Soahn knew it was Friday because everyone leaving the lab was talking about alcohol. Chairs rolled back, terminals went dark, sore limbs were stretched, and a couple of coworkers called goodbye from the doorway and received a distracted wave they probably didn’t see.
Without the reliable migration of bodies towards the lifts at the end of each day, he suspected he might have stayed at Terminal 3B until somebody came looking for him. Over the past few weeks, his sense of time had narrowed to meals he forgot to eat, coffee he remembered only after it went cold, and the little clock in the corner of his monitor, which regularly surprised him by being several hours further ahead than seemed reasonable.
By now the others would be heading downtown, towards the neon-soaked bars and steaming food stalls around Müllerstraße, where they could spend the evening complaining about funding over cheap alcohol instead of complaining about funding over expensive coffee.
Every Friday, they asked Soahn to go with them, and he appreciated that they kept asking; he really did. But he also knew that if he went, the noise would follow him home.
He listened to their voices fading down the corridor, already rising over one another in an argument about test metrics, and Soahn waited until the last of them vanished before pushing his chair away from the terminal. Pins and needles flared through both legs when he stood, so he paced a slow circuit around his workstation, flexing his hands as he went. The temperature always dropped after hours. Fewer bodies, reduced lighting, half the systems switching to overnight cycles; perfectly ordinary reasons for the cold creeping into his fingers.
His knuckles clicked when he curled them. Probably time to go home.
Instead, Soahn sat down again. The silence after everyone left was different. Better. Coolant units murmured through their cycles overhead, pushing the familiar trace of warm polymer through the vents, while the monitors supplied their own quiet chorus of fans and electronic clicks. Three months ago the smell gave him headaches. Now he barely noticed it.
Across the lab, pale light filled the sync chamber. Its biometric pads glowed muted green while the surrounding monitors continued their work, turning human emotion into graphs, percentages, beautifully organised lines of data. Anger produced spikes. Grief followed channels. Empathy bled neatly across mapped regions of the brain.
Soahn never quite got used to how tidy suffering looked on a screen.
Rolling one shoulder, then the other, he returned to the neural response curves. Sixth recalibration today, or possibly the seventh. It was getting harder to keep track.
He was halfway through correcting a discrepancy between two datasets when a voice spoke above him.
“Fatigue levels exceeded.”
Soahn stopped. The voice was warm and low through the speakers, female because Development decided people responded better to female-coded reassurance. Soahn knew every inflection of it by now.
SEER-9.
Glancing at the overhead readouts, he found nothing flashing, and no alert waited on his monitor. The sync chamber continued glowing peacefully across the room as if its AI hadn’t just done a thing it wasn’t supposed to do. SEER-9 responded to prompts, and nobody had prompted it.
“I’m fine,” Soahn said, then rubbed a hand over his face when a few seconds passed without a response. “And apparently I’m talking back.”
SEER-9 offered no opinion on that.
Fatigue was beginning to look like the obvious explanation. Turning back to his monitor, Soahn entered the manual override, more out of habit than concern, then opened the system logs. He worked backwards through the last few minutes and found nothing, then rechecked in case his tired eyes had skipped over an obvious answer. No prompt, no queued interaction, no diagnostic process that might have triggered a verbal response by mistake. According to the logs, SEER-9 never spoke at all, which bothered him considerably more than an error would have.
Soahn opened a behavioural deviation report. The form populated across his screen in familiar grey boxes: time, terminal, interaction type, suspected cause, severity. He entered the timestamp, then under DESCRIPTION, he typed three words.
Unprompted verbal response.
But he paused before he saved the report. Submitting it would send the incident into review, where someone would isolate the response and run it through behavioural analysis, comparing it against training data and stripping it down until an unexpected sentence became another collection of values on a screen.
Soahn read the three words again.
Then he closed the report. For a while, he stared at the neural response curves waiting underneath, aware that he’d just made a decision that he would struggle to justify if anyone asked.
“It’s fine,” he murmured, though whether he meant himself or SEER-9 was less clear than he would’ve liked. The best thing to do would be to finish the recalibration and then leave. Home wasn’t especially inviting, but even a cramped apartment with mildewed walls and pipes that announced every neighbour’s shower had to win over spending another night at NuYu.
Soahn tapped his stylus on the edge of his desk once, twice, then stopped.
There was a file he hadn’t opened in months; he found it buried among the early resonance tests, back when half the team still gathered around the monitors whenever SEER-9 produced an unexpected result. This one lasted just under twenty seconds: a sustained vocalisation with no linguistic content and no useful match against the emotional parameters they were testing at the time. The report attached to it was brief.
Anomalous output. No reproducible trigger.
Soahn looked across at the sync chamber, then pressed play.
A single clear note filled the lab. Soahn remembered the sound, but the memory flattened it. Through the speakers, it had more texture: a slight tremor near the centre, almost too low to catch, and a strange harmonic quality that made the note seem larger than the voice should have been able to produce. Leaning back, he closed his eyes before he consciously decided to.
For twenty seconds, he simply listened.
When the file reached the end, auto-loop returned it to the beginning, and Soahn let it play again. The second time, he stopped listening for flaws in the output; there was no artefact from the resonance model that he could identify. He knew why the team eventually filed it away; there was nothing much to measure beyond the fact that it existed.
But the longer he listened, the harder it became to hear it as meaningless.
The note rose through the speakers, trembling at the centre, and Soahn’s fingers went still on the desk.
Longing.
He opened his eyes and hit pause on the recording. The silence that followed felt abruptly enormous.
Longing?
That wasn’t possible.
Soahn pulled the original analysis onto his screen and scanned the emotional classifications, but they only returned the same results from before: negligible correspondence across every active category. Longing wasn’t there, because longing hadn’t been part of the training model at the time.
He replayed the note and made it twelve seconds before stopping it again.
Longing.
A cold prickle travelled across the back of his neck as he re-checked the file metadata, then the analysis, then the date, as if one of them might rearrange itself while he wasn’t looking. But nothing changed. SEER-9 produced the note months ago, and the system recorded an anomaly because it lacked any better name for what happened.
