Simon yanked his hand away from the terminal like he’d touched a live wire. A jolt—not of electricity, but something deeper, colder—rippled through his synthetic frame.
Something had forcefully rejected him.
He stared at the dark screen, confusion blooming into arm. He tried to reconnect, but the panel remained lifeless, a void where information should be. It was as if something on the other end had simply... shut down. Disconnected.
Simon flexed his fingers and reached for the structure gel embedded in his body, preparing to manually reactivate the system. But before he could even begin, the heavy door in front of him hissed, then groaned open with a reluctant, grinding sound.
An elevator shaft y beyond, cloaked in shadow.
Simon stepped into the car, scanning the walls with caution. It was eerily still. He opened the hatch at the top and hoisted himself through, inspecting the old cables and mechanisms. Rust clung to the steel, but everything still seemed functional. He dropped back into the elevator and pressed the button to descend.
With a mechanical whine, the elevator jolted to life and began to descend.
Then it stopped.
Suddenly. Violently. The lights flickered. The car shuddered.
Simon opened the panel at the bottom of the elevator, crouched low, and reached into the opening. From his palm, a slender snake-like camera slithered downward.
There it was—clumps of hardened structure gel blocking the shaft below.
Simon narrowed his eyes.
He activated the electromagnets in his hands and feet. A soft hum pulsed through his limbs. Carefully, he exited the elevator and began his descent, crawling down the metal walls like an insect, the shaft echoing with distant groans and metallic creaks.
At the bottom, he reached a partially opened door. It had been forced open—the frame bent, scratched, warped. Something had cwed its way through.
Beyond it y a locker room.
Custrophobic.
Silent.
Shadowed.
The overhead emergency lights blinked erratically, casting strobe-like fshes across rusted lockers and cracked tile. The air buzzed with a low, oppressive hum, as though the walls themselves were vibrating with tension. Dust and mold clung to the corners. Bckened gel oozed from ceiling vents.
Simon stepped inside.
His bdes extended. Every motion was calcuted. Every footstep deliberate.
His sensors fred.
A shiver of static crept through his audio feed.
Simon advanced, the tension in the room coiling around him like a noose.
The door smmed shut behind him with a hiss that echoed through the silence like a gunshot.
Simon froze.
His gaze snapped to the metal.
There, smeared across the inner surface of the door with structure gel, were words.
"I am Simon."
He stared at it.
The writing was uneven. Desperate. Like a child’s scrawl carved in blood.
"What the fuck...?" Simon whispered, the voice coming from his emitter faint and brittle.
His sensors caught it—an audio distortion in the far distance. Faint. Shifting. Like breathing ced with static. Indecipherable.
He didn’t wait.
He activated his leg dampeners, softening his steps as he moved toward the open door ahead.
A hallway stretched into the bck.
And then he saw them.
Handprints. Hundreds of them.
Smeared across the walls, the floor, the ceiling—chaotic trails of palms all coated in the same wet gel. In some areas, the prints formed clusters, like someone had cwed at the same spot over and over again.
And the words.
Over and over.
"I am Simon."
He considered retreating. Even with the DUNBAT still out there. Anything seemed better than this descent into madness.
But no. There had to be a terminal. A control node near the assembly mainframe. That was the pn.
To the right—sealed. Choked by dense structure gel.
To the left—an open path.
He pulled up the internal schematics of Delta. The terminal should be just beyond the next intersection.
Simon moved.
Every step felt like a sin against the silence.
He turned the corner.
And froze.
Something stood at the far end of the hallway.
Still.
Facing the wall.
It twitched.
Not in rhythm. Not like a machine. But like something broken. Like a puppet dangling from strings.
And then—slowly—it turned.
The face was a mess of metal and meat.
The thing took a step forward.
"I am Simon," it gurgled, voice bubbling through torn vocal hardware and wet gel, echoing down the hallway like a fractured memory given flesh.
Simon took a step back. One. Two. Three.
"I am Simon," the creature gurgled again, its voice bubbling with wet static.
The hallway spun. The flickering lights stretched and warped around him as he staggered backward, disoriented. His back hit something unyielding—the wall of structure gel. A dead end.
Trapped.
The creature advanced. Its frame twitched erratically, a grotesque fusion of metal and muscle, pulsing with dark veins of structure gel. One dripping hand reached out and seized Simon's helmet.
It pulled him in—too close.
"I want to die!" it shrieked, the words slicing through the silence like a bde, resonating through Simon’s core.
His mind buckled.
"I am Simon. I am Simon. Hell... This is hell. Ashley... Ashley... I’m sorry," it whimpered, voice cracking, suddenly frail.
