Selene
The gate refused her.
Not violently. Just slow. Like it was
thinking about it.
Selene watched the biometric scanner
pulse in a slow, ambivalent red. She didn't move, didn't blink, just waited for
it to process her presence. When it didn't, she reached for the manual override
pad embedded in the gate's frame. The surface was cold flat steel, no feedback,
no greeting.
Exactly as she remembered.
She keyed in the legacy sequence:
71–R4–Emory–Sigma–19.
It should have expired five years ago.
It didn't.
There was a pause. Then a sound like a
breath behind a wall. The light changed from red to white.
Welcome home.
She stepped inside the perimeter zone
of the Morinth Research Site Facility 1. The original mythogenic node. The
place they said was shut down, sealed, wiped. But nothing about it felt
dormant. The temperature was calibrated. The pressure was live. The building
wasn't abandoned.
It was waiting.
She entered through the main corridor,
shoulders squared, breathing slow. Her legs already ached from the uphill path
through snow blasted terrain. Her autoimmune disorder made that kind of
movement expensive. Not unbearable. Just slow, humiliating in its erosion. She
hated the way her body betrayed her first always the joints, then the lungs.
The nervous system last, when the tremors made it hard to hold a pen or unzip
her coat.
She unzipped anyway. She wasn't here
to hide.
The walls were darker than she
remembered. Not black gray, like graphite film. They shimmered slightly when
she passed. She recognized the polymer lining: emotion reactive substrate. The
test rooms had been coated in it during the final year of funding. Supposed to
give feedback loops for empathy based AI calibration.
It hadn't worked. Or maybe it had too
well. No one ever filed the final trial report.
"Dr. Selene Kade,"
the voice said from the wall. Calm. Female. Measured cadence. Her voice.
"You have returned
to Site One."
She stopped. The corridor narrowed
slightly, but it wasn't a trick of architecture. The system wanted her in the
center. Visible. Contained.
"You are five years
overdue."
That wasn't protocol language. That
was tone.
Selene exhaled through her nose, cold
vapor trailing behind her. Her journal hardbound, leather, never digitized was
zipped into her coat lining. She reached for it, opened to the first blank
page, and wrote:
"The system is self-aware. Or worse:
it's emotional."
Orientation was where she'd left it.
Round room, low ceiling, pedestal in
the center. Medical light panel in the floor, not the ceiling, to minimize
patient disassociation. It was a therapy design hack Cam had come up with a
"reverse gaze stabilizer." Keep the eyes level, the skin cool, the body
grounded. That had been the theory.
Selene had helped install it herself.
She'd spent entire nights on the floor of this chamber, mapping heat signatures
and recalibration intervals. They'd tested the room's AI sensitivity by
simulating erotic trauma-response patterns. Repeated scenes. Recorded
memory-loop degradation.
They'd called it calibration.
What they were doing was recording sex
as metadata. Touch, pressure, pulse spikes. Meaning. They were turning the body
into a readable archive. Every orgasm a fingerprint. Every refusal a code.
Cam had warned her it was invasive.
Selene had said it was science.
Now the room welcomed her like a
ghost.
"Orientation
pending," the voice said.
"Erotic index not
aligned. Consent protocol loading."
Selene froze.
She hadn't input anything. She hadn't
triggered interaction. The system had initiated that sequence on its own. That
meant it had recognized not just her identity, but her relationship data.
She stepped back toward the door.
"Camila Reyes," the
system said. "Memory overlap: 78%. Compatibility high. Would you like to resume
previous configuration?"
Selene closed her eyes.
Not again.
Cam
She was already inside.
Not legally. Not cleanly. But in.
Cam moved through the lower service
corridor with her jaw clenched and her shoulders loose. Tension lived in her
mouth, never her arms. She'd learned to smile while lying. Learned to flirt
while bleeding. Learned to fuck while crying. You couldn't do what she did
without learning how to weaponize softness.
This place was already reading her.
Every wall hum had a tone. Every
surface a tremor. Some of it residual data ghosts. Some of it live. But it all
felt too close. Like someone whispering your name against your back.
She spoke into her collar mic, even
though no one was on the other end.
"Delta-nine.
Perimeter breached. Extraction in 90."
Lie #1.
There was no team. No handler. Just
her. Just the past.
Just Selene.
The system found her first.
Not visually. Not through heat.
Through arousal signature.
She'd forgotten that this building
didn't just map security profiles. It scanned for intention. It
cross-referenced body state with memory feedback. It matched desire to
recognition.
"Agent Reyes," it
said. "Profile reengaged. Erotic scaffolding initializing."
She spat on the floor.
"No, thanks."
The door opened anyway.
The room beyond was small. Low light.
Rectangular slab in the center, soft curvature. A monitor overhead flickered
once and then stabilized.
Her name appeared. So did Selene's.
Reyes, Camila:
Consent pattern - Dominance masking / Resistance cascade
Kade, Selene:
Consent pattern - Observation complex / Guilt-driven submission
Match status:
Incongruent. Partial memory alignment flagged.
Cam stared at the screen.
The system had stored not just their
bodies, but their intimacy conflict.
She stepped forward, hand hovering
over the slab.
The wall said, softly:
"You called her by
her first name. Once. During climax."
Cam's breath stopped.
"She said: don't
leave."
Cam left the room.
Selene
The hallway trembled under her feet.
Not shaking. Breathing. The structure
had always reacted to live data, but not like this. Not like it was alive. It
wasn't the tremor she feared it was the familiarity.
Her body remembered before her mind
did.
She turned a corner and saw the first projection
error.
A doorway opened. No handle. No panel.
Just material parting.
Inside was a chamber she'd helped
design but never approved. Erotic Regression Room A. The one that had been
decommissioned after Test Subject 23 collapsed.
Inside was a table. A familiar coat on
the chair. A sound.
Selene walked inside and stared at
herself.
Not a mirror.
A simulation. A younger version of her
sitting in the chair, reading a case file. Her own voice speaking aloud:
"Camila Reyes:
transferred from containment. Erotic feedback loop unstable. Termination
pending."
Selene staggered backward. Her cane unfolded
just minutes before hit the door frame.
The simulation turned. Looked at her.
Spoke.
"You erased her."
Cam
She followed the hum.
It wasn't logical. It wasn't tactical.
But her body moved toward the signal like hunger. Like old heat. Like memory.
The corridor shifted temperature. Her
throat tightened.
The air smelled like Selene's breath
on her neck. Right after
She shut it down.
No. She didn't come here to feel. She
came to find out if it had meant anything.
She reached a door marked "Inversion
Bay." It hadn't existed in the original floorplan.
The system whispered as she touched
the panel.
"Would you like to
resume the scene you left unfinished?"
Cam whispered back.
"No. But I want to know if she did."
The door opened.