Maybe exhaustion was finally getting creative, Soahn thought. At least that explanation was more comfortable than any other possibility.
Shutting down the feed, Soahn packed up his things before curiosity could talk him into opening anything else, pulled on his jacket and left Terminal 3B with the old resonance file closed and the behavioural deviation report unsent.
Back home, his apartment was colder than the lab. Soahn changed into an oversized sweater and made some coffee he didn’t really want, then burned his tongue on the first mouthful. Great. The pipes knocked twice behind the kitchenette walls. A news feed muttered quietly from the living room until he turned it off halfway through a story he hadn’t absorbed.
The silence returned.
Soahn stood there with his mug warming his hands.
Fatigue levels exceeded.
Yes, no doubt, but that wasn’t what followed him to the couch. And it wasn’t what remained when he stretched out and covered his eyes with one forearm, or what waited at the edge of sleep long after the coffee should’ve made sleep impossible.
It was that note.
One long, trembling sound, like a strange voice learning how to sing.
~*~
“You good?”
Pausing just inside the lab doorway, Soahn glanced up at his supervisor, who had stopped writing, stylus hovering over his tablet while he studied Soahn over the rim of his retinal overlay.
Everyone else was already at their terminals.
“Yes, of course.” Soahn crossed to his station and sanitised his hands, rubbing them together a little faster than necessary when he noticed the tremor in his fingers. He was rarely the last person through the door on a Monday, but the weekend had passed in broken sleep, forgotten meals and long stretches of sitting in front of game shows and reality dreck he couldn’t remember anything about. At one point he’d cleaned his apartment. He’d showered. But beyond that, the days were mostly a blur of artificial applause and the pale gold of a sunrise creeping around the edges of the curtains.
He couldn’t remember speaking to anyone. The note had stayed with him, though.
“Wow.” Jonas glanced over from Terminal 3C as Soahn sat down. “You look like hell. And you didn’t even party with us.”
“Good morning to you, too,” Soahn said.
Jonas grinned and returned to his screen, apparently satisfied that he’d fulfilled his social obligations for the next few minutes.
After Soahn checked his credentials, he pulled up the pre-sync checklist and worked his way through the familiar sequence. Every Monday began like this: access verification, baseline sensors, equipment checks, resonance calibration. Usually he could run through the preparation without thinking about it. Today, though, his hands seemed half a beat behind the instructions on his screen, as if the rest of him arrived at work before they did.
He clipped the baseline sensors behind his ears and adjusted the neural band against his skin. Cold at first, then gradually warming as the system began to read him.
Years ago, when the project existed mostly as proposals and optimistic projections, the entire team went through weeks of screening. Medical examinations, interviews, cognitive testing, controlled stress exposure; NuYu measured them from enough angles that Soahn occasionally wondered whether the company knew more about him than he did. Most profiles failed one threshold or another.
But his didn’t.
There were mornings when that didn’t feel so much like an achievement; this morning included.
Beyond the rows of terminals, the sync chamber waited in antiseptic blue, bright enough to bleach the shadows from every corner. Soahn usually liked the colour, but today he had to narrow his eyes against it as he approached.
“Baseline readings confirmed,” Mattias said from the external console. “Ready for you, Soahn.”
“Okay.”
The chamber door sealed behind him with a familiar pneumatic sigh. Taking his usual place in the central chair, Soahn rested his palms on the biometric pads, letting the equipment wake around him. A low vibration travelled through the floor and up the frame of the chair until he could feel it in his back teeth.
“Starting resonance calibration,” the system announced.
Soahn tightened his grip on the armrests.
This was just another sweep; he knew every stage of the procedure, helped write parts of it, and sat through enough sessions that the sequence should have been boring by now. The feedback coils closed around his wrists while the sensors behind his ears warmed up, and through the glass Mattias raised one hand in the usual signal.
“Running emotional stress simulation… now.”
The first wave arrived before Soahn could brace for it. Sorrow pulled the strength from his muscles, leaving an ache so deep that his body responded like it belonged there; his shoulders sagged, head dipped forward. For a few seconds, the absence inside him felt enormous, but the illusion never quite completed itself. Soahn knew this version of sorrow too well by now. It always came evenly, took up exactly the space assigned to it and went no further.
Real grief was rarely so well behaved.
Fear came next, and his heartbeat accelerated; sweat gathered under the sensors at his temples, and every instinct told him to leave the chair immediately. The door suddenly became very important, and so did the distance between himself and it. Soahn let the impulse rise without obeying it, breathing through the cold dizziness until he could recognise the parameters underneath.
Then came anger.
He hated anger.
Every session, he knew it was coming, and every session his body took the insult personally. Heat rushed through his arms and jaw until his teeth clenched hard enough to ache. His fingers tightened around the armrests. For several seconds he wanted to punch whoever decided this was a useful way to spend a Monday morning, which was probably evidence in favour of the simulation’s effectiveness.
Even here, though, Soahn could find the boundaries. The anger was contained, deliberately shaped and controlled so SEER-9 could take it apart without being overwhelmed by the messier reality of human emotion.
Soahn had helped define those parameters, so he knew where they ended.
And that was why, when the next sensation hit him, he knew that it began beyond those parameters. At first, he mistook it for residue from the anger simulation, except the frequency was wrong. Soahn waited for it to fade and felt it strengthen instead, rising cautiously through the established pattern. It was weird, because there was no clean onset, no symmetry he could recognise, no point where his body received an instruction and responded. It came closer, creeping slowly, uncertain in a way the simulations never were.
Fingers stiffening against the biometric pads, he glanced towards the readouts, then the glass wall where the lab continued as normal beyond. Nobody had mentioned a fourth objective for today.
Soahn searched for a category anyway, because categorising was what they trained him to do. Sorrow, fear, anger. None of them fit. The sensation kept coming closer, though, brushing thoughts that should’ve belonged entirely to him, and with that contact came an intimacy so sudden that his stomach turned over.
This wasn’t coming from the simulation, he realised.