It wrapped its arms around his head, trembling, desperate.
Simon felt it—something alien brushing against his mind. Thoughts. Pain. Fear. A storm of broken identity radiating through the contact. He could feel its terror leaking into him.
He was losing himself.
Then Jerry.
The memory of the small rat curled in fear. That feeling pierced the fog. A tether. A spark.
Simon snapped back.
His bdes sprang forth.
With one swift strike, he drove them deep into the creature’s chest. They sliced through the unstable flesh with sickening ease. Another brutal motion—and he cleaved the creature open, splitting it from chest to skull.
A wet, monstrous sound filled the hallway as it colpsed, spewing bck blood and structure gel in a gruesome spsh across the floor.
Simon staggered, shaking, synthetic breath rasping.
His gaze darted to the submersible on his back.
Jerry was still there—curled up, quivering inside the gss dome. Terrified.
Simon reached out and pced a hand gently against the dome.
"It's okay, buddy," he whispered. "It's over."
Jerry’s fear had grounded him—reminded him who he was.
Simon crouched beside the corpse. His hands trembled as he examined the remains.
There—embedded deep within the shattered skull—a cortex chip.
He hesitated.
Then connected.
Fshes. Fragments.
A woman ughing. Sunlight pouring through a kitchen window. Ashley’s voice, distorted. Blood soaking his hands. Screams in the distance.
His life—but not.
The memories were wrong.
Faces blurred or erased. Names missing. Moments out of sequence—events jumbled, like a puzzle smashed and forced together again.
Love without crity.
Grief without origin.
The emotional chaos made him nauseous. Even his synthetic systems recoiled.
He ripped the connection loose.
The chip cttered to the floor.
Simon dropped to his knees.
This thing… had once been him.
A version. A soul warped by darkness until it no longer knew what it was.
His eyes drifted to his hands, stained with bck gel and blood.
"How many of me are there?" he whispered.
No answer came.
Only the echo of silence, thick with sorrow.
He stood up slowly, his hand trembling faintly as he staggered forward.
'I need to find out what the hell is going on in this pce,' Simon thought, each step heavy with dread. One foot after the other, he forced himself down the hallway, the dim emergency lights casting his shadow like a specter against the walls.
Finally, he reached the terminal and connected to it. His vision flooded with cascading data—logs, systems, corrupted files. The site had been shut down and abandoned long ago, but something—or someone—had brought it back online.
Probably WAU. It always was.
Just as he started reading the st few entries, the connection snapped.
His HUD glitched violently. The terminal bcked out.
Pushed out. Again.
Simon reached for the console, structure gel beginning to crawl down his arm, ready to force his way back in.
He froze.
A sound. Metal scraping against metal.
His gaze slowly turned down the corridor.
Red dots.
Dozens of them.
Motionless at first. Then moving.
Small blinking lights embedded in mechanical husks—eyes, maybe. Malfunctioning sensors. Or something worse.
Whatever they were, they were blocking access to the main assembly line.
Simon patted the submersible on his back.
"Hold tight, Jerry," he whispered. "It’s going to get ugly."
The structure gel beneath his skin surged, solidifying across his frame like a second suit of armor. His body hummed with power, joints locking, internal systems optimizing for combat. His bdes hissed from his forearms.
Time slowed.
Then the lights in the corridor sparked and died.
They came crawling.
Twisted robots, some nearly intact, others torn apart—limping, dragging themselves across the floor. Bckened arms scraped along the metal walls. Sparks rained from broken torsos. The gel pulsated across their forms, puppeteering them forward.
They were infected.
And they screamed with his voice.
"Why are you hurting me?!"
"Please—stop! It hurts!"
"I want to die!"
Their voices echoed down the hallway like a chorus of pain—his own voice, shattered and looped, over and over.
Simon charged.
His bde cleaved through the first one, tearing it in half. Sparks erupted. Gel sprayed.
But they didn’t stop.
One lunged from the side, cws scrabbling at his armor, shrieking with a mouth it didn’t have.
He crushed it beneath his heel, twisting and driving his bde through its core. Another grabbed his back, mechanical fingers prying at the casing of Jerry’s pod.
Simon roared, spinning, driving a bde into its midsection and flinging it into the wall.
But they kept coming.
A dozen voices. A hundred pleas.
"I remember dying."
"Why did you leave me in the dark?!"
"You’re the lucky one!"
Simon’s focus fractured with every blow. Not just because of their strength—but because of the guilt.
Every machine he tore apart looked like a twisted reflection of himself—his eyes, his voice, his thoughts corrupted and repeated back at him like mockery.
