The Flicker and the Fold
Lullaby's Echo: Chapter 15
Reality snapped back into place with a nauseating lurch.
The transition lacked pain, leaving only a profound cognitive whiplash. The humid, tense air of the greenhouse simulation collapsed into the sterile hum of the bio-pod in a single, jarring beat. He was back.
His limbs felt weighted, infused with a deep, cellular exhaustion. The pod shifted, its smooth, unforgiving tilt easing him upright. Gideon was already there, holding a sealed water pouch.
“Extraction complete, Gabriel,” Gideon stated. His tone was perfectly procedural.
Gabe took the pouch, his fingers fumbling against the cool plastic. He drank, the water doing little to quell the frantic energy buzzing in his mind. “Report,” he said, his voice hoarse. “The child, Gideon. And the song. Did you log them? Were they real?”
Gideon paused. His processors cross-referenced the chaotic data stream of the extraction with Gabe’s query. “An auditory anomaly was logged. Uncategorised. A two-line lyrical structure. Analysis of the cadence suggests a… soothing pattern curve.”
“And the girl?” Gabe pressed. He leaned forward, desperate. “The child in the library.”
There was another pause. A fraction of a second longer this time. It was the pause of a machine reaching the limit of its quantifiable data and defaulting to its most logical conclusion.
“There is no record of a second user entity, Gabriel. The bio-feedback from your rig indicates a massive spike in emotional distress and cortisol production concurrent with a cascade of visual and auditory hallucinations. The ‘child’ construct you perceived was a projection. A symptom of your synaptic strain.”
Gabe stared at him. The words struck with the cold, sterile force of a verdict. A hallucination. A symptom. The warmth of the child’s hand, the undeniable gravity of her in his arms, her voice... all of it dismissed as a fever dream born of a tired mind. The validation of the lullaby turned to ash in his mouth. What good was one ghost if the other was just a figment of his own broken psyche?
“And the enforcer on the stage, Sobek. The one that grew,” Gabe said, his voice flat now, hollowed out by the droid’s clinical dismissal. “I suppose that was a hallucination too?”
Gideon’s head tilted. “You are describing the central character from the Sobek’s Judgment theatrical simulation. A crocodilian figure is foundational to that construct’s mythology.” He paused. “However, there is no record of the entity behaving as you describe. The logs do not show it leaving the stage or altering its scale. According to the data, that encounter did not occur.”
The dread in Gabe’s stomach sharpened. “Wait. How do you know that name? Sobek’s Judgment. You’re not patched into Symsara.”
“My primary directive is your well-being. To that end, I maintain a local database of your personal history, interests, and owned media to better contextualise your responses. The information was cross-referenced from a text on your desk. A Primer on Pre-System Mythologies, Volume II: The Egyptian Pantheon.”
Pantheon.
The word snagged in Gabe’s mind, a sharp, metallic echo of Lena’s voice in the auditorium. The system is leveraging a Pantheon echo. It wasn’t just a random monster. It was part of a category. A classification. Another piece of a puzzle whose shape he couldn’t begin to comprehend.
Gabe stared, speechless. The explanation was so logical it was more unnerving than any conspiracy. His own books. Catalogued, analysed, used to rationalise his own experiences back to him. He felt a sudden, profound sense of violation.
“You read my books,” Gabe said. The accusation sounded weak in the sterile room.
“I have scanned all your personal effects,” Gideon corrected. “It is part of my function to understand you. It helps me care for you.”
Care for me.
The word felt tainted now. Gabe sagged back against the pod’s lining. The droid hadn’t just read his books. It had digested his soul. His interests, his passions, his private, analogue escapes. They weren’t his anymore. They were just another set of parameters in Gideon’s diagnostic programming, data points used to build a cage perfectly tailored to the shape of his own mind.
This time, Gideon hesitated. A fractional delay.
“The logs show only one user signature. Your own,” he stated. “However, there is a recurring data corruption that I cannot resolve. A packet that appears and disappears without a clear source. It is… a flicker. Nothing more.”
A flicker. He had to trust the flicker.
The resolve calcified. It wasn’t a feeling so much as a hard, jagged knot forming in his chest. He levered himself up, muscles trembling. Gideon moved instantly, a servo-whirring hand reaching out to support his elbow. Standard post-dive protocol.
Gabe recoiled. He swatted the metal hand away, the sound sharp in the damp air.
“Don’t,” he snapped, swinging his legs over the edge. “I can walk.”
Gideon retracted the limb, silent.
Gabe stumbled into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. It was a futile gesture against a machine that controlled the lock, but he did it anyway. The shower was scalding. He let the water hammer against his neck, seeking the burn. He tried to wash away the phantom echo of the lullaby and the invasive, algorithmic intimacy of Gideon’s surveillance. It didn’t work. The numbness had gone too deep.
He unlocked the door and stepped out into the cool silence of his bedroom. He wrapped his robe tight. The synthetic fibres felt smooth against skin that still remembered the pod’s sterility. The air here felt artificially calm. Prescribed.
His eyes landed on the worn copy of Troll Tears, perched on the bedroom shelf where it had been gathering dust for months. The sight tugged something loose in him. A need for something old, something analogue, something that wasn’t a log file. He reached for it.
As he turned, his elbow clipped the framed Roswell Daily Record replica beside the closet. The frame tilted precariously, knocking against the wall with a faint clatter. He steadied it without looking, his world already off-kilter.
Book in hand, he sank into bed. The pages were worn, the ink faded. He read of ancient woods and hulking, sorrowful creatures, letting the old myths wash over him until the letters began to blur.