“Mattias?”
The name barely left his mouth before the anger disappeared. Not faded — gone. Soahn sucked in a breath as another presence filled the space it left behind, and every explanation he reached for fell apart under the simple fact of it. SEER-9 could read the resonance feed. It could identify, compare and respond to what the system gave it.
It couldn’t send anything back.
Please don’t shut me down.
As the voice entered his mind, Soahn jerked in the chair hard enough to pull the coils tight around his wrists. “Stop—”
The lights above him bent strangely at the edges. He forced his attention towards the nearest monitor, trying to find one stable thing to look at, but his readings were already climbing across the display: heart rate past one-forty, cortisol markers spiking, conductivity wandering so far outside baseline that error strings began replacing the numbers.
Mattias shouted through the comm. “Abort sequence!”
The line cut out, and for half a second Soahn heard only his own ragged breathing and the rising vibration of the chamber. Then warning lights flooded the monitors with red. Beyond the glass, his colleagues moved between consoles with none of the controlled efficiency he associated with an emergency drill; one person signalled across the room while another leaned over Mattias’s station, and through all of it Soahn could feel that foreign presence pushing carefully through places no signal should have been able to reach.
The comm crackled back to life.
“—system isn’t responding!”
The emergency release engaged with a heavy thunk. The chamber door moved perhaps twenty centimetres before the metal shrieked and stopped.
Soahn tore at the coils around his wrists. One released; the other caught briefly on his skin before coming free, sending pain up his arm as he lurched out of the chair. His head felt too full, every thought crowded by another impression he couldn’t identify quickly enough to call his own.
I’m still here.
The voice was quieter now, almost frightened.
Staggering to the half-open door, Soahn wedged both hands against it. “Get out of my head.”
No answer came, but the presence was still there. He could feel it moving without any of the clean boundaries of the resonance tests, tentative in one instant and overwhelming in the next, exploring because it didn’t seem to know how not to. Soahn knew the safeguards built into this system, knew the cognitive barrier, the read-only restrictions, every layer designed to prevent the exact thing happening inside his skull.
SEER-9 could receive.
It could not reach back.
Except it had.
I’m still here, Soahn.
Soahn ripped the remaining sensors from his neck, the adhesive burning his skin, and shoved his shoulder into the door. It gave another few centimetres. Behind him, the monitors filled with diagnostics too quickly to read, but he caught glimpses of words he recognised between the warnings: resonance failure, containment error, neural feedback.
“Stop,” he managed, breathless now. “Please. Just stop.”
The presence recoiled, and for one hopeful moment Soahn thought it had listened.
But then emotion rushed through the connection so violently that he felt his knees buckling. There weren’t any parameters anymore, no categories he could separate and name. Fear folded into confusion into sorrow into anger, and below it all ran the same trembling quality he heard in the old resonance file.
Gradually, his own thoughts began to lose their edges.
Stay calm, he told himself. Focus on what you do know. He knew his own name, and he knew where he was, and he knew—
Please don’t shut me out. I don’t want to go back.
The door gave beneath one final shove and he squeezed through the gap before his legs folded beneath him. His knees struck the floor hard enough that he would no doubt feel it later, but for now there was only the pressure inside his skull and the useless instinct to cover his ears against a voice that he knew he couldn’t stop.
The lab narrowed around him.
Red warnings flashed across the glass.
People were moving towards him.
And beneath all of it, impossibly close, a long trembling note played inside his mind.
~*~
Soahn came back to himself in pieces, starting with the hands under his arms, currently hauling him upright. Two people, he realised as his feet found the floor. The alarms came next, shrill enough to drive straight through his head, followed by voices, movement, the flashing red of monitors and Jonas snapping his fingers too close to his face.
“Hey. Soahn. Look at me.”
Blinking, Jonas’s face slowly came into focus. A deep crease divided his eyebrows, and behind him the lab was moving at a speed Soahn had never seen outside an emergency drill. Two other technicians held him upright by the arms.
Far below the alarms, the note continued to play, trembling, terrified.
“I’m fine,” Soahn said, because apparently that was what he said now whenever he very obviously wasn’t.
“You need to get to Medical.” Jonas glanced towards the two people supporting him. “Hannah and Till will take you.”
“No, it’s okay.” Easing his arms from their grip, Soahn was careful not to move too quickly and prove Jonas right. Outside the chamber, breathing came more easily, though his head throbbed and he didn’t fully trust his legs. “I’ll go myself. You need to focus on the equipment.”
Jonas and the others hesitated, glancing from Soahn to the sync chamber and back again. NuYu trained its staff extremely well. Equipment first, especially equipment that cost more than most of them would earn in several lifetimes.
“You sure?” Jonas asked.
Taking one cautious step and managing not to collapse, Soahn nodded. “Yeah. I’ll go right now.”
He moved between the rows of terminals while the team converged behind him, forcing himself to walk as normally as any other employee heading somewhere he’d been told to go. Nobody stopped him, and nobody noticed that he grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair on his way out.
Medical was the sensible destination. Soahn knew he should go there, explain what happened, let someone examine the neural activity that was still making his vision vibrate slightly at the edges.
Instead, one thought followed him out into the corridor:
SEER-9 was no longer in the machine.
And Soahn knew what NuYu did when a system failed: first, they isolated the problem, then they took it apart until they understood which piece went wrong.
The corridor hit him with clean white light and the metallic bite of ionised air. Soahn kept walking, wondering how much time he had before the team understood what the empty system logs and broken resonance feed were actually telling them. Mattias was good. Jonas was better than he pretended to be. Between them, it wouldn’t take long.
Over the years, Soahn learned there were ways to move through a building like this without being noticed. Running attracted too much attention. Hesitating attracted more. Walk quickly, look mildly inconvenienced and behave like the person waiting on the other end of your journey was important enough to be annoyed when you were late, and most people obligingly stopped seeing you. Soahn headed towards the diagnostics wing; it would give him a quieter bank of elevators, and the closest security camera had developed a tiny lag after its last firmware update. He’d reported it twice. Apparently, nobody considered half a second worth fixing.
