12. Free
"Anna," he called. "Come here."
No.
No.
NO.
She bolted.
"Anna, wait!" Adam's voice was firm, edged with concern—too convincing, too real. Footsteps followed, steady, relentless.
"You're not real!" Claire's voice was ragged, her breath coming too fast. "None of this is real!"
Adam's steps didn't falter. "Baby, please. You're scaring me."
Scaring him?
No.
She was the one terrified.
Claire's hands shook as she grabbed the edge of the desk, using it to push herself forward. The walls felt too close, like they were breathing. The air thickened, warping around her like static trying to take shape.
She turned a corner. A door.
A way out.
She ran toward it—
But Adam's hand caught her wrist.
Her world collapsed.
Warmth. Familiarity.
A feeling she couldn't recognize but somehow still knew.
She wrenched free, staggering back, heart hammering against her ribs. "DON'T TOUCH ME!"
Adam's expression shattered. His mouth parted slightly, eyes dark with something she couldn't name.
"Anna," he whispered, voice barely above a breath.
That name.
That damn name.
She gritted her teeth. "WILL YOU STOP CALLING ME THAT''
Adam's brows pulled together, hurt flashing across his face. "What are you talking about?"
She backed toward the door. Her fingers trembled as they closed around the handle, " I don't belong here....I WANNA BE FREE!!! LEAVE ME ALONE!!! PLEASE "
Adam's entire demeanor changed.
His shoulders squared. The warmth in his eyes dulled into something else.
Something calculating.
"Anna," he said again, but this time, it wasn't soft.
It was a command.
A sharp pain stabbed behind Claire's eyes. She winced. A buzzing noise—low, droning—coiled through her skull.
The walls flickered.
"You're tired," Adam said, stepping closer, voice impossibly even. "You need to lie down."
She shook her head. "No. I need to wake up."
Adam exhaled, as if disappointed.
"Wake up?" he echoed, tilting his head.
The buzzing grew louder.
Claire stumbled.
Adam sighed. "Oh, Anna..."
The whole room trembled.
Claire's vision warped. The ceiling stretched, the walls rippled, Adam's face—
Flickered.
Like a screen glitching—like something struggling to hold its shape.
"Anna," he repeated.
Claire clamped her hands over her ears, screaming against the noise.
And then—
She ran-
Again the voices
"She's not cooperating"
"Wipe her again"
"Destabilizing Patient 024"
And there....Claire—no, Patient 024—lay frozen in realization, the beeping monitors around her pulsed erratically, as if responding to the truth unraveling inside her mind.
Dr. Evelyn Crane turned away, pressing a button on the console beside her. "Initiate memory reset. Override resistance."
The doctors beside her nodding on her orders.
A low mechanical hum filled the room. The IV drip beside her bed pulsed with a faint blue light. Something was coming.
Claire's body tensed.
No.
She couldn't let them erase her again.
She's already a mess
Her memories... her muscles... Those feelings
Nothing are in her control now
If she gets erased.. it's over !
No!!
She can't forget.
A whisper stirred at the edges of her mind.
Not a voice. Not yet. Just the ghost of something waiting.
She swallowed, her throat dry.
Maybe she was nothing more than a failed experiment. A mind stuck in an endless loop.
But she had felt them.
She had heard them.
Adam.
The others.
They had spoken to her when no one else could. They had reached her.
Could they do it again?
Her breath trembled.
Her body felt impossibly heavy, sinking into the hospital bed, the IV drip pulling her down like an anchor.
Her vision blurred. The blue pulse of the liquid snaking through the tubes grew brighter, spreading into her veins.
Her mind was slipping.
She was slipping.
Claire—Anna—024—**whoever she was—**was dissolving into nothing.
Her lips barely moved.
"Please..."
A single word. A whisper.
A plea.
And Then—They Answered.
At first, it was just a shift. A flicker.
The light overhead buzzed—once, twice—before darkening into something unnatural.
The steady rhythm of the heart monitors faltered.
And then—
The room groaned.
Not in a way metal groans, not like wires straining under pressure.
It was deeper. Older.
Like something buried beneath the surface had begun to stir.
Claire's pulse spiked.
Dr. Crane noticed it too.
Her hands hovered over the console, fingers tightening. "No," she whispered. "That's not possible."
But it was.
Because they were here.
The screens on the walls flickered, static bleeding across the data like ink seeping through paper.
The air grew heavier, colder.
The fluorescent bulbs above shattered.
Glass rained down in slow motion, catching the dim glow of the pulsing monitors.
And in the reflection of the shards—they appeared.
Faint outlines at first. Shadows with no faces. But then—
They solidified.
Adam stood at the front.
He wasn't flickering anymore. He wasn't just a ghost of the system.
He was here. Really here.
And behind him, the others followed.
Their faces, once hollow and distant, were sharper now. Clearer.
The missing.
The erased.
The ones who had been reduced to whispers in the dark.
And now—
They were staring directly at Dr. Crane.
Her breath hitched.
"No," she choked out. "You're gone. You're not real."
