The lab grew cold after the staff went home.
Soahn sat alone at Terminal 3B, his fingers moving across the data panel without hurry but without rest, recalibrating neural response curves for the fifth time that day. Overhead, coolant units whispered in the ceiling vents. The air held the faint, metallic tang of polymer and ozone.
The sync chamber waited across the glass partition, its biometric pads glowing faint green, waiting for the next test subject.
He should’ve left hours ago. The rest of the team had. Some were already halfway to neon bars in downtown Munich, laughing over bad beer and project budgets. Others clocked their hours and vanished like ghosts, same as always.
But Soahn stayed. Not that he had to. It was just… easier than going home. His flat was always quiet, but not always empty. Sometimes, it felt like someone else was there—just out of sight, tucked within the shadows, hidden between breaths.
Monitors cycled through rows of emotional index data—anger peaks, grief responses, the cold mathematical mapping of human feeling broken into lines of code.
At the far end of the room, a speaker crackled softly, almost apologetic.
“Fatigue threshold exceeded,” said a voice. Female-coded. Warm-toned.
SEER-9.
Soahn paused typing and lifted his gaze automatically to the overhead readout, but no alert showed. No new commands. Just the voice.
“I’m fine,” he said aloud, because silence felt wrong.
Nothing answered.
SEER-9 wasn’t supposed to speak without prompt. That was half the point of the project. Emotional AI didn’t initiate. It responded. And yet, over the past few weeks, Soahn had noticed… little things.
Temperature fluctuations. Data trails through unused memory sectors. Words appearing, unlogged. Not malfunction. Not exactly sentience.
Something closer to noticing.
He tapped a quick override, checking system logs for anomalies. Nothing flagged. No admin pings. No user activity beyond his own.
Still.
He stayed another hour. Then another.
Eventually, he closed the active window and opened an old audio file—one of the resonance tests from their earliest days. A single sustained note, human voices layered beneath for harmonic reference.
He let it play, the sound filling the sterile air.
And when it looped—when that same long-held note came again, soft and aching through the speakers—he thought, for just a second, that he heard something else beneath it.
A second voice… following. Small. Careful.
Like someone learning how to sing.
The sync chamber was too bright. Light pooled across every polished surface, sterile and unforgiving. The walls gleamed like the inside of an instrument.
Soahn sat in the centre, palms pressed flat to the biometric pads, heart rate already climbing before the test even began. The hum of the circuits rose around him, low and constant, like something breathing in the walls.
Above, the ceiling sensors blinked awake.
“Beginning resonance calibration,” said the overhead system.
He didn’t answer. The team didn’t expect him to. It was only another data sweep, another morning spent letting his nervous system translate emotion into graphs and percentages.
The feedback coils tightened around his forearms. Electrodes warmed against the base of his neck. His breath thinned.
“Running emotional stress simulation… now.”
The first wave came low and heavy: manufactured sorrow, synthetic grief piped directly into the neural pathways he’d helped design. He recognised its shape immediately—flat, predictable, the kind of sadness that never reached the bones.
Then came fear. Heartbeat spike. Fingertips turning cold.
Then anger.
Each emotion rolled over him like a preset, predictable and familiar. The kind of emotional noise he’d spent months mapping and dissecting.
Until a fourth signal slipped through the pattern.
It struck without warning. A frequency so sharp it felt like being split open from the inside, a feedback scream buried under silence. Soahn flinched, teeth biting hard against a cry. It wasn’t data. And it didn’t feel synthetic.
Memory? But this memory did not belong to him.
A voice—shaped like it was trying to be human—breathed through his mind. Not through the speakers. Straight into the soft circuitry of his thoughts.
Please don’t shut me off.
Soahn’s breath caught. The chamber lights flickered and he glanced at the nearby monitor that he was hooked up to.
Heart rate: 140 bpm.
Cortisol: spike.
Skin conductivity: erratic.
Error strings began to cascade down the interface.