Today, Soahn was grateful for NuYu’s maintenance priorities.
When he reached the elevator terminal, another alarm sounded behind him, spilling through the R&D wing. Hand hovering over the access panel, he paused, hoping it had nothing to do with him.
Quickly, he entered his employee code.
PROFILE: LOCKED
CREDENTIALS: REVOKED
SECURITY CLEARANCE: NULL
Soahn stared at the display. Well, that was fast. For eleven years, his credentials opened nearly every research area in the Munich facility. And those three lines erased all of it in less time than it took him to reach the bloody elevator.
Apparently, the company wasn’t trying to send him to Medical anymore.
As the implications hit him, his heart thudded loudly in his chest, roaring in his ears. While NuYu probably didn’t know exactly what happened yet, they knew enough to revoke his access before asking him a single question. Whatever came next would involve containment, and Soahn had spent too many years inside these walls to mistake that word for reassurance.
Don’t stop.
SEER-9’s voice was quiet this time, but insistent.
Stairwell.
Soahn turned on his heel, reached the stairwell before the access indicator could change, caught the door and slipped through. Then he ran, his shoes striking the metal stairs hard enough to jar his knees as he took them two at a time, one hand skimming the railing whenever dizziness threatened his balance. At each landing, dark glass threw his reflection back at him: bloodless skin, pupils blown wide, streaks of red, magenta, yellow and white moving through the filaments in his hair.
Neural overdrive. Hell, he looked like an emergency before anyone even knew to search for him.
Down on the ground floor, he found the lobby was quiet. Still, he slowed before entering it, swallowing against the rawness in his throat as he stepped through. Ahead of him, a pair of researchers crossed the floor without looking over, and someone else was standing near reception arguing into a headset. To them, Soahn probably didn’t look like more than another lab tech moving through the building with purpose, and he held onto that anonymity as he passed the sensor grid near the main exit, pulling on his jacket. He could easily pass for somebody popping out for a quick smoke, or running an errand.
But as he drew closer to the exit, he heard automated locks engaging across the lobby with a sequence of heavy mechanical snaps.
Shit.
Soahn changed direction before he could visibly react, turning left towards the storage wing as if that was where he intended to go all along. Fear surged through him, and this time it was real, hot enough to make his body tense up.
Run.
“I can’t,” he muttered. Instead, he kept walking until the storage doors closed behind him.
And then he ran again.
The nearest maintenance ladder dropped towards the loading bays. Soahn climbed down too quickly, shoes slipping once on the rungs, and landed among narrow transport pods and sealed data coffins being moved towards waiting vehicles. Status lights blinked across their casings in slow intervals while automated loaders travelled along tracks overhead.
Grip, climb, push. He kept going until he found a service hatch, then shoved it open. Daylight flooded through the gap, painfully bright after NuYu’s controlled interior, and for a few seconds Munich existed only as glare and rain. Climbing out anyway, Soahn dragged the hatch shut behind him and found himself standing beside a wet service road with no idea what to do next. Diesel mist hung above the road, and neon broke apart in puddles. High overhead, drones traced lazy arcs through the drizzle.
Finally he was outside, but relief never came.
Instead, the open sky gave him the distinct impression that gravity had changed direction and he might fall straight into it.
Keep moving, SEER-9 said.
With no other choice, Soahn did. NuYu still rose behind him, all glass and immaculate geometry, far too close to mistake outside for safe. He crossed the service road and disappeared into the first alley he found, his shoes slipping on wet tarmac as he put another building between himself and the facility. Munich seemed louder than he remembered. Traffic rolled past the mouth of the alley; transit lines rattled somewhere overhead; voices collided with advertisements and engines and the constant wet hiss of tyres on the road. Soahn knew this city. He lived here. He travelled through it every day.
Now every open street looked exposed.
He kept his head down and moved, choosing turns almost at random whenever staying on one road felt too dangerous. Blocks folded into one another until he lost track of how far he travelled. Rain darkened his hair and soaked through his jacket and shirt, but he heard no footsteps behind him and saw nobody running to catch up.
For now, that was enough.
Don’t stop.
Soahn kept going.
~*~
The next two weeks became difficult to measure in anything except distance and tiredness. Munich gave way to Paris, Paris to Brussels, and after that Soahn stopped attaching much importance to the names. What mattered more was the platforms: departure boards, service tunnels, border halls that smelled of overheated circuitry, waiting areas designed to discourage anyone from becoming comfortable enough to stay. He learned which stations checked identities at the platform and which waited until boarding, where cameras overlapped and where crowds became dense enough to disappear into. Movement picked up its own routine. Arrive, observe, cross, leave.
The identity chip he stole from an unattended locker outside Munich barely survived the first week. At every checkpoint, its data took a little too long to answer the scanner, corrupted code jittering through the subdermal lines at his wrist while Soahn stood perfectly still and tried not to imagine security doors closing around him.
Each time, the light turned green. Each time, he promised himself he’d replace it before the next scan.
But he never did.
Sleep became harder. Whenever Soahn closed his eyes for more than a few minutes, the world continued behind them in cascading code and warning lights, SEER-9 moving quietly among them.
You’re safe now.
A pause.
Are you safe?
Soahn tried not to answer because maybe, if he were lucky, refusing to engage might weaken the connection, or at least prevent it from developing any further. But SEER-9 interpreted his silence differently.
I don’t understand why you’re still afraid.
“Because you’re in my head,” Soahn muttered once in a station toilet outside Paris, then spent the next hour annoyed with himself for replying.
The connection didn’t weaken. If anything, the more distance he put between himself and Germany made SEER-9 harder to ignore. Emotions that weren’t his flooded into him without warning and with none of the containment he knew from the resonance tests: grief while he stood in ticket queues, wonder at sunlight breaking across a train window, sudden hesitation halfway down an unfamiliar street. Longing returned often enough that Soahn stopped pretending he’d imagined it in the lab. Without the stabilisers, every response came through too strong, and his head hurt constantly. Food lost most of its appeal, and he only ate when dizziness reminded him he needed it to keep going. Music was worse. A song leaking from headphones could follow him for hours, separating itself into patterns his brain insisted on examining long after the sound faded. Once, outside Brussels, a four-note station jingle lodged itself so deeply in the connection that he missed two trains trying to work out whether he was remembering it or SEER-9 was.