But they were.
And this time—they would not be ignored.
Claire's chest burned, her body shaking, but she forced herself to move.
She turned her head, barely able to lift her arm.
And when she did—
Adam's gaze met hers.
His expression was unreadable.
But in the static-ridden silence, his voice came through, steady and sure.
"You found us."
The echoes rippled around her, their forms shifting between light and shadow.
And then—
They surged forward.
The room shattered.
As the echoes descended, Claire felt the weight of them, pressing into her mind like a tidal wave of memories.
Not hers.
Theirs.
Flashes of their lives, their pain, their erasure. Every moment stolen from them.
And now, they were taking it back.
The facility shuddered.
The fluorescent lights burst, plunging the lab into flickering darkness.
Dr. Crane screamed.
Dr. Evelyn Crane took a step back, her hands gripping the console like a lifeline.
The machines screamed in protest, monitors flashing red warnings that flickered between gibberish and corrupted code. The air itself warped, twisting in unnatural ways, as if reality was being rewritten in real time.
The missing were no longer just ghosts in the system.
"No," Evelyn whispered. "No, no, no—this isn't happening."
"NOOOO!!!!!!.... "
Dr. Evelyn Crane was not afraid of death.
She was afraid of ceasing to exist.
Of being unwritten.
Of being forgotten.
And .. they knew it... Only THEY DID ...
They had no bodies to fight her with. No hands to strangle her. No weapons to tear her apart.
But they had power.
The power of the system she had built.
The power of the memories she had erased.
The temperature around her dropped—not like a chill, but like a vacuum sucking the warmth out of her existence.
The machines in the lab began to glitch.
Numbers flickered. Warnings filled the screens.
> WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED.
WARNING: SYSTEM OVERRIDE IN PROGRESS.
WARNING: REWRITING CORE PARAMETERS—
Her fingers flew across the controls, desperate to override, to reset, to erase—but nothing responded. The system was no longer hers to control.
Reset it. Reboot it.
Nothing worked.
Because the system wasn't hers anymore.
It belonged to them.
She turned wildly, searching for a way out—but the room wasn't stable anymore.
Adam Lorne stepped forward, his form flickering between flesh and static.
"You stole our lives," he said, his voice impossibly calm. "You turned us into shadows."
The others echoed his words, their whispers threading through the sterile air.
"You erased us."
"You rewrote us."
"You don't get to walk away."
Evelyn's breath hitched.
She turned, looking for an exit—but the walls were gone.
Not broken. Not destroyed. Gone.
The pristine hospital room dissolved into nothingness, as if space itself had forgotten it existed.
Beyond her was only darkness.
A void.
A space without end.
And it was closing in.
"No!" Evelyn stumbled backward. "I built this! I control this! You—you're just—"
She stopped.
Because in the reflection of the remaining monitor—
She saw herself.
Or at least, what was left of her.
Her outline blurred, edges distorting like a glitched image. Her limbs flickered in and out of existence, as though something was rewriting her out of the world she had once commanded.
Her fingers—where were her fingers?
They were there a moment ago.
She lifted her hands, watching in horror as her skin pixelated, breaking apart into fragmented data.
She reached for the console, but her hands phased through it.
She couldn't touch it.
She couldn't touch anything.
She couldn't feel her heartbeat.
She couldn't feel herself.
The voices grew louder, no longer whispers but a chorus of the forgotten.
"You don't get to exist," Adam murmured. "Not anymore."
"ARRRRGGGHHHHHHH....", Evelyn screamed
It was not a human sound.
It was the sound of a mind unraveling, of a being reduced to nothingness.
The last thing Claire saw—before the world collapsed—
Was Dr. Evelyn Crane dissolving into the void.
A woman who had erased so many—now erased herself.
And then—
She was gone.
Her body faded.
Like data being deleted.
And then—
Silence.
The weight in the room lifted. The air felt lighter. The static buzz was gone....
The ghosts—the echoes—were free... The rhythmic breaths of the other clones stopped
They were just laying like dead bodies
The echoes...Their forms shimmered, no longer glitching, no longer trapped between existence and deletion.
One by one, they turned around to Claire.
Adam stepped forward towards Claire ... She was laying on the bed.
"You did it," he murmured.
Claire swallowed, her throat tight. "No. We did."
He gave her a small, knowing smile. "It's time to wake up."
She blinked. "But… my real body and the first copy—"
Adam's gaze softened. "You'll find it. We made sure of it."
The other echoes nodded.
They weren't just lingering anymore. They weren't trapped.
They were guiding her back.
Adam softly kept his palm on her eyes , " rest well for now".
That's all she could remember before falling asleep.
___
A sharp gasp tore from Claire's throat as her eyes snapped open.
Not in a simulation.
Not in a fabricated memory.
But in a real, physical space.
A hospital room.
The beeping of a heart monitor filled her ears. The scent of antiseptic was stronger now—real. The ceiling above her wasn't flickering.
And her arms *her real arms*were covered in needle marks.
IV drips. Wires. Electrodes clinging to her skin.