The Breach

There was a scream.

But it didn’t belong to Marley.

It was mine.

I gasped awake, choking on air like I’d been held underwater. The sensation was violent—like being peeled out of a dream with a crowbar. I was back in Daniel’s apartment, but my body didn’t feel right. My arms were locked, twitching. My legs wouldn’t respond. I was cold. And my ears rang with silence so loud it became its own kind of noise.

“Eliza.” Daniel’s voice was near. Panicked. Sharp. “You’re okay. You’re out. Look at me.”

I couldn’t. My eyes were open, but they weren’t focusing. Everything trembled—light, shadow, air. My thoughts stuttered like skipping tape.

Then, slowly, the static cleared.

Daniel was crouched in front of me, sweat beading down his temple, hands clenching and unclenching like he didn’t know what to do with them. The helmet device was discarded beside me. The earpiece lay cracked on the floor, sparking faintly.

“You flatlined for five seconds,” he said, voice low, like it might shatter something. “No pulse. No eye movement. Just—gone. Then you came back.”

I tried to sit up, but the floor tilted sideways.

Daniel caught me. “Easy. Your brain’s still catching up.”

“Marley,” I breathed. “She was there.”

“I saw.” He gestured to his laptop, still glowing faintly from the corner of the room. “Whatever they fed you, it wasn’t just a loop. It was a controlled simulation with sensory sync. That’s bleeding-edge tech, Eliza. Government-adjacent.”

“I touched her,” I whispered. “I felt her. She flipped pancakes and told me I looked like I’d seen a ghost.”

Daniel handed me a bottle of water. “And the black box?”

“They sent another one. Inside the loop. With a threat. They said if I ‘deviate again,’ she dies for real.”

Daniel’s jaw clenched. “They’re escalating.”

I drank mechanically. The water didn’t taste like anything. My brain still felt unplugged—like it wasn’t tethered to the rest of me properly. I looked at my hands. They were shaking.

“I bled,” I said. “In the loop. From my nose. Marley saw it. That’s not supposed to happen, right? If it’s a simulation?”

Daniel looked grim. “You brought a symptom out with you. That’s a bleed-through. Which means your connection to her, to the memory of her, is destabilizing their protocol.”

I stood on unsteady legs. “They didn’t erase her completely.”

“No,” Daniel agreed. “Because they couldn’t.”

I turned in a slow circle, taking in his apartment again. The lights were back. The hum had stopped. But everything still felt off-center, like the gravity in the room was just slightly wrong.

“What are they trying to do?” I asked. “Force me to forget her? Punish me for remembering?”

Daniel walked over to his desk and brought back the journal—the one that had flipped open on its own before the reset attempt. He held it out to me.

“Here,” he said. “Read the last entry. It wasn’t there before you went under.”

I opened the book. The ink was fresh, smudged in places like it hadn’t dried properly. The handwriting was mine, but jagged, erratic.

Subject M-12 exhibited resistance to full reset. Loop integrity failed at 63%. Emotional tether to Variable R-7 (Rhodes, Marley) remains unbroken. Recommend relocation or termination.

I read it twice. Then again. “They’re writing reports on me.”

Daniel nodded. “And storing them in your own hand. You’re the system’s archive and its subject. That’s how deep they’ve gone. They’ve made your brain the database.”

“Relocation or termination,” I repeated. “What does that mean? For her? For me?”

Daniel hesitated. “We don’t know what ‘termination’ means in their framework. Could be memory wipe. Could be institutionalization. Could be worse.”

My skin prickled with cold. “They’re going to erase her again. Or bury her somewhere deeper.”

“Unless we get there first.”

Daniel moved to his laptop and started typing. “The loop ran from a source. They tried to hide the origin, but they couldn’t stop the signal echo. There was a delay—three milliseconds—on your neural sync when the pancakes hit the skillet. That’s not a hallucination delay. That’s physical relay.”

“You’re saying it was streaming in?”

“Exactly. From a physical location.”

