The aftermath of the RedQueen echo left the air tasting like static. Every breath I took felt heavy with emotional debris—not just from the fight, but from the recognition. Even though the echo had been unstable, nothing more than a corrupted rendering of the woman I loved, the pieces had been real enough to wound. Patch remained close, her breathing irregular—or what passed for breathing in her biomech form. Her damaged leg dragged slightly more now, the crack in her flank leaking thin trails of light with every step, like Nullspace itself was trying to crawl in through the gaps.
We didn't speak for a long time. Not as we left the rotunda. Not as the corridor rebuilt itself piece by piece ahead of us, the walls trying to make sense of which memory to follow. Each turn was a branch of uncertainty. Nullspace didn't rebuild corridors the same way twice. Some corners looped back on themselves like recursive logic. Others flickered to nowhere, vanishing mid-stride before Patch's claws could touch down. It took all of her motion tracking and my intuition to navigate forward—my memory of space, her read of motion. Together, we made just enough sense for the world to tolerate us.
Eventually, the system began to narrow the path. Literally. The walls pressed inward, compressing the hallway to little more than a crawlspace. Patch crouched lower to stay ahead, her frame humming with low-frequency defence logic. I followed, shoulder dragging against code-streaked stone, the bandage on my palm soaked and frayed. I was dehydrated. Exhausted. Every scrape of metal echoed down the tunnel like footsteps that didn't belong to us. By the time the crawlspace finally opened into a chamber, I was barely standing.
The space we entered didn't resemble Nullspace as it had. The room was larger, circular, and strangely warm. Lights pulsed from the floor tiles like breathing—slow, rhythmic. As we stepped inside, I felt a vibration crawl across my skin. Not seismic. Not environmental.
Emotional.
Like the memory of a voice held just behind the ear.
[FRAGMENT SIGNAL DETECTED]
[CONTEXT: LILY]
[ANCHOR TRACE: ACTIVE]
[STABILITY: LOW // HAZARD CLASS: HIGH]
I didn't need Patch to interpret that one. I stepped forward instinctively and felt my stomach twist. The room had texture. Not just visual. Personal. The walls were etched with shifting shapes I recognised—one corner showed an outline of a gaming chair, another flickered with bits of childlike posters, only they were off, too sharp, too clean, or rendered in the wrong colour palette. The centre of the room was occupied by what might have been a bed. It had form. Legs. A blanket draped awkwardly over it. But the materials were all wrong. Wires instead of cloth. Mesh for mattress. And where a pillow should have been, there was a cube of raw data still glitching.
I stepped forward, breath caught. I'd seen parts of Lily's room recreated before—in drawings, in saved screenshots—but this was built from memory, not documentation. And something had gone terribly wrong. The toy chest at the far side of the room was stuck in a render loop, opening, closing, opening again, its hinges making a corrupted squeak with every frame. Stuffed animals sat nearby, but none of them were quite right. One had too many eyes. Another barked on repeat, glitching through dog barks and television laughter.
Patch circled the perimeter once, scanning. Then she sat, eyes narrowed. "Fragment instability is extreme. This was once memory. It is now threat."
I exhaled, rubbing the back of my neck. "We're going in anyway."
Patch remained beside the entrance, scanning the room with her gaze like a turret with a soul. The glint in her eyes tracked each detail—the jittering seams of the memory constructs, the endless loop of the toy chest's lid clapping open and shut, the stuttering flicker of light at the ceiling where a mobile might have once hung. Everything here was a memory, but none of it belonged anymore. This wasn't nostalgia. It was grief with the code still raw.
I took another step, instinctively holding my breath as if the world might snap in half at the sound of air. I moved closer to the malformed bed, eyes tracing the too-straight stitching of the blanket, the off-centre patterning of what should have been cartoon shapes, now replaced with abstract sigils—like the system was trying to substitute joy from a corrupted font file.
I didn't have to say her name aloud. The moment my gaze settled on the centre of the bed, the system responded.
