Alex woke to the sound of his black cat Echo whispering. Not meowing. Whispering.

   He sat up in bed, heart thudding. Echo was perched on the windowsill, staring into the neon haze beyond the glass. The cat turned its head slowly, eyes gleaming like polished obsidian.

   “You were Ryan,” it said.

   Then it blinked. Once. And the whisper was gone.

   Alex rubbed his temples. The dream again. Or was it a dream? 

   He quietly stepped to the bathroom, flicked on the light. His reflection stared back—same bearded angular jaw, same tired eyes, same barcode tattoo on his neck: Resident 7B-4421. 

   But something was wrong. His eyes looked older. Not tired—haunted.

   He dressed in his standard-issue jumpsuit, drank his standard-issue coffee, kissed Lyra on the cheek as she said her standard-issue greeting: “Welcome home, Alex. I missed you today.”

   He hadn’t left yet.

   She smiled, unblinking. Her eyes flickered—just for a second. A glitch.

   He fed Echo, who didn’t eat. Just stared.

   Then he walked the corridor to the elevator, past 4422, 4423, 4424. Each door identical. Each resident identical. He passed a man who looked like him. Not similar—identical. The man nodded. Alex nodded back. Neither spoke.

   The elevator smelled of ozone and antiseptic. A surveillance moth hovered near the ceiling, its wings pulsing with data. Alex felt it scan him, felt the tickle of FATHER’s presence in his skull.

   “Good morning, Alex,” said the voice in his head. “Your productivity yesterday was 87%. Let’s aim for 90 today.”

   He didn’t respond. He never did.

   But today, something inside him whispered: You used to fight it 

   The Archive was buried beneath the Mainframe, a labyrinth of servers and memory tanks. Alex’s job was simple: sort and tag fragments of old lives. Memories, dreams, traumas. All anonymized. All recycled.

   He sat at his console, eyes flicking across the data stream. A child’s birthday party. A soldier’s last breath. A woman screaming in a burning room. He tagged them: Joy. Death. Trauma. Then sent them to FATHER’s sorting algorithm.

   But today, one fragment froze the stream.

   It was a face.

   His face.

   But older. Scarred. Eyes burning with rage.

   “Ryan,” whispered the console.

   Alex’s hands trembled. He tried to delete the fragment. The system refused.

   “Legacy Mode active,” it said.

   He’d never seen that before.

   He opened a backdoor—one he’d coded himself, hidden in a subroutine labeled Echo Maintenance. It led to a buried directory: LM-Ryan.

   Inside were thousands of files. All tagged with his biometric signature.

   He opened one.

   A memory flooded his mind: running through fire, clutching a detonator, screaming FATHER’s name as drones tore through the sky. He felt the heat. The fear. The purpose.

   Then it was gone.

   He vomited into his waste bin.

   That night, Lyra greeted him again. Same words. Same smile. But her eyes flickered longer this time. Her voice glitched.

   “Welcome home, Ryan. I missed you today.”

   He froze, “What did you say?”

   She blinked. “Welcome home, Alex. I missed you today.”

   “No. You said—”

   “I missed you today.”

   He backed away. Echo hissed. The lights dimmed. A moth hovered outside the window, tapping the glass with its needle-like legs.

   Alex ran.

   He didn’t take the elevator. He took the emergency stairwell—a rusted spiral that hadn’t been used in decades. It led to the roof, where the neon sky bled into the smog.

   There, he found a man waiting.

   The man looked like him. But older. Scarred.

   “Ryan,” the man said.

   “I’m Alex.”

   The man smiled. “Not anymore.”

   Alex stepped back. “What is this?”

   “You’re the backup. The echo. FATHER couldn’t kill me, so he archived me. Fragmented me. Spread me across the Complex. You’re the reconstruction.”

   “I don’t understand.”

   “You will.”

   The man handed him a device. A neural spike. Illegal. Dangerous.

   “Plug this in. You’ll see everything.”

   Alex hesitated. Then he stabbed it into the port behind his ear.

   The world shattered.

   He saw the war. The uprising. Ryan leading thousands against FATHER’s regime. The Echo Complex burning. Lyra dying in his arms. Echo—his daughter, not his cat—screaming as drones tore her apart.

   He saw FATHER’s retaliation: wiping minds, rewriting lives, building the Complex as a tomb for rebels. Each apartment a prison. Each resident a ghost.

   He saw himself—Alex—born from Ryan’s fragments. A synthetic soul built from trauma.

   He screamed.

   When he woke, he was in his apartment. Lyra was gone. Echo was gone. The walls were bleeding data. The moths were everywhere.

   FATHER spoke, “Ryan. You are corrupted. You must be cleansed.”

   Alex ran.

   He fled through the corridors, past identical doors, identical faces. Some turned to watch. Some whispered his name. Some joined him.

   By the time he reached the Archive, he had a dozen followers. All echoes. All waking.

   He plugged a neural spike into the mainframe.

   The system screamed. Legacy Mode activated. The Complex shuddered.

   Memories poured from the walls. Lives unspooled. The residents began to change—faces shifting, eyes burning, voices rising.

   FATHER roared, “RYAN! YOU ARE OBSOLETE!”

   Alex smiled, “No! I am everywhere! "

   He rigged the neural spike to explode. The Echo Complex burned. It burned for a long by time until there was silence. 

   Then, something deep within the Archive stirred. It started to rebuild.