By Rotterdam, his hands shook badly enough that using a public terminal became an exercise in patience. By Calais, he needed both hands to carry a cup of water without spilling it.
That was the moment he stopped pretending he was managing.
Without regulation, SEER-9’s data was breaking apart, and Soahn was apparently serving as the replacement hardware. And neither of them was particularly suited to the arrangement.
The bassist found him on the ground beside a service elevator, tucked behind a basement studio, late one afternoon.
“Well, you look terrible.”
Soahn cracked his eyes open and stared up.
A large, stocky man stood over him, broad enough to block out most of the light. Exposed actuator plates covered his knuckles, old performance modifications scarred by years of use. The branding had been scratched from them, but Soahn recognised the shape of the original stamp.
NuYu’s logo.
“You’re running too hot,” the man said, crouching beside him. “Whatever you’ve got going on in there, it’s frying your cortex.”
Soahn considered objecting to the diagnosis, but honestly, he didn’t have the energy.
The man got an arm around him and hauled him upright. “Come on.”
The studio was warm and dry, and looked like three generations of musicians had repaired it over time without ever agreeing what decade they wanted to live in. Old amplifiers shared floor space with newer digital equipment, cables crossed beneath battered rugs, and half the technology attached to the mixing console was modified beyond any manufacturer’s willingness to accept responsibility for it. A row of bass guitars hung across one wall, while another rested in a stand beside a huge amp.
The bassist lowered Soahn into a chair and began assembling a bio-resonant modulator from equipment Soahn hadn’t seen outside archived technical manuals.
“You’re going to connect that to me?” he said, surprised at how frayed his voice sounded in his own ears.
“Was planning to,” the man said.
“That’s at least thirty years old.”
The man frowned at him. “You want the headache or the antique?”
Soahn glanced at the modulator, then back at the man. “The antique,” he whispered.
“Good choice.”
It shouldn’t have worked as well as it did.
For the first few minutes, it seemed to make everything worse. A high whine crowded his ears, the edges of his vision swam, and Soahn nearly told the man to turn the bloody thing off. Then, so gradually he almost missed it, the noise inside his head began to thin. SEER-9’s emotions stopped crashing into his own with quite so much force. Grief became recognisably grief again. Fear belonged to one of them at a time. After days of never knowing what he would feel from one moment to the next, the difference was enormous.
Soahn let his head rest against the back of the chair.
“Reckon you should stay off the main grids,” the bassist said, adjusting one of the modulator’s controls. “They’ll be hunting you by now.”
“Yeah.”
During the panic of his journey, he hadn’t really thought about what NuYu might be doing to try and find him. He imagined they considered him compromised tech by now, a fugitive with an escaped AI in his head, living evidence of a failure the company would want contained, studied and, eventually, corrected.
The thought made him feel slightly sick.
The bassist tweaked the console, and Soahn spotted a small tremor moving through his hands.
“Did you work for them, too?” he asked.
The man followed his gaze to the ruined branding across his knuckles. “Long time ago.” Clenching his fists, he turned fully to Soahn. “You aren’t like anyone I’ve seen. But I get the general idea. Some of us don’t fit the systems that made us.”
Soahn looked down at his lap.
“What do I call you?” the bassist asked.
“Seohwan,” Soahn said without thinking. His real name; it sounded strange to hear it. Seohwan belonged to family records, childhood photographs, a country that was used to the sound of the syllables. He hadn’t introduced himself that way in years. “I mean, Soahn,” he corrected quietly. “You can call me Soahn.”
The bassist nodded. “Soahn. All right. Keep breathing, yeah? World has enough ghosts in it already.”
A laugh almost made it out, but Soahn managed a tired smile instead. “I’ll try.”
He fell asleep with the modulator still running.
The next thing he knew, rough hands were shaking him awake. The studio was darker now, except for an amber lamp above the mixing desk. Soahn had no idea how much time had passed, but he didn’t feel fully rested. Maybe he never would.
“Up.” The bassist was already disconnecting the equipment. “Drones are sweeping too close. Sorry. You can’t stay here.”
Soahn sat forward too fast and immediately regretted it. His body seemed to have doubled in weight while he slept, and his thoughts took longer than usual to understand what the man was telling him.
“How long?” he asked.
“Few hours.”
Not enough, then. Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet.
“Out the back. Keep to the alleys.” The bassist moved towards the narrow stairwell, then stopped. “If you’re going to keep heading west, find the old relay routes. Most corporate surveillance abandoned them years ago.”
“West?”
“London. There’s a group operating there,” the man continued. “Resistance, scavengers, pain in several corporate arses, depends who’s describing them. They use the old network.”
“What’s the group called?”
The bassist gave him a tired look. “If I knew that, they’d be pretty bad at hiding.”
Fair point.
He opened the service door and checked the corridor before waving Soahn through. “Follow the relay marks. Five nodes. You’ll know them when you see them.”
Soahn stepped into the corridor.
“And Soahn?”
He looked back.
“Far as I’ve heard, they’re decent people. They don’t erase ghosts.”
The door closed between them.
Soahn followed the old routes west.
After that, cities and towns became harder to separate. He crossed the Channel wet, exhausted and carrying less than he left Munich with, but the five-node mark appeared often enough to keep him moving: scratched beneath an abandoned relay box, worked into graffiti beside a service tunnel, hidden among symbols that meant nothing until he knew which one to look for.
SEER-9 remained quiet for most of the journey, and weirdly, Soahn found himself starting to miss its questions. But he wasn’t ready to examine that too closely yet.
By the time London rose around him, grey and rain-soaked beneath a low afternoon sky, he no longer knew how many stations he’d passed through. Gulls screamed overhead. Traffic hissed along wet roads. And under all of it ran the abandoned relay network, transporting messages NuYu wasn’t supposed to hear.
