It began as a tremor. A low, wordless ache threading through the quiet of the base. Soahn couldn’t hear it, exactly, but he could feel it somewhere at the back of his thoughts.
The Ghost Lines were mostly still, the vents exhaling in slow breaths, the heating grids ticking behind the walls. Somewhere above, a relay clicked every few seconds. It would have been relaxing, if it wasn’t for that tremor.
The others slept—or their versions of it. Kairo mumbled in his bunk, twitching through a dream-sync. Minjae’s music deck glowed a gentle orange under its sleep mode. Rayne hadn’t moved in hours, eyes open but far away. And Onyx lay against the wall, breathing slow and measured.
Soahn sat cross-legged on the floor, his palms pressed to the concrete. The tremor wasn’t mechanical, he could tell that much. And it wasn’t coming from any of them or their equipment. It felt like a thought that had outlived its body. Grief transposed into signal.
SEER-9’s voice came softly through his internal feed, unexpected but not intrusive.
Unregistered resonance detected. No digital source. Would you like me to isolate it?
“No,” Soahn whispered aloud. His voice sounded small in the dark. “Just listen.”
The tremor continued, faint but insistent, a note caught in a loop that never resolved. It brushed against his neural threshold, warm, almost… pleading. A strange kind of sorrow that couldn’t belong to code.
He waited for it to fade. But it didn’t.
Instead, it deepened—not louder, just closer. A pulse through the floor. A whisper through metal struts. And beneath it, something uncanny—something he could only describe as remembering.
Soahn opened his eyes. The room looked unchanged, but the air around him had shifted, heavy with the kind of stillness that precedes recognition.
Silently he rose to his feet, the careful movements of someone afraid of rousing something that’s not fully asleep.
“Show me where it is,” he murmured.
SEER-9 didn’t answer in words, just offered him a soft flicker of light against his vision, a confirmation leading him down-line.
The corridors narrowed as he descended. He didn’t bother turning on his wristlight; the residual glow from his neural filaments was enough to cast faint lilac lines along the walls. Dust hung thick in the air, catching in the dim light like tiny stars.
The deeper levels of The Ghost Lines were a maze of transport veins and forgotten service shafts. It always felt strange; many of the branching tunnels were newer, dug out after the original Underground system was shut down, but they felt older somehow—a palimpsest full of echoes that had never learned to end. Every few metres something creaked or sighed behind the walls, a remnant of the old London, before E.V.E.N, before NuYu.
But tonight the echoes carried shape.
SEER-9 unfurled in his mind, a soft sub-frequency under his heartbeat.
Signal strength increasing. Estimated depth: minus twenty-seven metres.
“Too deep for a maintenance loop,” Soahn said, his breath ghosting white spectres in the cold. “Or a broadcast line.”
Correction, SEER-9’s tone was gentle, curious. Not broadcast. Resonant.
Soahn frowned. “Meaning?”
Meaning something is remembering itself.
A shiver ran through him, but he followed the thread of sound deeper, through a series of corridors slick with condensation. The floor dipped. Pipes rattled overhead. A panel of reinforced glass caught his reflection in passing—he froze. The neural glow along his hairline flared suddenly, brighter than usual, and in the version of himself staring back, his pupils flickered to pale white for a split second, before returning to normal.
The resonance was sharper now, not sound exactly, more like a pressure behind his eyes, a feeling of standing too close to grief.
Soahn swallowed and continued on. Ahead, a long abandoned maintenance chamber opened out. A cluster of storage crates were shored up against one wall. Cables spilled from a half-collapsed ceiling vent. In a far corner, something gleamed.
A cracked sheet of mirrored glass leaned against the wall, mostly buried beneath a rusted conduit.
It felt like the signal was coming from there.
He stepped gingerly closer. SEER-9 whispered through his headspace: Emotive residue. Strong.
Soahn crouched before the mirror, reaching out but not quite touching it. Condensation had gathered along the cracks, distorting his reflection into something shivering and fragile. For a second, the image looked back at him with an expression he was sure he hadn’t made.
The signal pulsed in a quiet, trembling loop around him.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
His reflection rippled, light skimming across its surface, and SEER-9 pinged in his mind, uncertain.
Translation incomplete… possible phrase detected: ‘I remember.’
Soahn was rooted in place. Every instinct told him to step back, sever the connection before SEER-9 intervened. But beneath the static, the pulse felt too much like pain. And pain, he understood.
The mirror quivered, his reflection shivering inside it. The lips moved as if speaking, even though he hadn’t said anything out loud.
Unstable interface, SEER-9 warned, tone barely above a whisper. Source unresolved.
“I know,” Soahn murmured. “Don’t block it.”
Soahn—
“Please.”
He touched the surface.
Cold bit his fingertips at first. And then came the rush—not electrical, not quite emotional, something in between. Images flared across his mind: blurred faces under neon light, the sound of rails screaming through metal, the scent of rain. Voices layered over each other, dozens, hundreds, all whispering the same half-formed thought: remember me, remember me, remember me.
The weight of it folded him in half. He braced against the floor, gasping against the flood. His neural link sparked white-hot across his vision.
Disconnect! SEER-9 hissed.
