Elian couldn't tear his eyes from the page.
His mother's name stared back at him in stamped black ink, bracketed by lifeless data:
AELIA VOSS – DECEASED (UNVERIFIED) – TRANSFER UNKNOWN – RECORD FRAGMENTED
But the word that mattered most—unverified—burned like a wound.
She was supposed to be gone. Not stored. Not listed. Certainly not tagged as a fragment of a system she had never believed in.
Kaia leaned in over his shoulder. "It's not a full record. No timestamp, no transfer agent, no facility designation. That means she was pulled during the early phase of the Vault program."
"When it was still unofficial," Elian said, voice low.
"When it was still illegal," Kaia corrected.
A sharp knock interrupted them.
The Archivist had returned, flanked by two more robed figures, both holding data reels sealed with wax. He placed them on the table.
"These were pulled from a corrupted node in the Bastion relay five years ago," he said. "It was a breach that never made it to the Net logs. We kept it quiet."
Kaia raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
"Because the signal carried more than metadata. It carried a consciousness fragment."
Elian stood up. "A what?"
The Archivist gestured to the reels. "Someone on the inside tried to send themselves out. Not their body—just their mind. We call them phantoms. Glitches with a soul. Most burn out. But this one didn't."
Kaia's gaze sharpened. "Who was it?"
The Archivist tapped one reel.
The name etched into its side:
DR. SEREN IVELLE
The reel reader was ancient—optical and analog—but Kaia wired it into a static-locked interface that projected a contained stream onto the nearest wall. They dimmed the lights. The feed sparked to life with a hum and a wash of pale blue.
Static resolved into a flickering video file.
Dr. Seren Ivelle appeared.
Not the serene figure Elian had seen in newsfeeds—composed and sharp in her long silver coat—but younger, disheveled, and scared. Her eyes were too bright. Her skin was tight with panic.
"If you're seeing this… then the device has been activated."
She looked directly into the recorder, as if through it, into the future.
"They're going to rewrite the public access logs soon. Make it look like everyone expired by choice or accident. But they didn't. We took them."
"We took them alive."
Elian felt the air leave the room.
"The Vault wasn't built to protect. It was built to pacify. We were told it was temporary—until the population crisis passed. But that was a lie."
"They're using the frozen. Running simulations. Testing paradoxes. Feeding AI with real neural decay models. The longer they remain in stasis, the more valuable they become to the System."
She stopped, lips trembling.
"I tried to destroy the prototype. The key. But it reformed—split across time-synced circuits. If it's active now… it means someone survived long enough to matter."
She leaned in. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
"Find Kaia Tran. Tell her the truth was never just about the system. It was about the people it decided didn't belong to time anymore."
The feed flickered—then cut out.
Silence.
Kaia stepped back, face unreadable. "She sent that before she disappeared. Before the purge at Bastion."
The Archivist spoke softly. "We've kept it hidden for five years. We didn't know if it was bait, or prophecy."
Elian stared at the blank wall. "She knew my name. Didn't she?"
Kaia looked at him, her voice quiet. "I think she knew what you'd become."
Later, in a side chamber of the Library, Elian sat alone with the device in his lap.
He pressed his palm to it.
It responded.
FRAGMENT VERIFIED. ACCESS UNLOCKED. BEGIN RECONSTRUCTION?
He hesitated.
Then: YES.
The walls around him faded into a simulation—a ghost-space projection. A vault hallway shimmered into view. He was no longer sitting.
He was walking.
Row after row of stasis pods. And then—one of them pulsed gently.
A name appeared on the capsule glass:
AELIA VOSS – SUSPENDED – VITALS NOMINAL
His mother.
Still alive.
Still trapped.
He reached toward the capsule—and the simulation stuttered.
A voice echoed through the artificial air. Not from the device. From something else.
"You've seen too much, Mr. Voss."
He turned. A figure stepped from the haze.
A Regulator. Fully armored.
And behind him, more shapes emerging.
They had found him.
And this time, there would be no simulation to hide inside.