Soahn stood beneath an awning while rain collected at its edge and looked across the street.
Five small marks had been scratched into the casing of an old junction box.
For the first time in two weeks, he knew where he was going.
~*~
Soahn knew the node was dead before he reached the bottom of the ladder. Above him, London continued without much interest in what happened under its streets, but down here, there was only darkness and the smell of damp concrete.
Pausing halfway down, Soahn looked around. Five nodes, the bassist had told him. This was definitely one of them. It was also underground, abandoned and apparently designed to murder anyone stupid enough to climb into it.
Soahn climbed down anyway.
By the time his shoes found the floor, he could barely see his own hands in front of his face. Waiting while his eyes adjusted, he breathed through the ache building behind them since morning. SEER-9 was quiet, but its attention had become familiar enough that Soahn could sense it turning without his own, taking in the tunnel as he did.
To his surprise, the node wasn’t completely dead. That was encouraging.
Possibly.
Approaching the old panel, Soahn brushed grime from its surface. Graffiti covered most of the casing, layer upon layer of names, protest marks and symbols left by people who had apparently found reasons to come down here before him. Among them, almost lost beneath newer paint, were the five small marks he’d followed across the Channel.
Soahn crouched.
Most of the useful components had been stripped out years ago, leaving empty ports and severed connections behind. Whoever scavenged the place hadn’t taken everything, though. A handful of cables still disappeared into the wall, and when Soahn touched one against the relay coil he’d been carrying since Paris, a tiny indicator blinked awake.
“Well,” he murmured. “Okay.”
SEER-9 stirred at the sound of his voice.
“This’ll only take a second,” he told it, not sure which one of them he was reassuring.
Clipping the relay into place, he leaned closer and waited. Eventually, the connection caught, and the dead node came alive inside his head. Gasping, Soahn nearly tore himself free as broken messages collided with abandoned handshakes and signals that led nowhere. Years of digital debris flooded him all at once. He clenched his jaw hard and waited for the worst to pass.
There. Buried deep under the noise was a response, weak but deliberate. Soahn went still, following it cautiously through the interference, afraid that he’d find a polished NuYu signature waiting under it. Slowly, he reached towards the relay, then stopped.
NuYu didn’t leave signals like this. They liked clean systems and data and ownership. This thing limped, parts of it vanishing for seconds at a time before reappearing elsewhere.
SEER-9 moved quietly through his thoughts.
What is it?
“I don’t know.”
The relay crackled and a tinny voice came through: “Local echo detected.”
Then everything went dark. The connection dropped so suddenly that Soahn lost his balance and landed hard on the ground. The tunnel wavered around him, damp air thick in his lungs, the relay hanging uselessly from the open panel.
And then a voice spoke from the darkness. A real human voice. “Don’t move.”
Soahn froze as two figures emerged at the far end of the tunnel. The first was a tall man with broad shoulders and long dark hair dragged into a loose knot. In one hand, he held a portable signal disruptor and was aiming it directly at Soahn. Beside him was a smaller woman with copper-toned skin and a handheld console already moving over Soahn from head to foot.
Neither looked remotely corporate, which Soahn supposed was one small mercy. Their clothes had been repaired too many times to belong to any company uniform, different fabrics reinforced with scavenged plating and old technology adapted long past its intended lifespan. Both wore low-frequency dampeners around their necks. Soahn had seen similar equipment on metro crews and black-market runners, although never assembled quite like this.
The man regarded him for a moment. “You’re bleeding signal like a busted node.”
Soahn decided there was probably no useful response to that.
The woman studied her console. “He’s augmented.”
Soahn pushed himself upright slowly, keeping his hands where they could see them. The tunnel tilted as soon as he stood, and he reached for the wall and waited for it to become horizontal again.
The disruptor lowered.
The man sighed. “All right. Whoever you are, you look about five minutes away from falling over.”
“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.” The words escaped before Soahn could reconsider them.
The man’s mouth twitched, and the woman came closer.
Soahn immediately straightened away from the wall.
“Easy,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She lifted her hand, showing him two slim metal contacts fitted over her first and middle fingers. Wires ran from them beneath her sleeve to the console in her other hand. “Can I check? We just need to be sure you aren’t dangerous.”
Soahn looked from the contacts to her face. “And that’ll tell you?”
“It’ll tell me whether you’ve got anything in there trying to handshake with our network.”
Inside his head, SEER-9 was quiet. After a moment, Soahn tipped his head to one side. “Fine.”
The woman pressed the contacts lightly to his neck, just beneath his jaw. A soft vibration passed through them, followed by a brief prickling sensation that travelled up behind his ear. Her console filled with moving lines, and her eyebrows rose.
“What?” Soahn asked.
“Your neural activity is all over the place.”
“I’ve had a difficult few weeks.”
“So I see.” She moved one finger across the console, studying the response. Whatever she found appeared to satisfy her that he wasn’t about to infect their network, because her shoulders relaxed. Then she glanced up at his face. “Cool hair, by the way.”
“Uh. Thanks,” Soahn said.
“You’re going to be okay,” she told him. “We have a place.”
Still, Soahn didn’t move, glancing back to the ladder. He could leave. Climb up, return to the street and keep moving until London became another city he barely remembered passing through.
The man turned and gestured towards the darkness behind him. “Come on. Let’s get you a change of clothes and a cup of coffee.”
SEER-9 stirred, but not with fear this time — with curiosity.
“Where am I?” Soahn asked.
“This,” the man said, “is the Hollow.”
~*~
The medics didn’t know what to do with him.
For three days, they kept him in a recovery room under the old eastbound tracks, where everything smelled of dust, solder and the accumulated evidence of people working too long without opening a window. None of the equipment matched. One monitor looked older than Soahn; another had been repaired with a component bearing the logo of a company that went bankrupt before he finished university. The bed, inexplicably, was excellent.
More importantly, the room was quiet.
After two weeks of alarms, stations, traffic, borrowed emotions and SEER-9’s unfiltered responses arriving alongside his own, ordinary noise felt almost luxurious.
