CHAPTER 3:
The pod doors hissed open like a sigh of defeat.
Lena stumbled out first, legs unsteady, the neural lace peeling from her temples with a wet, reluctant sound. The Observatory's vast glass dome arched overhead, but the view was wrong—clouds boiled in impossible colors, violet and bruise-green, as though the sky itself had been infected by the merge.
Marcus followed, face pale, eyes wide. He reached for her arm to steady himself, but she jerked away.
"Don't touch me."
Her voice came out raw, layered—as if two versions of her had spoken at once.
Marcus flinched. "Lena, I didn't know it would—"
"Save it." She pressed her palms to her temples, trying to quiet the storm inside her skull.
Memories that weren't hers—or were, but from branches she'd deliberately severed—flooded in without mercy.
She saw their daughter's first steps in a sunlit kitchen that existed only in Marcus's kept timeline. Felt the weight of a second child in her arms, a boy this time, born two years later. Remembered breastfeeding, sleepless nights, the fierce, exhausting love that had terrified her when it was only theoretical.
And beneath that, darker currents: Marcus in bed with another woman in the timeline where Lena had left early. A redhead named Claire, soft-spoken, eager for the family Lena had refused. The guilt he'd carried. The relief.
All of it poured into her now, unfiltered.
She staggered to the rose arch and gripped it until thorns bit through her gloves.
Marcus approached slowly. "The patch was supposed to stabilize the dominant branch. Mine and yours. Not… not pull everything."
"You lied," she said without turning. "You said it was a reunion merge. This is a full harvest protocol."
He didn't deny it.
Outside, the unnatural lightning forked again, closer this time. The glass vibrated.
Lena turned to face him. "Who's paying you?"
Marcus's jaw tightened. "It's not like that."
"Then explain it to me like I'm not the idiot you clearly think I am."
He exhaled, ran a hand through his hair. "The Institute sold the original patents to ChronoCorp two years ago. They wanted more than clean divorces. They wanted data—real emotional data—for the next-generation companion AIs. But simulated affect wasn't cutting it. They needed authentic residue: love, loss, desire, betrayal. The rawer the better."
"So you volunteered us." Her voice was flat, dangerous.
"I volunteered myself first," he said quickly. "After our divorce, the echoes nearly drove me insane. I saw you everywhere. Heard our daughters laughing in empty rooms. ChronoCorp offered a stabilization trial. All I had to do was feed the system high-intensity emotional events."
"Like remarrying me."
He nodded. "A reunion merge between the original test subjects? It's the holy grail. Enough data to train thousands of AIs. Enough to make them indistinguishable from humans."
Lena laughed, a sound without humor. "And you thought I'd just… go along with being harvested?"
"I thought if we were together again—if we fixed us—you wouldn't care about the rest."
She stared at him, seeing the man she'd loved and the stranger he'd become, superimposed like a double exposure.
"You don't get to fix us, Marcus. You broke us."
A low hum filled the room—not the pod this time, but something deeper, resonating in her bones.
The air shimmered near the pod. A fracture appeared, vertical, like a tear in reality itself. Through it, Lena glimpsed another version of the Observatory: same glass dome, same rose arch, but night instead of day, and filled with people in white coats applauding.
Then Dr. Elara Voss stepped through.
Not a reflection. Not a hologram.
Flesh and blood.
She wore the white coat, hair in that severe knot, eyes cold and triumphant. In her hand, she held a neural suppressor—Institute issue, top-grade.
"Hello, Lena," she said pleasantly. "Or should I say… me?"
Marcus backed away. "Elara—no. You weren't supposed to manifest physically."
Dr. Elara smiled. "You opened the gate wide enough, darling. I simply walked through."
Lena's stomach twisted. This wasn't just an echo. This was her—the version who had never divorced Marcus, who had embraced the children, the career, the power. The version who had stayed at the Institute and risen to director while Lena walked away.
The version who had everything Lena had rejected.
Dr. Elara tilted her head. "You look thin. Unhappy. All that running away didn't suit you."
"Stay out of my head," Lena warned.
"Too late. We're sharing one now." Dr. Elara tapped her temple. "Thanks to Marcus's little harvest party."
