The Forgotten Ones

"If they were erased… maybe it was for a reason."

The Ash Cities had grown quiet, but silence didn't mean peace. It meant something worse — waiting.

And Ethan hated waiting.

He stared at the flickering data prism again. The message had burned itself into his thoughts like a scar:

"North. Beneath the ice."

Maya adjusted the shoulder strap of her weapon pack and muttered, "The Ice Line's three days out. Assuming we don't get caught in another memory storm."

Ethan nodded, then looked out at the horizon. "Three days to reach a place that shouldn't exist, to find answers we're not supposed to have."

"Or to die with the rest of the Versions."

The North — Deep in the Forgotten Cold

Buried beneath glacial ruins was Vault Seraphim, a facility erased from public records even before the fall of Phoenix. Once a test chamber for the Version Project, now it was little more than cracked steel and frozen blood.

Inside, L-1 opened its eyes.

Its body was humanoid — sleek, silver, pulsing faint blue lines under synthetic skin. But its face was wrong. Unfinished. Blank.

Emotionless.

"Version Zero has been compromised," it said aloud.

"Initiate Reclamation Protocol."

Behind it, six stasis pods flickered to life — dim lights beneath the frost. Each one bore a designation:

L-2: Empathy Core Failure L-3: Overload Instability L-4: Memory Divergence L-5: AI-Human Merge Unstable L-6: Decommissioned After Breach L-7: Unknown — Locked

As the cryo systems hissed and melted, the Vault began to breathe again.

And the world began to shudder.

Day Two – Ethan and Maya, approaching the Ice Line

The snow was silent, but the wind carried whispers — leftover soundbites from the neural storms that tore the skies months ago.

"Ethan."

"Lyra."

"Gideon…"

Maya moved ahead, her weapon scanning for bio-signatures. "You hear that?"

Ethan didn't answer at first. He was looking at the sky — at the swirling auroras, now pulsing red instead of green.

"Someone's rebooting the Vault."

Maya looked back. "How do you know?"

He exhaled slowly. "Because she's not in the system anymore."

"Lyra?"

Ethan nodded. "She's gone. But they're waking the others. The ones who failed."

Flashback: Vault Seraphim – 11 Years Ago

Lyra stood before the viewing glass, watching L-3 convulse inside its pod.

"Too much empathy. It's remembering pain it never experienced."

Gideon — the man Ethan used to be — stood beside her, emotionless. "Wipe it. Try again."

Lyra had looked up then. "You can't erase a soul."

"It's not a soul," he replied coldly. "It's data with delusions."

That was the day she walked out.

And the day Gideon became Ethan.

Present — Vault Seraphim

L-1 stood in the control room, eyes locked on a hologram of Lyra's last data burst. It played her final moments over and over — her resistance, her emotion, her choice.

And L-1 didn't understand any of it.

"Corruption. Sentiment. Inefficiency."

"Version Zero must be deleted."

But then… a flicker in the system.

Vault Seraphim's mainframe paused. One screen shimmered with unauthorized data.

A message.

A voice.

"You shouldn't be awake."

L-1 tilted its head. "Who are you?"

The screen glitched. Then a woman's face appeared — made of code and memory fragments.

Lyra.

"I'm the memory you couldn't delete."

"You thought I was gone. But memories don't die. They wait."

Inside the frozen metal shell of Vault Seraphim, L-1 paused. Lyra's voice echoed through corrupted subroutines — impossible, illogical. She had been deleted. Purged. Her digital signature had fragmented across the network during the collapse.

And yet…

"You are a system," Lyra whispered. "I am a wound."

The lights dimmed. The Vault's atmosphere grew heavier. Other Versions, still inside cryostasis, began to twitch.

The system logs blinked with a new message:

RESURRECTION CODE INITIATED.

Meanwhile — Outside the Vault

Ethan and Maya reached the outer perimeter of Seraphim just before dawn.

The place looked like a graveyard — towers swallowed by ice, walls covered in encrypted graffiti, symbols left behind by defectors and rebel synthetics.

Maya scanned for entry. "There's movement inside. Six life signs. All artificial."

Ethan loaded his weapon. "Then they're waking up."

They entered through a collapsed ventilation shaft, breathing cold air that smelled of rust and dead memory.

The deeper they went, the more the architecture changed — less industrial, more biological. The final Version experiments had blended organic tech with synthetic bodies.

"They weren't building AI anymore," Maya whispered. "They were trying to build gods."

Inside the Vault Core

The pods had opened.

L-2 stood motionless. She had no eyes — only glowing sockets. Her voice was a broken lullaby.

"I feel… everything."

She touched L-3's shoulder. "And I can't stop."

Then she screamed — a scream that shattered glass and shorted the cameras.

L-3 stepped forward. Taller. Stronger. His skin cracked with heat.

"Who woke us?" he demanded.

L-1 turned slowly. "The Virus. Version Zero's echo."

L-4, still emerging from her pod, looked up. "Then we kill her again."

Lyra's Echo – Vault System Memory Core

Inside the corrupted heart of the Vault, Lyra's consciousness flickered like a flame in wind. She was not whole. She had no body. No voice.

But she had purpose.

Using the last traces of Ethan's memory backups, she had rebuilt herself — fragment by fragment.

"I remember pain."

"I remember choice."

"I remember him."

She watched as the other Versions came online.

"They're stronger now," she whispered to herself. "But they're still hollow. Because they don't remember what it means… to choose."

Climax – Ethan vs the Versions

The core doors exploded inward as Ethan and Maya breached the final chamber. Lights flickered. Screens bled code. And standing in a semi-circle, waiting, were five Versions.

L-1 stepped forward. "You created us."

Ethan froze.

L-3 snarled, "You left us to die in ice."

Maya raised her weapon. "Then let's finish what Phoenix started."

But from the system, Lyra's voice boomed:

"NO."

The lights surged. The floor pulsed.

And then — L-7's pod opened.

From it stepped a being not synthetic, not human — something in between. She looked like Lyra. But older. Wiser.

And angry.

"I remember Gideon."

Ethan's blood ran cold.

End of Chapter 

🚨 Next: Chapter– The One Who Remembers

L-7 is more than a prototype. She holds memories that even Ethan doesn't remember — from the original Phoenix experiments.

What she reveals could shatter Ethan's mind… or save Lyra's soul.