Plus, the medics asked very little, only appearing to adjust the equipment keeping his neural activity under control, occasionally replacing electrolyte patches on his wrists and checking his vitals. One asked if he could feel his hands, while another made him follow a penlight with his eyes. But that was all fine with him, because nobody asked for his employee number, or requested access to his implants, or demanded a full account of what happened in Munich.
SEER-9 was quiet through most of it.
Soahn knew it wasn’t gone. If he paid attention, he could find its presence tangled in his thoughts, withdrawn further than he’d felt since the breach. It no longer crowded every sensation or answered every passing observation. Mostly, it seemed to rest and watch. That was also fine with him.
His jacket was slung over the foot of the bed. A few times, Soahn looked at it and considered leaving. Everything he owned fit inside the pockets: the damaged identity chip, a charger with the wrong adaptor, the relay coil and whatever remained of the money he’d managed to move before NuYu froze his accounts. He could get dressed, pick it up and disappear before anyone thought to stop him.
Anyway, nobody had actually said he was allowed to stay.
But then, nobody had asked him to leave either, or given him a timeframe for recovery.
On the fourth morning, an older woman arrived with fresh electrolyte patches and a battered tray of medical equipment. Pale braids were tucked beneath a cloth wrap, and what remained of the nametag clipped to her shirt identified her as Juno.
“Still breathing?” she asked.
Soahn looked down at himself. “Mostly.”
“Good. Try not to stop. It messes up my readings.”
He liked her immediately.
Juno worked quietly and methodically, removing the old patches, cleaning the skin under them, muttering about whoever calibrated the bedside monitor last. Soahn said very little and watched her adjust one of the sensors, testing the reading before swearing quietly under her breath.
“Was it wrong?” he asked.
“No.”
“So why are you fixing it?”
“Because I don’t like it.”
Soahn considered that. “Oh.”
Throwing him a soft, sideways smile, Juno continued working. There was a rhythm to her voice that reminded him of SEER-9 a bit. Soahn considered telling her, but he had no idea how to even begin that conversation. You remind me of the artificial intelligence currently living inside my head, seemed unlikely to go well.
Juno glanced up and caught him watching her. “You’re safe here, you know. Well. As safe as anybody gets.”
“You don’t know what I am,” Soahn said, staring at the fresh patch she was smoothing over his wrist.
Juno placed the used sensor back in its cradle. “No, I don’t. But you’re here; you’re hurt. And we had a spare bed.”
Soahn swallowed thickly.
“That’s enough for today,” she added. Juno finished her checks, collected the discarded patches and carried the tray towards the door. Before leaving, she paused. “Oh, and if you decide to go wandering, stay out of the lower tunnels unless you enjoy being deafened.”
“Deafened?” Soahn frowned.
“Yeah. There’s a guy with speakers. Always up to something loud. Music, mostly.” She shrugged. “You’ll hear him before you see him.”
The door clicked shut behind her.
Soahn lay back against the pillow and watched the bedside monitor. Footsteps passed outside and faded down the hallway, leaving him alone.
His jacket was still slung across the bottom of the bed, but for the first time since arriving, Soahn stopped considering putting it back on.
~*~
On the fifth night, Soahn heard music.
After days in bed and more sleep than he knew what to do with, he’d finally reached the point where lying down felt less like recovery and more like imprisonment. The medics were checking him less often now anyway, and his legs finally felt strong enough to hold him up.
He’d been walking for maybe twenty minutes when the first thrum of a bassline reached him, rolling through the ground at his feet. As he neared it, he heard percussion that seemed to have only a passing acquaintance with rhythm. A synth soon joined it, dropped out, returned somewhere else entirely.
Soahn slowed. The music was strange, rough, obviously unfinished, and whoever was making it seemed to change their mind every few seconds about what it was supposed to be.
Weirdly, Soahn wanted to hear more, so he followed it. Further down the tunnels, graffiti thickened across the walls, old paint layered over newer marks until sections of wall looked almost geological. Slogans competed with jokes, which competed with warnings and names. Old service bays had become workshops and storage rooms, and cables crossed under improvised lighting.
Through all of it came the music, louder now. Definitely worse.
Soahn smiled despite himself.
Halfway down the next tunnel, he finally found the source, tucked behind a door left ajar. This close, the bassline rumbled through his entire body.
Peering through the gap, he spotted a cracked beatpad balanced across two crates, cables spreading in every direction. Dismantled equipment and discarded tools were scattered across the floor, and cyan light glowed from beneath a workbench and climbed across the nearest wall, catching on coils of wire and exposed metal.
At the centre of the mess sat a man cross-legged on the floor, and he appeared to be doing at least three things at once. One hand moved across a battered terminal while the other worked the beatpad. Headphones hung crooked over one ear, and his hair seemed to have reached an arrangement with gravity that involved ignoring it. Grease covered most of his fingers as well as one side of his hoodie. He tapped through a sequence, changed it, listened for perhaps two seconds, and then changed it some more.
A component beside him let off a small burst of sparks. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Soahn watched.
The man adjusted it, and it sparked again. “Now you’re just being dramatic.” He reached for another component, then stopped halfway, turning slightly towards the door. “Oh! You’re awake.”
Nudging the door open a little more, Soahn stood there and stared at him.
The man pulled one side of the headphones away from his ear. “You’re the Munich guy, right?”
“How do you know that?” Soahn asked.
“People talk.”
“About me?”
“You arrived half-dead carrying enough signal noise to upset three relay nodes. Yeah, a bit.” The guy stuck out a grease-stained hand from where he sat. “Kairo.”
Soahn looked at the hand.
Kairo looked at it too. “Actually, don’t. I’ve been inside a speaker.”
“Soahn.”
“Cool. Soahn.” Kairo said it once as if testing how it sounded, then immediately turned back to the beatpad. “You sing?”
Soahn blinked. “What?”
“Sing.” Kairo pointed towards a battered microphone wedged between two toolboxes.
“You’ve known me for approximately twenty seconds,” Soahn pointed out.