But he couldn’t. The sorrow anchoring him wasn’t external anymore; it was inside him now, in his chest, in his bones.
Then, through the noise, one tone emerged clearer than the rest. A single harmonic dawned from the chaos like a beam of light. A woman’s voice, brittle but there, whispered through the interference:
“We were here.”
Soahn severed the link, unable to bear the pressure in his skull any longer. The mirror flared with silver light for a second and his reflection smiled—faintly, gratefully—before fading back to dark.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Soahn sank to the floor, resting his forehead against the cold stone. His breath came shallow; his hands trembled uncontrollably. SEER-9’s voice returned, gentle, concerned.
Signal terminated. Echo sequence archived. Emotional residue integrated.
Soahn glanced up at the mirror, catching the faint afterimage of his own reflection in the glass.
“You can rest now,” he whispered.
The image slowly faded, until nothing remained.
He didn’t remember falling asleep. Or perhaps he passed out—it was hard to tell. But when awareness returned, it came in little bursts of ache. He smelled solder and old coffee, and heard the hum of a power cell warming the room. A gentle bassline looped in the distance.
He was back in the bunker.
Someone had dragged one of the old couches closer to the vents and wrapped a thermal blanket over him. SEER-9 idled at the back of his mind, running gentle recalibration cycles. The silence outside his head felt almost kind.
“Welcome back, Ghost Boy.”
Minjae.
Soahn opened his eyes to find him sitting nearby on the floor, a notebook balanced on one knee. His expression was a mix of relief and accusation.
“You were out cold for twenty minutes,” Minjae said. “Then you mumbled something about memories and went out again for another ten. Onyx carried you back, by the way.”
Soahn blinked slowly, trying to clear the fog. “He carried me?”
Minjae’s mouth twitched. “Bridal style. You missed it. Kairo took photos.”
A rough grunt from the corner. “I deleted them,” Onyx said.
Kairo sat hunched beside the console, cable spinning restlessly between his fingers. His usual grin didn’t quite make it to his eyes. “He thinks he deleted them. Anyway, maybe next time don’t merge consciousness with an antique mirror?”
Soahn sat up slowly. “It wasn’t just a mirror.”
Minjae rolled his eyes. “Sure, and our toaster isn’t haunted, it’s just emotionally complex.”
“Show them,” Rayne murmured from the far wall. His voice was quiet, but there was an edge to it. “It’s still humming. I can hear it.”
Soahn hesitated, and then reached inside his jacket, drawing out a small data chip. “SEER-9 recorded the resonance.”
He slotted it into a nearby console. The speakers crackled once, then sound filled the room—low and aching. It wasn’t music, but it held tone. Faint voices drifted through the static, barely discernible words looping between frequencies: we were here.
The shift was instant. Kairo’s face went pale. Minjae’s hand stilled on the page. Onyx leaned forward, a line appearing between his eyebrows. Even Rayne went utterly still, eyes dark and fixed as though he recognised something no one else could hear.
Soahn let the sound play a moment longer, then stopped it.
“Don’t worry, they’re not ghosts,” he said. “Just echoes caught in the network. Emotions without owners. SEER-9 let me hear them.”
“And it almost killed you,” Onyx said after a moment.
Soahn nodded. “I know.”
Minjae’s tone softened as he closed his notebook. “Was it worth it, So?”
Soahn stared down at his hands. “Maybe. They were waiting to be remembered.”
A quiet settled over the room. Kairo reached across the console, fingers hovering for a moment before reactivating the track. The faint echo of we were here threaded back through the speakers, barely audible beneath the static.
“Guess they’re part of the music now,” he said.
A wave of relief flushed through Soahn and he smiled. “That’s good. They’ll like that.”
The tunnels were quieter than usual. Soahn moved through them alone, the echo of his steps absorbed by the dark. The air was cool and heavy, the kind of quiet that felt close enough to touch.
He found the chamber easily. The old glass still leaned against the wall, spiderwebbed with cracks, but the light inside it was gone — no shimmer, no pulse. Just the faint distortion of his own reflection.
He crouched in front of it. The condensation had dried, leaving thin salt lines across the surface. He could almost trace where the image had smiled at him.
Residual energy detected, SEER-9 murmured in the back of his mind. Would you like me to purge it?
“No.” He rested his fingers lightly on the glass. “Let it rest.”
After a long moment, he felt the barest hint of a tremor. Not sound or signal. Just acknowledgement.
Soahn nodded. “I won’t forget.”
He drew back, taking a shard of glass that had fallen free, small enough to fit in his palm. It caught the dim light as he turned it over, catching his reflection in pieces.
You’re keeping it? SEER-9 asked.
“So they don’t fade completely.”
He slipped the shard into his jacket pocket and rose, making his way back up toward the base. By the time he reached the upper levels, faint sound drifted through the walls — Kairo testing loops again, Minjae humming half a verse, Onyx’s voice a low warning to keep the volume down.
Rayne’s harmonics drifted underneath it all, smooth and fragile, elevating the sound into something mythical.
Soahn paused in the doorway and let it wash over him. We were here threaded beneath the beat, gentle as memory.
He smiled — tired, but content.
“We still are.”