[MEMORY NODE IDENTIFIED: LILY THREAD]
[STABILITY: 14%]
[INTERACTION: DANGEROUS]
[RECOMMENDED: OBSERVATION ONLY]
The message didn't dissuade me.
I took another step.
A soft chime rang out from under the bed. Something small. Familiar. The sound of a plastic toy shifting against the laminate floor. I crouched, slowly lowering myself down. The pain in my side flared again. My hand throbbed in rhythm with my heart.
Beneath the bed sat a single object.
A block.
Blue.
Scuffed at the edges.
It was identical to the ones Lily used to stack near her old monitor during streaming setups. She said it made her feel calm, gave her fingers something to fidget with. I stared at it, breath stalled halfway through my chest.
"Patch…" I whispered.
"I see it."
I reached forward.
The moment my fingers brushed the surface, the air changed. The light snapped into high contrast. The render loop of the room paused mid-frame, the chest halting with its lid half-raised. Even the walls stopped breathing.
Then the floor screamed.
Not audibly. Not with sound. With force.
Lines of red pulsed through the seams, branching out from where I touched the block like veins tearing open across the floor. The bed exploded in reverse, unfolding like it had been hiding something, and from within the centre, a form began to rise.
Patch jumped between me and the forming echo in less than a second, her claws already extended, her plating shifting back into combat stance.
[WARNING: MEMORY CONFLICT DETECTED]
[ECHO FORMING: LILY // VERSION: INCOMPLETE]
[BEHAVIOR: UNKNOWN]
[TETHER INITIATOR: NULLPOINTER]
The figure took shape too quickly.
Too violently.
It rose like being yanked by invisible strings, limbs snapping into place, one shoulder rendered backward, hair untextured and floating independently from its head. A face began to form, but only partially. Just one eye. Then two. Then none. A mouth that opened, but didn't speak.
It didn't look at me.
It looked through me.
Then it pointed.
Not with a gesture.
With intent.
And the system howled.
The howl wasn't sound. It was data pressure—a shift in Nullspace's lattice that rippled across the room like the code itself had flinched. The flickering posters warped into white static, tearing off the walls. The ceiling glitched, disappeared, then snapped back as a dome of flickering skybox texture, the illusion of a child's ceiling spinning with stars that burned too hot. One of the corrupted stuffed animals burst into a stream of corrupted polygons, melting back into the floor.
The echo that stood in front of us no longer tried to resemble Lily.
It tried to resemble my memory of her.
And it was failing.
The voice that slipped from its lips was small at first. Light. Tremulous. Almost perfect. "Dad?" it asked.
Then its mouth looped. The sound continued, breaking, repeating, pitch-shifting into a whine.
"Dad. Dad? Da...ad. DaDaDaDaDa—"
Patch growled, louder now. "This is not her."
"I know," I said, too fast.
The echo took a step forward.
It didn't move like a person. It shuffled—limbs bending on the wrong axis, knees snapping too straight. Its head tilted back and forth like a broken doll trying to nod, the eyes unblinking, mouth still open. The corrupted voice loop stuttered again, then changed tone entirely. It began laughing.
Childlike.
Then glitch-warped.
Then deeper.
Then Lou's laugh.
Then mine.
Patch stepped forward, body half-crouched, voice tight. "Fragment is spiralling. System cannot resolve it. It is building from layered memory bleed."
I forced myself to stand. "It's using pieces of her to test me."
"Yes," Patch said. "To provoke instability."
As if hearing her, the echo convulsed. Its entire form shifted once, expanded, doubling in size before snapping back to the shape of a young girl. It opened its arms. The fingers on one hand split into too many digits.
I stepped forward, ignoring the burn in my hand and the fear dragging at the corners of my reason. "I'm not leaving this room without something of her," I said. "If there's a real fragment in there, we can save it."
Patch didn't argue. She moved to my side, glancing once toward the spinning ceiling.
"We will do it together."