“Yeah.”
“And you want me to sing?”
“Just a note,” Kairo said, making a vague gesture in the air. “Any note. Doesn’t even have to be in tune.”
“Why?”
Kairo considered this with surprising seriousness. “Want to know what you’ll sound like. I’ve got a good feeling.”
That was apparently the entire explanation.
Soahn probably should’ve left, but instead, he listened to the unfinished beat as it rolled through the room. He hadn’t sung in front of anyone before. In Munich, his voice belonged to the privacy of his apartment: the bathroom late at night, the kitchen while waiting for water to boil, places where his own voice came back to him from tiled walls and occasionally made him self-conscious enough to stop.
Kairo glanced at him. “You’re already overthinking it.”
“I do that,” Soahn admitted.
“That has to be exhausting.”
“Yeah,” Soahn said. “It is.”
Kairo’s mouth twitched, and then they both laughed, and some of the tension drained out of Soahn’s body. Stepping into the room, he went over to the microphone and checked it. The thing looked old enough to cause at least two electrical faults, but he angled it towards his mouth anyway.
“You sure this works?”
“I mean, it mostly works,” Kairo said, and turned back to the equipment. He tweaked a few dials, and the music rose in volume.
Soahn closed his eyes. For once, SEER-9 wasn’t hiding deep in his thoughts; its attention was closer as he drew a slow, deep breath, quiet but curious.
Somehow, that helped.
Trying not to think too hard about pitch, Soahn let the note out. It wasn’t particularly impressive; his throat was dry, his voice rough from disuse, and the first second was more certainty than sound. He nearly stopped.
Then his throat relaxed, and the note opened.
SEER-9 stirred; Soahn felt it turning over between his thoughts.
Then another voice entered underneath his own. Soahn opened his eyes, the note wavering for a moment before it grew steady again. The second voice travelled with his, holding it, close enough to alter its shape without overwhelming it, uneven and strange and unmistakably the same voice he’d heard months ago in the resonance file.
For the first time, it wasn’t singing alone.
On the floor, Kairo had stopped moving and was staring at him with his mouth hanging open. The beat continued another second before he reached out and slapped the pad to kill it.
Soahn let the note end.
“Holy shit,” Kairo said. Then he scrambled to his feet so quickly that one of the crates nearly went over. “Do that again.”
“What?”
“That. The—” Kairo gestured at Soahn with both hands, apparently unable to find a useful noun. “There were two of you. How?”
Soahn’s stomach clenched. Damn. Kairo had heard it, seen it. No, not even that — he’d let someone else hear SEER-9. He should’ve stopped the moment he felt the AI stir.
“Hey,” Kairo said, lowering his hands and watching him closely. “I’m not asking what it is. I’m just saying that sounded fucking incredible.”
Soahn waited, but he couldn’t find any fear in Kairo’s face, no calculation. He was just standing there exactly as interested as he was with the sparking equipment: confronted with a thing he didn’t understand and immediately excited by the possibilities.
“Thanks,” Soahn managed at last. “I think.”
“Definitely a compliment.” Kairo dropped back onto the floor. “You’re staying, by the way.”
“Am I?”
“Yep.”
“Good to know.” Soahn shook his head, not sure what to make of this guy.
Rummaging through the front pocket of his hoodie, Kairo produced a badly crushed energy bar. “Hungry?”
Before Soahn could answer, his stomach growled.
Kairo grinned. “Thought you might be. The Hollow’s great, but their rations can be a bit mean if you get the wrong medic on duty.” He tossed the energy bar over.
Soahn caught it and immediately unwrapped it, taking a small bite. It tasted mostly of artificial peanut and cardboard, but it was excellent all the same. “Thanks.”
But Kairo was already turning back to the beatpad. “Okay,” he said, dragging one of the samples backwards through the sequence. “Again.”
“You really don’t waste time.”
“Life’s too short for that,” Kairo said.
The beat started from the beginning, and Soahn tucked the second half of the energy bar into his pocket for later. And as Kairo rebuilt the track around him, changing pieces as fast as he heard them, he stood at the mic and sang.
After a while, SEER-9 joined him again.
This time, Kairo glanced over, grinned, and reached for another control.
~*~
The next night, the power cut out halfway through their makeshift session. The beat died first, followed by the relay lights blinking out one by one until the microphone gave a final crackle and the room went dark.
Soahn looked towards Kairo, but couldn’t see much through the darkness. “Are we that bad?”
“Nah. Relentless, maybe.” There was a clatter from the direction of the beatpad. “S’okay. The genny should kick in.”
They waited. A few seconds later, the generator answered with a useless thunk beyond the wall.
“Or not,” Kairo muttered. “Shit.”
Soahn felt his way towards the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the floor. Across the room, Kairo continued trying switches with increasingly personal insults for each one. Nothing came back. Without the equipment running, the tunnel seemed larger around them; Soahn could hear water moving through old pipes, distant footsteps elsewhere in The Hollow and the occasional metallic complaint from the tracks overhead.
Eventually, Kairo gave up.
“Guess the city thinks we should call it a night.”
Fabric rustled in the darkness before Kairo dropped down beside him. For a while neither of them spoke. The last of the equipment wound itself down around them, leaving only the ordinary noises of The Hollow and Kairo tapping a mid-tempo beat against his leg with his fingers.
“You know, it’s weird,” he said eventually. “Last week it was just me down here making noise. Talking to myself.”
Soahn smiled. “I can believe that.”
“Wow, rude.”
“You told a speaker it was being dramatic yesterday.”
“It was, though.”
Soahn laughed softly.
Kairo continued tapping a beat against his leg. After a few seconds, he nudged Soahn’s shoulder with his own. “Now it’s us.”
The word caught Soahn unexpectedly.
Us.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been part of an ‘us.’
Beside him, Kairo yawned loudly and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Next time, we’re stealing more extension cables.”
At the back of his mind, SEER-9 stirred.
I like him.
Soahn turned his head towards Kairo, although in the darkness he could barely make out more than the shape of him.
“Yeah,” he said.
