried something else—vibrational. Patterned.
Not unlike vibranium, but cruder. Wilder. More reactive.
Ash recorded a voice memo:
> "Day 14. Prototype Cell #3 has entered anomalous phase. External power drain occurred without wire contact. Vibrational frequency indicates non-classical behavior. Possible quantum shift?"
He paused.
Then said it aloud:
"Or… it's reacting to me."
---
It didn't make sense.
Ash was a reborn human. No cosmic entity, no gamma accident, no mutant gene. His body was as normal as it could be—on paper. But what if memory wasn't the only thing that crossed over?
What if something else came with him?
---
Later that night, he returned to the garage alone. The lights buzzed again the moment he entered. The second he touched the workbench, the tools closest to him rattled—faint, almost like static charge, but different.
He slid on his crude HUD and stared at the blank screen. No overlays. No anomalies.
Then the screen blinked. Once. Twice.
And flickered to life on its own.
White letters appeared.
> "INTERFACE DETECTED"
Ash froze.
He hadn't programmed any text protocols. There was no onboard AI, no voice command recognition yet. Just sensors and input relays.
He stepped back.
> "ECHO PATTERN LOCATED."
"CORP LINK — GENESIS PROTOCOL READY."
The screen went dark.
Silence.
Ash stood motionless for ten full seconds, heart hammering in his chest.
Echo Pattern?
Genesis Protocol?
He grabbed his notebook and jotted everything down, hands shaking with restrained excitement—or fear. Maybe both.
---
Camryn showed up two days later.
This time she didn't hide.
She sat on the garage roof, legs dangling like she'd lived there all her life.
"You ever talk to your tools?" she asked when he climbed up to confront her.
"Not until they started talking back."
Her eyes lit up. That was the answer she wanted.
"So it's happening to you too."
He raised an eyebrow. "Too?"
She pulled a coin from her pocket. At first glance it looked like copper. But it shimmered when it caught the sun. She tossed it between her fingers like a fidget toy.
"This thing shouldn't exist," she said softly. "It vibrates at three frequencies. One of them doesn't match any known matter signature on Earth. I didn't build it. I found it."
Ash squinted. "Where?"
"In my jacket pocket. The day I woke up in this body."
Her tone shifted then. Cold. Sharp.
"You're not the only one who remembers a life you didn't live."
---
The conversation stretched long into the evening.
Camryn had been reborn, like him. Not in the exact same way—she hinted at dying during a classified military test, something involving AI alignment and symbiote theory—but they both retained full cognitive memory. And more importantly?
Both of them were beginning to affect this world in ways it wasn't ready for.
"You feel it too?" she asked. "When you touch metal? Like it moves around your thoughts?"
Ash nodded. "It's not just science. It's something else. Something inside us. Like… like our memories fused with the physics here and made something new."
"Something whispering," Camryn added.
They didn't say much else after that.
Just watched the stars come out, both knowing the silence between them wasn't really empty.
It was the beginning of a spark they hadn't named yet.
---
Back in the garage, Ash tested the HUD again.
This time when the interface flickered on, he whispered to it.
"Echo. Respond."
A pause.
Then:
> "Listening."
He stared at the words.
Not a hallucination. Not random.
Something had truly activated inside the suit—no, inside him.
---
He flipped the notebook to a new page and wrote one word at the top:
> "ECHO."
Beneath it, he scribbled what he now suspected:
Corp Protocol is embedded within me.
Armor isn't just mechanical—it's sympathetic.
Suit may be partial AI… or partially me.
My rebirth wasn't clean.
I brought something through.
And beneath that, the smallest, most dangerous possibility of all:
> "What if the Corp is alive?"