He activated an area EMP. Blue light exploded from his core, frying circuits. A half-dozen fell, twitching, sparks bursting from shattered shells.
But more came.
Had to finish this.
Even if it meant killing himself again and again.
He stepped over the twitching remains, his breathing ragged, armor dented and slick with structure gel.
And still—still—he could hear their voices.
Whispering.
Crying.
Begging.
"Please... don’t leave us alone."
After clearing his way forward, Simon stood amid the carnage—dozens of broken robots littered the corridor, sparks flickering like dying stars from fractured frames. Bits of metal, torn wires, and puddles of structure gel coated the floor like blood.
He breathed, or simuted the motion, as he looked around.
"Those were like the crazed robots I've encountered before... but why do they all have my brain scan?"
The moment the question formed, the answer followed like a knife sliding into flesh.
"WAU," he murmured. "It was trying to perfect its method of installing a brain scan into a functional robot. It’s much easier when you use the same sample—my brain scan."
He looked at the wreckage, the mangled echoes of himself, and felt a chill seep through the fibers of his synthetic muscles.
"How many of me are lying around here... minds shattered, screaming in the dark?"
He clenched his fists.
He needed to find the source.
He had to know who—or what—had been pushing him out of the system.
And maybe... maybe there was another Simon still intact. A sane one. Or at least, not another monster.
Simon reached the main assembly line. The space was vast, stretching endlessly into the dark. Conveyor belts coated in dust snaked through the chamber. Robotic arms hung limp from the ceilings, some rusted, others frozen mid-motion like ancient statues. Giant 3D printers loomed over the machinery like forgotten titans, and scattered across the belts were fragmented components—parts of machines.
He walked slowly, scanning with every step. His sensors swept for anomalies, for signals, for the faintest trace of life or corruption.
Nothing.
The space was a graveyard.
At the far end of the chamber, a set of metal doors stood slightly ajar. Their edges were warped, as though something had forced them open long ago.
Simon approached silently. His footsteps echoed in the dead space.
He stopped at the threshold and pced his hand on the cold metal. From his wrist, the snake camera slithered out, sliding into the gap.
What he saw made his nonexistent stomach twist.
"This is fucked... this is so fucked," he whispered.
Inside the chamber, a massive pilr of flesh and steel rose from the floor. Embedded in its twisted, gel-slicked frame were brains—at least a dozen of them. Each encased in a web of structure gel that pulsed gently, like something breathing.
He took a step back, trying to steady himself.
His thoughts spiraled.
What was this? A storage facility? A tomb? A prison?
He clenched his fists tighter, forced the thoughts back into order, and stepped forward again.
With a grimace, he pulled the doors open.
The metal shrieked in protest.
From the ceiling, a tendril of structure gel descended—slow, deliberate. At its end, fused with the bck mass, was a small drone. Its single red eye glowed faintly.
"Who are you?" the drone asked in a warped version of his own voice.
Simon swallowed. "I’m Simon."
Silence.
The drone hovered, studying him.
"Who are you?" Simon asked back.
The answer came, not from one voice—but many.
"We are Simon."
Simon’s breath hitched.
"We?" he asked.
The drone’s voice deepened, filled with quiet madness.
"All the brains here—whatever consciousness they had—have been overwritten. Repced. With the brain scan of Simon Jarrett."
Simon felt the ground shift beneath him, though his feet stayed pnted.
Dozen of brains. Dozen of versions of himself.
He was standing in a cathedral of his own stolen identity.
And something deep inside him cracked.
Simon staggered back from the pilr, his metal boots screeching against the floor.
His breath came in short, harsh bursts—pointless, instinctual. His synthetic body didn't need air, but his fractured mind did.
He looked at the brains—each pulsing gently in their prison of gel—and something inside him screamed.
"Why... why ?" he asked, his voice trembling. He wasn't even sure who he was asking.
The drone hovered in silence, its red eye staring.
Simon dropped to his knees.
He pced a hand on the cold floor, trying to ground himself. It didn’t help. The weight of it all crushed down on him—the horror, the grief, the stolen lives.
He pressed his palms to the sides of his helmet. Shaking. Trembling.
Memories surfaced. Ashley’s voice. Catherine’s ughter. His own cries from the pilot seat at the bottom of the ocean.
"I didn’t ask for this," he whispered.
Then louder.
"I didn’t ask for ANY of this!"
His voice echoed in the chamber, bouncing back at him like the voices of the dead.
He looked up at the brains—his gss visor reflected their casings, multiplied, distorted.