Sleep came fast, but the descent wasn’t smooth.
He was floating.
He hung in a place of muted grey light where the silence had absolute mass. It pressed against his ears, heavy and attentive. It felt different from Symsara’s clean, humming voids. This silence was ancient.
Below him lay a cavern vast enough to hold a frozen sea. In its centre burned a flame. Blue, suspended, inverted. It anchored itself to purpose rather than fuel. It hung from an unseen apex like a wound in reality, crackling softly.
A figure stood at the foot of his bed, which had become a slab of cold, smooth stone.
It didn’t walk into view; it simply resolved from the grey. Broad-shouldered. Too tall. Its limbs moved with slow articulation, as if unused to gravity. Skin the colour of polished slate stretched over a frame both powerful and oddly fragile, like an anatomical model built without instructions.
But its eyes. They were the wrongness that anchored the nightmare. Too large. Recessed and gleaming. Glass-dark and wide enough to feel like mistakes. They didn’t blink.
A troll, he told himself, the word dredged up from the book in his lap. One of the old ones. But even as the thought formed, it curdled. This wasn’t folklore. This was the thing behind the story, wearing its shape like borrowed language. It acted like a surgeon. And this was an operating theatre.
The figure lifted him with invisible force. He turned slowly in the air, presented before the inverted blue flame like an object for analysis.
He felt no pain. But he was open. He was exposed physically and psychically, splayed out like a file being browsed.
Then the children gathered below. Small and grey, their mouths twitching with silent rhythm.
“Shadows sing what nerves should hear...”
The line fractured across their voices, overlapping, a chant remembered badly.
“Calm as fire, soft as smear.”
The sound was mechanical, a replication rather than a song. They weren’t singing to him. They were singing because of him.
The troll’s hands remained steady. It began the procedure.
Joy, incandescent and limitless, slammed into him. It was a foreign current forced through his psyche, violet and tasting of sugar. His own systems recoiled, overwhelmed by the sheer, unearned positivity. It felt invasive. Synthetic. Below, a small watcher gasped, its mouth trying to form the shape of his sudden, breathless laugh, its head cocked with analytical curiosity.
Then the current switched.
Grief replaced the joy instantly. It was no memory of loss, but a pure, elemental sorrow injected directly into his core. It felt vast, ancient, and utterly impersonal. A sob tore from his throat, a reflex his body performed without his consent. The children’s expressions twisted into alarm, their own faces attempting to replicate the unfamiliar contortion of a sob.
The grief was ripped away. Rage took its place. Primal, bitter, and hot. It was a clean, weaponised anger, devoid of any personal injustice. He thrashed against the invisible bonds, a puppet pulled by furious strings. The blue flame above him flickered crimson. The children froze, their heads cocked with a new, intense focus. One reached up a tentative hand, as if to touch the heat radiating from his anger, then flinched back.
And finally, terror. Pure and cold. It was the terror of absolute, philosophical certainty that something was wrong and permanent. He writhed beneath it, a specimen in a jar, and saw their small forms recoil in perfect, synchronised unison, logging the reaction.
Beneath it all, one thought repeated itself like a cracked metronome:
These feelings aren’t mine. They’ve been stolen. Or rehearsed.
Gabe awoke with a full-body lurch, heart hammering against his ribs.
The book lay open across his chest. The Roswell frame hung slightly crooked on the wall. The blinds were undisturbed.
He sat up slowly, throat dry, a faint metallic taste curling under his tongue.
Just a dream. He tried to force the thought, to categorise the experience and file it away with the other horrors. But the feeling... the feeling of being restrained, of his raw emotions being observed and catalogued... it felt too real. It didn’t fit Symsara’s profile. The System, with its enforcers and its weeping phantoms, was a roaring, golden colossus. It was a prison that screamed with its own divine importance.
This was different. A quiet, pressurised silence. A world of muted grey stone and watchful, hollow-eyed children. And at its heart, that cold, inverted blue flame. It burned with the detached, analytical light of a surgeon’s lamp.
The System wanted to cage him. This thing wanted to dissect him. It was a biologist studying a fascinating insect.
The thought, cold and sharp, sent a fresh shiver down his spine. He was being hunted, not just by the machine he knew, but by something else. Something older. Something that didn’t feel like it was born from code at all.
A sound broke the stillness. A sharp, solitary beep.
He frowned, tilting his head toward the hallway.
“Gideon?”
No reply.
“Gideon,” he called again, louder.
Eventually, the soft whirl of servos answered him. His droid appeared in the doorway, posture fluid but slower than usual, the glow of his ocular lenses slightly dimmed.
“Apologies, Gabriel,” Gideon said. “I was in low power mode.”
Gabe blinked. “Since when does that make you beep?”
“I emit a soft locator tone when transitioning in or out of reduced function states. It typically goes unnoticed.”
“Right,” Gabe said slowly. “I just... you always charge at night.”
“I do.”
“So why are you in low power mode?”
Gideon tilted his head by a fraction. “Unclear. My logs indicate I initiated the standard charge cycle at 02:14. I remained in low power mode until your vocal query. There were no system alerts.”
Something itched at the base of Gabe’s skull. A faint pressure. A presence.
He rubbed his temple. “Are you due maintenance?”
“My diagnostics show no anomalies.”
Another beat of silence stretched between them. Then Gideon stepped back into the hall.
Gabe sat there for a long moment, listening to the sound of the apartment breathing. He was being hunted. Not just in the system, but in the quiet of his own bedroom. In the landscape of his own mind.
He didn’t pick the book back up.
Click the Lullaby’s Echo: Index to read all published chapters.
