The chamber wasn't large, but the room insisted on pretending it was. The edges shimmered in and out of depth, with walls that extended infinitely in one direction and collapsed into stuttering render loops in another. The floor was fractured in long, horizontal bands—half of them reflective, the other half transparent. The ceiling continued to cycle through architectural templates, each barely lasting five seconds before shuffling into the next, like the system was polling corrupted memory blocks and getting no consensus.
I leaned against the nearest solid structure I could find, which resembled a vending machine fused with a church pulpit. It hummed faintly beneath my shoulder. I had no idea what it was meant to be, and I didn't care. My legs were shaking again, and it wasn't just from the pain. The last encounter hadn't just cost us strength—it had torn something loose inside me. The way the echo had used Lily's laughter, her posture, the subtle inflections of how she used to ask "Dad?"…
It had been wrong.
Crude.
But effective.
Even knowing it wasn't her—even with Patch at my side—I'd felt something falter.
Patch sat beside me now, her hind leg fully off the ground. Her exposed wiring flickered in a slow pulse, still active, but slowing. She hadn't spoken in several minutes. The system message about rest was gone, but its warning still hovered at the edge of my awareness—like an itch in the back of my skull I couldn't scratch.
"I know you're still running diagnostics," I murmured, glancing down at her. "But if you collapse, I'm not carrying you."
Patch blinked once. Then again.
Finally, she said, "I am aware."
I smiled a little, in spite of everything. "I'll drag you, though."
"I would prefer you not."
The banter was faint. Almost forced.
But it helped.
The room didn't seem to notice us anymore. It felt passive. Or maybe exhausted. As if Nullspace itself had spent too many cycles processing something it couldn't contain and was now idling, crashed in the background of its own runtime.
After a few minutes, I pushed off the makeshift structure and helped Patch to her feet. She accepted the gesture with quiet dignity, letting me stabilise her without comment. Together, we crossed the chamber's midpoint, where the textures on the floor began to blur again—bleeding into a long, narrow tunnel formed of half-loaded geometry and threadbare logic.
The system wasn't opening doors anymore.
It was leaving crawlspaces.
We entered the tunnel side by side at first, but it didn't take long for the space to squeeze in around us. The floor remained level, but the walls angled inward like a throat tightening around a word that refused to be spoken. Patch lowered herself instinctively, shoulder plates brushing against the uneven surfaces. I ducked low and followed, my hands scraping against cold textureless render beneath a ceiling that blinked out of reality every few steps. It was like walking through a place still deciding whether it had the right to exist.
The temperature wasn't cold—not physically—but Nullspace had a way of mimicking absence. Warmth didn't fade.
It was replaced.
And here, in this tunnel, that absence was total.
The crawlspace hummed with silence—not the kind I'd grown used to, but a new kind. A sterile, humming vacuum. Every breath sounded too loud. Every heartbeat echoed like the knock of boots on metal stairs.
We pressed on.
Every twenty feet, the corridor attempted to open into something larger, only to fold in on itself—render attempts collapsing before they finished, leaving jagged geometric shadows on the walls and static-filled gaps in the floor. Occasionally, memory would try to assert itself. A child's shoe rendered in perfect detail, then vanished. A broken wall fixture shaped like the one I'd installed in Lily's old hallway. Each echo flickered, failed, and vanished into thread death.
My breath came rougher now. The air tasted flat. My hand was still bleeding—though not freely. It had crusted against my sleeve in a gritty layer that stuck to the inside of my hoodie. I'd lost the dressing during the fight. My other hand gripped the edge of the crawlspace wall as I turned into a narrowing curve, the corridor twisting unnaturally to the right as if mimicking the structure of a spine.
Patch stumbled slightly ahead of me. Her left rear leg clipped the floor, a spark trailing up her flank. She paused.
"You need a break," I said, voice low but insistent.
Patch didn't respond at first.
"I can't keep stopping," she said finally. "Not here."
"Why not?"
She looked back at me. Her eyes flickered out of sync again before stabilising. "Because it's watching again."
I didn't need clarification.
The overlay hadn't triggered another exposure warning, but I could feel it too. That shift in the crawlspace's pressure. That sense of being watched—not through cameras or system interfaces, but by the environment itself. It wasn't the omniscient gaze of a god. It was the unnerving stare of a dying machine, curious whether the anomaly in its wiring would keep moving.
We pressed forward again, but slower this time. Every footstep became a risk assessment. The tunnel began to twist downward now, descending into what Patch classified as a compression zone—a narrowing of geometry where data was forced to recompile faster than the system could regulate it. The floor tilted gradually. Then steeply. Before long, I was bracing one hand against the wall and one against Patch's shoulder to keep myself upright.
Finally, the floor curved forward—curling into a bowl-shaped bend that spat us out into a circular room no bigger than a supply closet. The moment we entered, the crawlspace sealed behind us.
No shimmer. No warning.
Just a fold of logic that erased the way we'd come.
The door—or the gap, or whatever Nullspace had used to open the crawlspace—was gone. One moment it had existed behind us, a ragged outline of mismatched geometry that had at least implied motion. Now, there was only smooth wall. Seamless. Featureless. A pale, pulsing surface with no texture definition, no corner seams, no sign it had ever led anywhere.
I turned in place.
The room was circular. Six paces across at most. No furnishings. No console. No prompt. Just an empty dome of inert code, like a storage cell forgotten during a patch.
Patch limped once around the perimeter, claws clicking faintly on the floor. Her movements were stiffer now, though she didn't falter. The fracture across her flank had stopped sparking—but only because something had stopped responding altogether. I noticed one of her rear LEDs had gone fully dark.
She sat in the centre of the room, tail curled around her body, eyes dimmed but still tracking. I joined her a moment later, lowering myself slowly against the curve of the wall.
The silence between us wasn't uncomfortable.
It was familiar now.
A shared recognition of the moment. Not safe. But survivable.
Barely.
I pulled my knees in and rested my arms on them. My injured hand throbbed under the pressure. I didn't even bother to check it. The system wouldn't heal me here, and there was no reason to look at how bad it had gotten.
Not until I had options.
"You said something earlier," I murmured. "That it's watching again."
Patch blinked slowly. "Yes."
I stared at the far wall. "Then why did it let us come here?"
"Because it's not ready to show us the next part."
I didn't answer that.
We sat like that for a while. Quiet. Breathing. Watching nothing.
After a time, I let my head rest back against the wall. My eyes closed. Not to sleep.
Not fully.
But because I couldn't keep them open anymore.
That's when the room began to shift.
Just a little.
A flicker in the peripheral dark.
A shimmer of movement.
Nothing real.
Not yet.
But memory was coming.