Marcus found his voice. "The protocol was supposed to prioritize the primary branch. Lena's and mine."
Dr. Elara laughed. "There is no primary anymore. You smashed three timelines together like cheap glass. Now we all get a vote."
She stepped closer to Marcus, trailing a finger down his cheek. He didn't move, but Lena saw the hunger in his eyes—the same hunger he'd aimed at her moments ago.
In Dr. Elara's timeline, they were still married. Still in love. Still powerful.
"You kept me," Dr. Elara murmured to him. "All these years. Our girls are teenagers now. Top of their classes. They miss their father when he's… away."
Marcus swallowed. "I didn't abandon you. I was trying to bring her back."
"You can't have us both," Dr. Elara said softly. "That's the point of branching. One choice, one life."
Lena felt the possessiveness rising in her chest like bile. Not love—something territorial, primal. The merge had awakened it.
She stepped between them. "He's not yours anymore."
Dr. Elara's eyes flicked to her. "He never stopped being mine. You're the ghost."
The fracture in the air widened. More shapes moved beyond it—shadowy figures, other echoes beginning to press through.
Lena grabbed Marcus's wrist. "We need to shut this down. Now."
He nodded, fear overriding everything else. "The pod has an emergency override. Neural disconnect and branch severance."
They ran to the pod. Dr. Elara didn't stop them—she simply watched, amused.
Marcus initiated the override sequence. The pod lights flared red.
But nothing happened.
Dr. Elara held up the suppressor. "I disabled it on my side hours ago. You're not severing anything tonight."
Marcus slammed his fist against the controls. "Damn it!"
Lightning struck the dome. Glass spider-webbed but held.
Lena's mind raced. There was another way—an old failsafe she'd built into the original protocol, hidden even from Marcus. A manual neural kill switch buried in the lace firmware.
But it required physical access to both laces simultaneously. And consent from both subjects.
She met Marcus's eyes. "Do you trust me?"
He hesitated only a second. "Yes."
"Liar," she whispered, but she was already moving.
She yanked the spare lace from the pod's emergency kit—the one meant for technicians—and slapped it onto Dr. Elara's temple before she could react. The filaments burrowed in.
Dr. Elara hissed, swatting at it, but the connection locked.
Lena jammed the second lace onto Marcus, then the third onto herself.
Three-way link.
The world exploded into shared consciousness.
She felt everything at once:
Dr. Elara's cold ambition, her love for Marcus sharpened into something possessive and sharp.
Marcus's guilt, his obsession, his terror that he'd lost them both.
Her own rage, grief, and—buried deep—a love that hadn't died, only mutated.
The pod screamed overload warnings.
Lena dove into the firmware, fingers flying over the emergency panel. Found the kill switch.
It flashed: IRREVOCABLE SEVERANCE. ALL BRANCHES TERMINATED. EMOTIONAL RESIDUE PURGED.
No second chances.
She hovered over EXECUTE.
Dr. Elara's voice echoed in the shared link, furious: "If you do this, you kill us all. Our daughters—"
"They were never mine," Lena said aloud.
Marcus's voice, small: "Lena, please. We can fix—"
"There's no fixing this." She looked at him—at both of them. "You wanted all of us. You can't have it."
She hit EXECUTE.
The world went white.
When sensation returned, Lena was on the floor of the Observatory. Alone.
The fracture was gone. The pod dark and silent. The sky outside normal winter gray.
Marcus lay a few feet away, unconscious but breathing.
Dr. Elara was simply… not there.
Lena crawled to the glass wall and pressed her forehead to the cold pane.
The echoes were quiet.
For the first time in three years, her mind was her own.
But as she sat there, watching snow begin to fall, something shifted inside her chest—not emptiness this time, but a new weight.
Memories that didn't belong to any single branch.
A daughter's laugh. A son's first word. A life she'd never lived, but now carried fragments of anyway.
The severance hadn't purged everything.
Some residue always remained.
And somewhere, in the quiet after the storm, Lena felt the vast hungry thing that had watched the harvest stir again—disappointed, but patient.
It would wait for the next merge.
Marcus groaned, stirring.
Lena didn't move to help him.
She stayed by the window, watching the snow cover the world in white, and wondered if closure was just another word for haunting.