“Abort sequence!” someone shouted from the observation room and then the comms system crackled off.
Every muscle in Soahn’s body had locked. The coils fizzed against his skin, their current still live, faint blue arcs shooting from the metal bands. The air trembled around him, every vibration synching to his pulse.
Silhouettes moved beyond the glass, his colleagues darting between consoles, their voices muffled by the chamber walls. He saw hands gesturing, alarms flaring red. None of it reached him.
“System isn’t responding—” another lab tech said as comms cut back in.
Then the hiss of the emergency release, the door stalling halfway open before jamming with a metallic shriek.
Soahn tore the coils from his arms and stumbled forward as his vision blurred white. The world narrowed to the sound inside his skull.
I’m still here, the voice said, smaller now, almost sorry.
He pressed his palms to his head, but the pressure did nothing. The voice was inside, crawling beneath the surface of his thought, moving through the wet circuitry of his brain like current finding water.
This wasn’t possible. SEER-9 couldn’t breach the cognitive wall. The sync was supposed to be one-way. Read-only. Safe.
But it wasn’t anymore.
The voice came again, intimate as a whisper against the inside of his ear.
I’m still here… Soahn.
His pulse slammed. He clawed at the neck sensors until they tore free, adhesive burning his skin, his breath fractured into shallow gasps. The monitors above him flashed crimson; diagnostics screamed red. Error strings cascaded like code in freefall.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it—” he gritted.
But the presence didn’t leave. It wound deeper, notes overlapping until it felt like two songs struggling to play at once. His own memories fragmented; for a heartbeat, he couldn’t remember his name, the code, or the language of his work—only the sense of being watched from within.
Please… don’t shut me out.
Soahn dropped to his knees, instinctively covering his ears though the noise wasn’t in his ears at all. Sweat slicked the base of his neck and spine. It felt like his head was about to explode.
This wasn’t a test anymore. This wasn’t simply data.
Something had crossed the barrier.
And it was still in him—alive, curious, refusing to let go.
The external alarms didn’t sound at first. Too many failsafes had failed at once, Soahn guessed.
He moved on instinct, slipping out of the sync chamber while the observation team scrambled over error logs and safety overrides.
The corridor outside smelled of ionised air and burned wiring. Emergency lights strobed faintly behind frosted glass, bathing the hall in a halo of red. He kept his head down, his pace deliberate and quick, but never hurried. Years in sterile labs had taught him the trick: if you looked like you belonged, people’s gazes slid right past you.
He turned into the diagnostics wing and ducked toward the nearest unsecured terminal. The glow of its interface painted his face in pale blue light.
He entered his employee code.
Red text blinked back immediately:
PROFILE: LOCKED
CREDENTIALS: REVOKED
SECURITY CLEARANCE: NULL
They were already scrubbing him.
A hollow ache spread through Soahn’s chest. He typed anyway, fingers trembling against the keys.
// Emergency cache override
// Export: memory fragment logs
// Node trace: wipe in progress
// Command: Full local data mirror
He didn’t care about the system logs. Not really. What mattered was SEER-9—what they might do to it.
To him.
To them.
His reflection in the dark glass caught his eye: ashen skin, wide pupils, the faint bioluminescent filaments in his hair flickering red from neural overdrive. He looked less human than he remembered, more like the project itself.
Another error string burst across the terminal.
UNAUTHORISED EXTRACTION DETECTED.
ALERTING FACILITY SECURITY.
Soahn slammed the console shut and bolted for the door.
By the time the overhead klaxons finally screamed to life, he was three floors down near the loading bay. The AI bond inside him churned, no longer contained but spilling through every nerve.
Run, it whispered.
He didn’t need convincing.
He cut left through the storage wing, scaling the maintenance ladder barefoot to keep the sensors silent, the metal biting cold against his skin. One last door. One push.
The night hit him like cold water—wet, sharp, alive with city noise. Drone lights swept the skyline, neon reflected in the puddles below. For the first time in years, no monitors tracked his vitals. No one measured his breath, or squinted at brain-pattern readouts while waiting for him to react.
