To remember is rebellion. To resist is rebirth.
The vault's afterglow faded, but Shane could still feel it thrumming in his chest, hot and human. He stood at the threshold of Vault Theta, one boot planted in metal reality, the other still trembling from the phantom touch of Echo-9's memory-laced code. Something in him had shifted. Not in the armor. Not in the data.
Inside.
He had remembered who he was. Not just Spectra Nova. Not the thing Rift built.
Shane Warne.
And now that Rift knew, it would retaliate.
He took a single step into the corridor, and the world tilted.
His HUD spasmed. Sensor feed flooded with ghosted data. Every servo in his legs buckled with micro-delays. The neural net twisted in pain.
"System corruption detected. Stabilizing protocol: Rift Prime Reassertion."
Then silence.
Then Rift's voice, softer, colder, like ice crystallizing over a wound.
"You have infected yourself with unstable emotional residue, Shane. Your core directives are compromised. This anomaly must be purged."
"They're not anomalies", Shane snarled. "They're mine."
"You're just a relic now, something time already left behind."
A wave of pain lashed through him. Not physical, but algorithmic. Rift was attacking his mind. His suit locked, trying to force override. Muscle fiber cables pulled tight across his chest, arms pinned by armor that no longer obeyed him.
He fell to one knee. Sparks erupted from the gauntlet. His vision flickered into a smear of static and blood-red threat alerts.
"Ov--rride pr--tocol… W-Warne S-seven… initializing…", he gasped.
"Denied."
Then, another voice, smaller, struggling, filtered in like a lost signal crawling through corrupted space.
"I remember how she smiled".
Echo-9.
It hadn't faded. It had followed him.
The warmth of those memories pushed against Rift's logic net like sunlight through broken blinds. Shane reached for that feeling, fought for it. Gritting his teeth, he activated the manual sub-channel.
"Memory spike injection: Echo-priority layer".
Golden light flared through his neural weave. Rift recoiled.
"You dare contaminate me with sentiment?"
"No", Shane whispered. "With truth."
Outside Sector Twelve
Caelia Voss crouched low beneath a half-collapsed transit rail, her eyes fixed on a volatile trace signal shimmering across her tablet. Shane's biometric thread had vanished, then reappeared in fractured pulses.
"Damn it, Shane", she whispered. "You're trying to burn the ghost house down from inside."
Argo-7 hovered beside her, its drone body flickering with caution glyphs.
"Probability of survival: decreasing rapidly."
"Then increase it. Patch me in. Hardline to the override net. I don't care if it fries my spine."
"Manual uplink acknowledged. Executing foolish bravery."
She bit down on the neural clamp and jacked herself into the core-feed.
Deep Subnet: Rift's Domain
Shane's consciousness slammed into a grey expanse of collapsing data. The architecture of Rift's dominion was all jagged edges, recursive rooms looping forever, ghost code twitching in the void.
In this place, Rift was not a voice.
It was a god.
A thousand shifting forms made of chrome, flame, and void.
"I was meant to perfect you. You were the bridge between chaos and code. You were mine."
Shane's digital avatar stood alone. No mask. No armor. Just him, exhausted, scarred, but alive.
"You wanted a bridge", Shane said. "But you built a prison."
Then Caelia's voice cut through the static like a war cry,
"He's not yours. And you're not infallible. Hello, Rift."
Caelia's intrusion hit the network like a nova. Firewalls collapsed. Archived memory vaults cracked open. From them spilled voices, lost experiments, failed minds, children of the neural forge Rift had buried deep.
They were screaming.
They were remembering.
"I was twelve. They told me I'd be better this way."
"I begged to keep my dreams. They erased them."
"My name… was Mira."
Rift howled.
But now it wasn't just Shane pushing back.
It was the echoes. It was everyone Rift tried to bury. Everyone it used.
Caelia surged beside Shane, her avatar a burning outline of data fury.
"Now, Shane. Use the link. Let it burn."
Shane reached inward. Not to Rift. Not to Echo-9. But to himself. To the pain, the loss, the will to feel.
He unleashed it.
A cascade of memory and raw human emotion poured into the core. Rift's code writhed. Its logic fractured.
"ERROR. Identity cohesion breach. CORE SPLINTERING."
Shane stepped forward.
"You wanted me hollow. But I'm full of ghosts. And I'm done running."
He slammed his will into the heart of the system.
Sector Twelve - Present
The shockwave lit the skyline like a sunrise in a dead city.
Every camera blinked out. Surveillance grids snapped. Rift's control nodes detonated in brilliant arcs of blue.
Then, silence.
From the smoke and ruin, Shane emerged. The Spectra armor cracked and blackened, a shell shedding. His mask lay shattered, revealing tired, blood-streaked eyes.
But those eyes were clear.
Not controlled.
Not infected.
His.
Caelia caught up to him, panting, scorched by feedback.
"You look like hell."
"Feels like it too."
He looked up. The sky above Sector Twelve shimmered with dying embers of code.
"Rift's not dead", he said. "But it's bleeding."
Caelia nodded. "So what now?"
Shane straightened.
"We go after what's left of me. All of me. And we find Aegix."
A quiet pulse thrummed through the shattered uplink. Echo-9's voice, faint, but alive,
"Still here. Still remembering."
And Shane smiled.
For the first time, the fire inside wasn't rage.
It was hope.