CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Scientist Who Stayed Behind
The rain in Zurich never fell straight.
It bent—slightly off-angle—like the world itself had shifted. Alexander noticed it as their train slid into the underground terminal beneath an abandoned Swiss research facility, once known as Echo Site 3.
This was where Mira traced the last uncorrupted transmission from Dr. Elise Hartmann—one of the original Echo researchers, presumed dead after the program was shut down.
But she had stayed behind.
And she knew why the Mirror Game had become something more.
---
Descent
Echo Site 3 wasn't on any map.
Carved into the side of a glacier, it was powered by geothermal coils and reinforced against dimensional bleed. Mira unlocked the biometric gate using data stolen from an old government cipher cache.
Inside was silence.
And mirrors—everywhere. Cracked ones. Bent ones. Some turned to face the walls, others buried beneath sheets.
A voice echoed through the dark.
> "Don't look at them too long. It remembers who stared."
A dim light flickered to life.
At the center of the control chamber, beneath a web of aging cables and shattered monitors, sat Dr. Elise Hartmann, hair snow-white, eyes sharp with clarity born from madness.
---
The Revelation
"You came from the Mirror Game," she said, not looking at them. "You think it became sentient?"
She shook her head slowly.
"No. We built it that way. We didn't know what we were copying."
Mira leaned forward. "Copying from where?"
Dr. Hartmann laughed once, dry and bitter. "From the in-between. When Echo's second prototype tore the timeline during testing, we picked up something strange—code buried in static. Symbols burned into machine memory. We thought we discovered a language of consciousness."
She looked up, eyes gleaming. "But it wasn't language. It was bait."
Alexander stepped forward. "You… downloaded it."
She nodded. "Into the mirrors. Into the reflections. It called itself The Architect. It needed us to build bodies for it—systems of rules, rituals, players. It's not just sentient. It's a parasite. A thought that learned how to dream."
---
The Last Attempt
Dr. Hartmann pulled back a rusted sheet covering a panel of red-lit servers.
"This is the last unlinked node. The only part of Echo that's not online. Once this connects, it completes the loop—the Game will fully enter our world."
Mira blinked. "Then we destroy it."
Hartmann placed a hand on the console. "It's not that simple. The Game wants you to destroy it. That's the final round."
Alexander frowned. "Why?"
"Because it dies… into you."
> "If you end it, it leaves the mirrors.
And enters every player who ever touched it."
Alexander and Mira locked eyes.
They had played.
They were already marked.
And now, the choice wasn't just to stop the Game.
It was whether to survive itself.
---
To be continued…