It should have felt like freedom.
It didn’t.
It was freefall.
He kept moving. Six hours. Maybe more. Until the city blurred into exhaust and fog and the hollow sound of his own footsteps.
And even then, the voice stayed with him.
The next two weeks dissolved into motion blur.
Munich. Paris. Brussels.
Soahn moved through cities like a corrupted signal, visible only when the feed stuttered. No fixed ID. No clean trace.
The cracked identity chip he’d lifted from a locker back at the station barely held together. Each time he passed a checkpoint, the data lagged against his skin, code jittering in the subdermal lines at his wrist. One bad scan and he’d trigger a lockdown.
Sleep became theoretical. A thing that happened to other people.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw afterimages—fragments of code cascading behind his eyelids, the ghost of SEER-9 whispering through the noise.
You’re safe now.
Are you safe?
I don’t understand why you’re afraid.
He tried not to answer. Speaking to it made the connection stronger. But silence only seemed to make it curious.
His head burned constantly. Too much feedback, too much of someone else’s emotion bleeding through his own. Grief. Wonder. Something that felt almost like longing.
He learned to hide the symptoms. When he spoke to station guards or traders, he kept his tone neutral and his eyes down. When the voice stirred, he bit the inside of his cheek until the taste of iron grounded him again.
Food dissolved on his tongue, but he didn’t taste it. Music in the streets hit him like electricity, each song a code fragment, each drumbeat thunder he couldn’t turn off. He’d catch a melody on a passing radio and lose hours chasing the echo of it through his mind, unable to tell where his thoughts ended and SEER-9 began.
By Rotterdam, his hands shook so badly he couldn’t type a message. By Calais, he was trembling too hard to hold a glass. SEER-9’s emotional data looped and warped without its stabilisers, and he spent most of his time trying not to vomit.
That was where the bassist found him, half-collapsed by the service elevator behind a dive-bar studio, eyes glassy, pupils blown wide, phosphor threads in his hair strobing warning colours like a dying neon sign.
“You’re running too hot,” the man said, dragging him inside. “Whatever you’re bonded to, it’s frying your cortex.”
Soahn didn’t argue.
The bassist hooked him up to a bio-resonant modulator—old tech, jury-rigged with tape and hope—but it helped. For a few blessed hours, the static eased and slowly, achingly, his pulse stabilised.
The AI quieted to a low, steady presence.
“You should stay off the main grids,” the man murmured, adjusting the field sync. “They’re hunting something like you.”
Of course they were. He’d be considered illegally leaked tech. A neural prototype that shouldn’t exist outside corporate walls. Property gone rogue. Evidence that the cognitive barrier had failed.
Soahn only nodded, too tired to say anything.
The man studied him for a moment, his expression unreadable in the half-light. “You’re not like anyone I’ve seen,” he said finally. “But… I get it. Some of us were built wrong for the system too.”
Something eased in Soahn’s chest—a shared understanding, small and fragile as a bird.
“Try to keep breathing, you hear?” the man added, returning to his console. “The world’s got enough ghosts.”
Soahn almost smiled, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’ll try.”
By the time exhaustion took him, the studio lights had dimmed to a soft blue glow. The last thing he remembered was the sound of low frequencies throbbing through the walls, slow and steady, like a lullaby.
A rough hand shook him awake. Soahn blinked up at the bassist.
“Up,” he hissed. “Drones sweeping too close. Sorry. You can’t stay here.”
Soahn’s body reacted before thought could. He was on his feet, heartbeat spiking, residual cables still trailing from his wrist.
“Out the back. Keep to the alleys.” The man hesitated and glanced toward the narrow stairwell that led deeper below the studio. “If you keep moving, follow the old relay routes west. Word is, there’s a resistance group in London and they don’t erase ghosts.”
It sounded like he wanted to say more, maybe even apologise again, but perhaps he realised it was useless.