My pulse jumped. “Where?”

He pointed at the screen. “Coordinates trace back to a node near the East River. An old ferry terminal that’s been ‘under renovation’ for three years. Private property. No records. Zero Google presence.”

I didn’t hesitate. “We go now.”

“Eliza—”

“Now, Daniel. Before they relocate her. Before they reset me again.”

He studied me for a beat. Then he nodded.

We dressed in silence. I pulled on my thickest coat, shoved the cracked earpiece into my pocket, and grabbed the notebook. Daniel packed tools I didn’t recognize—cables, a portable EEG monitor, two flash drives, and something that looked suspiciously like a homemade EMP.

“I can’t guarantee what we’ll find,” he said as we stepped into the hallway. “But if she’s real—and you’re this connected—they couldn’t have wiped her clean. They had to contain her.”

I locked eyes with him. “Then let’s break the containment.”

The streets were cold and empty, the kind of late-night quiet that feels stitched together by secrets. We didn’t talk much on the way. My thoughts were knots. Marley’s voice still echoed in my ears. The simulation had been too vivid. Too specific. You can’t fake a memory that real unless it was real. Which meant Marley was still out there. Trapped in someone’s machine.

The terminal loomed like a corpse on the edge of the water—gray stone, boarded windows, rusted gates. An old sign still clung to the wall: EAST RIVER TRANSIT – CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. Vines had grown up through the cracks. But behind the decay was something colder. Cleaner.

“They’re using the building as a mask,” Daniel whispered. “Infrared shows heat signatures inside. At least three.”

We slipped in through a side grate Daniel pried open with a screwdriver. The tunnel beyond was dark and low-ceilinged, lined with pipes that hissed intermittently.

After thirty feet, we hit a door. Steel. No handle.

Daniel plugged a black box into the panel and waited. A blue light blinked. Then turned green.

The door hissed open.

Inside was a hallway bathed in white light. Sterile. Too bright. The kind of light that feels weaponized.

Daniel’s voice was barely a breath. “This isn’t just tech. This is corporate.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed at the walls. Embedded screens, silent and dark, tracked our movement with motion sensors. One flickered as we passed—just once. Then black.

“This is memory architecture,” he whispered. “Synthetic environments. Lab-level containment. They built all of this to isolate variables.”

We passed a room with a glass window. Inside: a single chair facing a screen. Electrodes on the armrests. A helmet, identical to the one Daniel used, but sleeker. Polished. Like it had been used hundreds of times.

Then—down the hall—we saw her.

Just a glimpse.

Through another window, across a room filled with machines and blinking lights.

Marley.

Slumped on a cot. Hooked to wires. Eyes closed. Lips parted like she was whispering to someone in her sleep.

I nearly collapsed.

“Marley,” I breathed.

Daniel pulled me back into the shadows. “Wait. We have to know what they’re doing. One wrong move and they’ll scrub this whole place.”

I nodded, even though every part of me wanted to crash through the glass and rip the wires from her skin.

We crept forward. Another room. Another monitor. This one displayed files. Open windows. Code. A name:

PROJECT mnemosyne

Status: ACTIVE

Subject M-12: Noncompliant

Variable R-7: Quarantine Level: RED

Priority: Immediate Reset or Disposal

Then a command line.

RUN RESET_PROT_M12

Queued for Execution

I didn’t hesitate.

I slammed the nearest keyboard. Canceled the script. Overwrote the next command with gibberish.

Daniel shoved a drive into the console, copying everything.

An alarm blared.

Red lights strobed.

From down the hall, voices—shouting, running.

“Go,” I hissed.

We burst into the room.

Marley’s eyes opened just as I reached her.

“Eliza?” she croaked.

“I’ve got you,” I said, tearing the electrodes free. “I found you.”

And then—

The system shut down.

Every light. Every screen. Blackout.

Daniel cursed. “They killed the mainframe!”

But I didn’t care.

Because Marley’s hand was in mine.

Warm.

Real.

And she was crying.