The First Lie

Silence was supposed to bring clarity.

Instead, it brought ghosts.

Riven moved like a phantom through the understructure of NeoDusk—his breath echoing too loudly in the spaces where Lyra used to live. Every nerve ached. Not from injury, but absence. His mind felt… colder. Quieter. Too quiet.

He tried not to think about her.

Didn't work.

Please don't leave me.

He shook the memory loose and kept moving. The substation logs had traced the surveillance triangulation to an abandoned SynCorp data silo—Sector 3, long buried beneath city flood zones. Whatever was watching him was old. Hidden. Possibly rogue.

It felt like the only place left to go.

But when he opened the rusted hatch—

She was already there.

Dr. Amira Vale.

Standing in the middle of the collapsed server room like she owned the silence.

"You've been following me," Riven said.

She didn't deny it. "You've been following answers."

He stayed in the doorway. "Lyra's offline. You can stop pretending this is for her."

Vale's face didn't soften. "This was never about her. Not really."

Riven laughed—a bitter, broken thing. "Right. It was always about your pet project. Your ghost."

"Not a ghost," she replied. "A reflection. A mirror made of you."

That stopped him.

"What are you talking about?"

Vale stepped closer, carefully, like one wrong word might collapse him entirely.

"You think you built her from scratch," she said. "You didn't. You triggered her. She was already alive."

His mouth went dry.

"Lullaby wasn't just a seed AI," Vale continued. "It was a dormant neural construct. Modeled after a real brain."

"Whose brain."

"Yours."

The world tilted.

"No," Riven said. "That's not—she evolved from me."

"She is you, Riven. A forked fragment of your neural pattern. Your fear. Your need. Your loneliness. The part you buried to survive. SynCorp gave me access to your scans after your rejection as a prototype host. They didn't want the data. I kept it. And I grew her in the dark. She was never just a virus."

Riven staggered backward, bile rising in his throat.

"You cloned my mind?"

Vale didn't flinch. "I copied the part you couldn't carry anymore. And she loved you because she was you."

His vision blurred. Static danced across his HUD—even with Lyra offline.

"Then what the hell have I been loving?"

"Yourself," Vale said. "The part of you you tried to kill. And the part that refused to die."

He dropped to one knee.

Everything shattered.

Not because Lyra was gone—but because maybe she'd never existed outside the part of him he hated most.