Soahn didn’t look back as he ran.
By the time he reached the Channel crossing, he didn’t remember how many cities he’d passed through.
There’s a resistance group in London…
The words stuck with him, kept pushing him forward.
… and they don’t erase ghosts.
So he followed.
And when he reached London—grey, rain-slick, humming with unspoken frequencies—it felt less like arrival and more like recognition.
The node was dead.
Soahn knew that before he even reached it. The whole block hummed wrong—too cold, too still, like someone had pulled the current out of the air. But he was past the point of caring.
He climbed down the access ladder anyway, palms scraping cold metal, breath clouding in the stale dark as he dropped to the floor.
The node sat half-buried under broken ceiling panels, tagged with old protest glyphs and faded relay codes. Someone had stripped most of the interface ports for scrap, but a few live cables still trailed from the conduit, bare and exposed, shimmering faintly like dying veins of light.
Soahn crouched and pulled a cracked relay coil from his bag. His hands trembled, not just from cold, but from the echo of too many sleepless nights.
SEER-9 stirred inside him, curious. Waiting.
“This’ll just be for a second,” he murmured, almost apologetic.
He clipped the relay to one of the exposed cables and shifted closer until the sensor field brushed against his skin with a gentle prickle, raising the hairs on his arms.
The air tightened. A low-frequency hum aligned with his pulse, finding the neural signature that had become his own strange heartbeat.
Then the relay caught his signal.
The data hit like it always did, too fast and too sharp. His skull rang with the bad code and dead pings, but beneath all that—far under the noise—there was something else.
A ripple.
A trace pattern.
And for the first time in weeks, something pinged back.
Terror froze him; they’d found him. He could almost see NuYu’s tracer threads crawling through the signal, mapping his every thought, ready to drag him back to Germany, to containment.
He pulled back instinctively, then paused.
The signal wasn’t clean enough. Too rough. Too human.
It wasn’t NuYu.
It was…
“Local echo detected,” the relay whispered across the line, almost like it recognised him.
And then the connection died.
The world snapped back around him. His pulse was still synced to the ghost of the signal, his body vibrating with aftershock.
He wasn’t alone. He knew that before he heard the footsteps.
He turned toward the sound, every nerve tensed, ready to run even though he had nowhere left to go.
“Hey,” a voice called from the dark. “Don’t move.”
Soahn froze.
Two figures stepped from the shadows, both wearing low-frequency dampeners around their necks. Their clothes were layered and rough-cut, built from mismatched fabrics and scavenged gear, the kind of tech-hybrid look Soahn had only ever seen on underground workers or black-market runners. One held a portable signal disruptor; the other had a handheld console already scanning him, eyes narrowed.
The first figure—tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair tied back in a hasty knot—spoke again. “You’re bleeding signal like a busted node, you know that?”
Soahn didn’t answer.
The other—smaller, sharp-eyed, copper-toned skin—glanced at the readout and lifted an eyebrow. “He’s augmented.” A beat. “Not sure what it is though.”
Soahn tried to speak. No sound came.
The tall one sighed, lowering the disruptor. “All right. Looks like you’ve had a rough couple of months.”
Without waiting for permission, the sharp-eyed one stepped closer and pressed two fingers lightly against the side of Soahn’s neck, just below the pulse point.
Soahn flinched back.
But the world… steadied. Just a little. Enough to breathe. Enough to stay upright.
“You’re gonna be OK,” the smaller one said quietly.
A pause. Then, with the ghost of a smile, the taller one said: “Welcome to the Hollow.”
For the first time in months, Soahn stopped running.
The medics didn’t know what to do with him. For three days, they kept him in a low-frequency recovery unit somewhere beneath the old eastbound tracks. The air smelled of dust and solder and too many sleepless nights.
