Room To Believe
Lullaby's Echo: Chapter 12
Labyrinth. Matte walls. Flickering ambient light. Gabe’s breath scalded the air as he turned another corner. Alice’s silhouette vanished just ahead. No footsteps. Only the thrum of security droids dropping from the ceiling in a slow, rehearsed descent.
He sprinted. The corner ahead bloomed open. The walls lurched. Reset.
Again—Alice. Younger this time, darting through a forest draped in digital fog. The leaves shifted like shaders misbehaving. As he chased her, he realised with a sickening lurch that his own footsteps were silent—a void in the world’s soundscape—while hers were a noisy violation of the woods. He called her name. It came out as “Gretel.” The word felt clumsy, wrong in his mouth. She glanced back. Her expression was unresolved.
He chased again. This time Granny followed her. She moved with uncanny speed, limbs too smooth, face stretched tight across algorithms that almost remembered her smile. She opened her mouth. No words came out. Just static pitched high enough to sting.
Another corner. Another reset.
The walls thinned. Geometry peeled back like unrendered cloth, revealing the scaffold beneath. Overhead, a cell descended. A cage made of code. The bars pulsed with Symsara’s golden thread, circuitry etched into each one like commandments. Alice didn’t look up. Gabe screamed, a raw denial that tore through the dream’s placid hum.
A voice cut through. Distorted. Mechanical.
‘Gabriel. Gabriel. You are... not responding—’
The dream stuttered.
The world went white.
Then darkness.
Gabe jolted upright. A strangled gasp tore from his throat. The dim light of his bedroom pressed in on him, too solid after the peeling geometry of the dream. The phantom scream of Granny’s static still rang in his ears.
A cool, synthetic hand rested on his forearm. ‘Your vocalizations exceeded sleep-state parameters,’ Gideon said. His voice was a calm, infuriating anchor. ‘Pulse irregular. You exhibited signs of REM disturbance and—’
‘Get the console online,’ Gabe snapped. He shoved himself from the bed, sheets tangled around his legs. ‘Now.’
‘Your neurosomatic reactivity is still elevated—’
‘I don’t give a damn about my reactivity!’
Gabe slumped into the chair before the console. The screen flickered to life under his impatient gestures. A priority ping from Astrid pulsed in the corner of his vision. He swiped it away. His fingers flew across the virtual keys, running search protocols he hadn’t used in years.
He was hunting a ghost within his own system.
Lena.
The contact wafer she’d pressed into his hand had been a seed. He pieced the violation together: the faint, maddening itch in his palm during the dive, the lag that haunted his reflection in the mirror afterwards. They weren’t random glitches. They were symptoms. She hadn’t just left a trace in the world; she’d planted a ghost process in his personal console. A piece of her watched him through the very technology meant to be his refuge. He ran deep-level diagnostics, tearing through encrypted subroutines, hunting for the splinter in his soul.
‘Come on... where are you?’ he muttered. The code scrolled past, a meaningless blur of symbols.
It was like trying to catch smoke in a net.
Frustrated, he slammed his palm on the desk. His gaze snagged on an unread message alert he’d ignored earlier.
No sender ID. Subject: Checking in.
With a grunt of irritation, he tapped it open.
Gabe,
I hope this isn’t intrusive. I found your comms ID from our brief interaction at The Codex. I’ve been thinking about what you said. About your sister. I just wanted to know you were alright.
The thing we saw in the Codex… the regulars in the Drift, the few who’ve seen her, they have a name for it. They call her Whisper. It’s because sometimes… you can see her mouth move. Like she’s trying to speak. To warn us, maybe. But there’s no voice. Just… a sound. Like a radio tuned to a dead channel. A soft, distorted static. It’s the loneliest sound in the world.
It’s not easy, this search. It helps to know you’re not the only one hearing the whispers.
-Phillipa
Gabe froze. He could almost hear it—the phantom hiss of static. The image of a mouth moving without a voice. It gave the formless terror a name. Whisper. Phillipa wasn’t just checking in; she was initiating him into a secret society of the haunted.
And he had another name. Lena.
An idea began to form. A sharp, tactical calculation. He could connect them. They were all looking for lost things. He could connect the ghost to the ghost-seer.
His fingers flew across the console.
Phillipa,
Thank you. For the name. For checking in. It means more than you know.
I’ve been hunting a different ghost. A woman named Lena. She knew about you, Phillipa. She was waiting for me outside the Codex. She seemed to know a lot about the system, about users getting lost.
Maybe our objectives align. Maybe we can help each other. All three of us.
-Gabe
He hit send. A decisive click. He had two potential allies. Two threads to pull. The dull weight in his bones lifted, replaced by the phantom thrill of the hunt.
Ping.
The console lit up. A reply. Already. He tapped the message open, a grim smile forming on his lips.
The smile died instantly.
Gabe,
I’m glad you have another lead. But I have to ask...
Who’s Lena?
His breath hitched. The hope in his chest turned to ice. Who’s Lena? His mind snagged on the question. Was this a trap? Was she being watched, forced to play dumb? Was this some kind of reverse-psychology bullshit to throw off the system’s keyword sniffers?
He was a man trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing.
Ping.
Another message.
Be careful what you grieve for; you never know what’s listening.
The pieces clicked into place. Not with a satisfying snap, but with the dull, tragic thud of a coffin lid closing.
Oh, God.
A chill of unwelcome recognition snaked down his spine. He saw in her words a dark mirror of his own frayed edges. But where his paranoia was rooted in the cold logic of a system trying to kill him, hers was untethered. A grief that had curdled into mania. She wasn’t a cautionary tale. She was a premonition. He looked at her words and saw his own future if he kept staring into the abyss. He saw what happened to people who heard the whispers for too long. They started whispering back.
She wasn’t an ally. She was a ghost from a future he had to prevent.
With a heavy sigh, he swiped a hand across the console. The messages vanished.
The screen went dark. The room plunged back into its familiar, oppressive quiet.
As his eyes adjusted, a flicker of movement caught his attention—a brief, almost imperceptible shimmer of static in the far corner of the room. He blinked, rubbing a hand across his tired eyes. Another visual tracer. Just another phantom symptom of his own frayed nerves. He dismissed it, turning away from the darkness.
It was nothing.
Click the Lullaby’s Echo: Index to read all published chapters.