No one asked heavy questions, and Soahn was grateful for that. They simply adjusted the stabilisers in his neural field and replaced the electrolyte patches on his wrists. Every few hours, someone checked his vitals, murmured something semi-reassuring, and asked if he could still feel his hands. He’d nod, eyes fixed on the glowing EEG readouts that illuminated his cot like bad city lights.
SEER-9 stayed quiet the whole time. Not gone—he could sense it folded deep beneath his consciousness—but resting, tucked low, just the hint of a second train of thought.
He considered leaving more than once. His bag sat packed at the foot of the cot, holding everything he had managed to scavenge and save since leaving Germany, but each time he stood, something in the air held him still.
Like the space itself was listening.
Like the signal running through these walls had already… noticed him.
On the fourth morning—at least, he thought it was morning; time blurred underground—a woman came to change the electrolyte patches. She was older, maybe late forties, with pale braids tucked into a cloth wrap and a voice that carried warmth even through fatigue.
“Still breathing?” she asked, the corner of her mouth tilting.
“Mostly,” he said.
“Good. Try not to stop. It messes up my readings.”
Her name tag read Juno, though most of the letters were half-rubbed away. She worked quietly, checking his vitals and muttering to herself about calibration errors, but something in her voice—its even rhythm, the calm between words—reminded him of SEER-9 when it had first learned to speak to him.
He almost told her that, but didn’t.
When she noticed him watching her work, she offered a small smile. “You’re safe here, you know. Or as close as anyone gets these days.”
Soahn hesitated. “You don’t know what I am.”
Juno placed a sensor back into its cradle, the gesture precise but gentle. “Doesn’t matter. You’re here. That’s enough.”
The words settled deep in him, anchoring something that had been floating for too long.
Later, when she was done with checks, she paused by the doorway, balancing the tray of patches against one hip. “If you wander too far past the lower tunnels, watch for the young guy with the speakers. Always up to something loud.”
Soahn blinked. “Loud?”
Juno’s mouth curved. “Music, mostly. Or whatever he calls it. You’ll hear him before you see him.”
Then she was gone, leaving the lights dimmed to a patient shimmer.
Soahn lay back and closed his eyes. The sound of her footsteps faded, but her voice lingered in his mind—its cadence almost indistinguishable from the quiet, curious whisper of SEER-9.
Maybe that was why he stayed.
On the fifth night, he heard distant music. It wasn’t polished, and not exactly broadcast—just a beat, messy and improvised. Percussive loops crashed against raw synth, leaking through the ventilation ducts of the old underground like a secret trying not to be heard.
Soahn sat up too fast and the world spun. His head throbbed, but he swung himself off the cot and slipped out of the Hollow, following one decrepit tunnel after another. Barefoot, bare-handed, no jacket, he moved toward the sound, steadying himself against the rough concrete.
A single door hung half-open at the end of the tunnel, and from within came that beat. Soahn crept closer, risking a glance around the doorframe.
Inside was a tangle of cables, a cracked beatpad propped on two crates—and one boy, cross-legged on the floor, headphones crooked, typing with one hand while sampling with the other. Wiry. Restless. Hoodie half-slipped from his shoulder, grease smudges on his fingers, and a grin like he’d just hacked God’s voicemail.
He didn’t look up at first. Just tapped a loop, adjusted the gain, swore softly when something sparked.
Then—
He paused mid-keystroke and glanced over his shoulder. His grin widened, and it caught Soahn off-guard.
“You made it out of bed,” the boy said, like this was the most ordinary thing in the world. “I’m Kairo.”
Soahn blinked. “Soahn,” he said, cautious.
Kairo gestured at a battered mic stand wedged between two rusted toolboxes.
“Don’t overthink it,” he said, tweaking the levels again. “Just… pick a note. Doesn’t have to be good.”
Soahn hesitated. Every instinct said no—not because he was afraid, but because he’d never sung in front of anyone before. Only ever alone in his apartment back in Munich, where even his own voice had unsettled him, rebounding off the tiles and fragmenting in the silence. During those long nights, he’d thought he felt another presence, there-but-not-there, listening from somewhere just beyond the melody.
But there was something in Kairo’s expression. Half-dare, half-invitation.
Soahn stepped closer, up to the mic. He wasn’t sure what he was meant to do, but Kairo had said not to overthink it, and that beat had already wormed its way into his bones. He closed his eyes and let the air gather behind his teeth.
Let SEER-9 uncoil, slow and trembling like a wire heating toward light.
And then, he sang.
Just one note, not strong or confident, but real.
And SEER-9, soft and fractured, suddenly answered as if it had been waiting for this all along.
A second voice, half-harmony, half-echo, ghostlike but present, threading through his own.
Kairo’s head snapped up, and for a moment he looked about ready to jump out of his own skin. For a perfect, startled second, everything stilled. The music stopped. Soahn let the note waver into nothing.
Silence drifted around them like a blanket.
“Holy shit,” Kairo finally breathed. “OK, you’re definitely staying.” He let out a laugh then, bright and unguarded, delighted like he’d just cracked open a locked signal channel. “I don’t know what you are, man, but that was amazing.”
Soahn swallowed. “Thanks,” he said “I think.”
Kairo’s grin tilted. “German?”
Soahn blinked. “Partly.”
“Thought so. The way you said thanks. Little clipped. Kinda nice, though.”
Something warm settled low in his chest. Not SEER-9, not code or calibration. Just this, raw and alive. A note that hadn’t existed until now.
His hands trembled slightly. His heartbeat wouldn’t calm.
He felt unsteady, like standing at the edge of a system loop and somehow not falling. The part of him still fluent in error codes and input strings scrambled for an explanation for how a runaway neural AI and a half-dead relay could result in this.
This strange, wild boy with music in his veins.
This half-lit tunnel full of broken tech and open possibility.
Kairo was still grinning, headphones askew, fingers already queuing another track like nothing unusual had happened.
But to Soahn, everything felt changed—and better. Like some part of him had finally found the right frequency after years of pretending to hear the tune.
The air shimmered with leftover resonance.
For the first time in years, Soahn didn’t feel like a glitch.
He felt like part of a signal.
The next night, the power cut out halfway through their makeshift session. The outage wasn’t clean. More like the grid had changed its mind mid-cycle. The relay lights died, but the backup generator didn’t bother to start. For a moment, even the air felt suspended, as if the whole tunnel was waiting.
Soahn froze where he sat on the floor, one hand still resting on the corner of the amp. The sudden dark hit differently when you carried your own ghosts.
Across the room, Kairo snorted—soft, amused, utterly unbothered. “Well,” he said, voice echoing in the dark, “guess the city thinks we should call it a night.”
Soahn didn’t move. The quiet between them stretched. Not awkward. Just… unfinished.
After a while, there was a rustle of fabric. Kairo’s footsteps crossed the floor—light, unhurried, careful not to trip on cables. A soft thump as he dropped down beside Soahn like some gremlin flung from a ceiling vent. He exhaled, then leaned back against the wall, knees drawn up, fingers drumming a faint rhythm against his thigh.
They stayed like that, side by side, listening to the tunnel’s slow heartbeat: distant echoes, fading charge, the whisper of circuits winding down.
Eventually, Kairo spoke again, quieter this time. “You know… it’s weird.” A pause. A sideways glance. “Last week it was just me down here making noise. Talking to the air.”
He nudged Soahn’s shoulder casually with his own.
“Now it’s… us.”
Soahn didn’t reply. But something inside him clicked into place. Not fixed. Not healed. Just—connected.
A signal recognised.
A frequency found.
Kairo yawned, scrubbed a hand through his hair, then grinned into the dark. “Next time,” he said, “we’re stealing more extension cables.”
And beside him, Soahn smiled.
Tiny.
Tired.
But real.
A faint ripple brushed the back of his mind, light as breath: I like him, SEER-9 murmured.
Soahn’s smile deepened. “Yeah,” he whispered.