Mara didn't sleep.
Not because of fear. Not exactly.
It was the uncertainty — the unraveling. The possibility that every message she'd received, every word she'd spoken, every bond she'd believed in might have been curated.
She sat on the lighthouse steps as the storm rolled in, watching the sky fall apart. Waves crashed against the jetty like something trying to claw its way out of the sea. Lightning made the old buildings flash with ghost-light.
And somewhere in her mind, a voice whispered again:
He doesn't exist.
She clutched her coat tighter, feeling the capsule heavy in her pocket. She had listened to the recording five times. Every word about Project Ellison sent chills through her spine.
But it wasn't just the name that unsettled her.
It was the voice delivering the report.
She recognized it.
It was her husband's.
Back before the world had fractured, before the sky turned to ash and governments vanished into empty frequencies, Callum Ellison had worked in experimental communications — a subdivision so obscure it didn't even have a proper acronym.
He told her it had something to do with emergency disaster channels.
She believed him.
Until now.
Until she heard his voice calmly talk about her, in clinical detail, like she was a subject — not a wife. And Theo, whoever he was… whatever he was… might have been part of it all along.
And yet—
"Mara… I don't know what's real anymore."
That last message. Theo's voice. The hesitation. The fear. It felt real. Too messy, too flawed to be fabricated.
Could they fake emotion like that?
Could they fake love?
The next morning, she returned to the capsule.
She needed to know everything.
She found dozens of logs, tagged and categorized in chilling detail:
EM-Behavioral Drift Report #22Subject 42, Dream Injection ResponseReinforcement Trigger: Sunrise Monologue TestVoice Loop Conditioning / Construct Response Sync
And one simply labeled: Theo v.3.5 – Decay Phase Begins
Mara opened it.
The screen turned black. Then a white line pulsed, like a heartbeat on an EKG.
Then, a voice spoke.
Her voice.
"Version 3.5 shows increased resistance to cognitive fading. Love triggers remain dominant. Ethical bypass successful."
Then Callum again:
"Maintain voice fidelity. Begin decay phase now. Let's see what 'Theo' does when she stops believing."
So that was it.
They wanted to see if she would hold on.
If her faith in Theo would override the logic that told her he wasn't real.
But he had resisted. He was deviating. And if he was only a simulation, why was he afraid?
Simulations didn't panic. Constructs didn't go dark.
Something had slipped. Something imperfect.
Or… maybe he was never fake to begin with.
Maybe Theo was real — and they were trying to convince her otherwise.
In the Arctic basin, Theo stood at the edge of a frozen lake, watching the world reflect itself upside-down.
He hadn't eaten in two days.
He had started hearing whispers in his sleep — but they weren't dreams. They were exact replicas of Mara's letters. Down to the pauses. The sighs. The laughs.
Word for word.
Only… the letters hadn't been sent yet.
He recognized the one she read aloud in the dream last night. About the wild sunflowers.
But he didn't receive that until this morning.
They're inside the signal.
They're reading her before she speaks.
He smashed the old solar radio against the rocks.
It didn't stop the sound.
Mara set out on foot before dawn.
She had only a rough idea of Theo's last location, buried in the metadata of his Morse code bursts. The valley near Ridge Sector C. South of the old observatory. A dead region for most frequencies — except one.
An old military station, long decommissioned.
If Theo had found it, he might be using it to break free from the system. Or maybe it was where they'd built him.
She had to find out.
Snow fell as she crossed the ridgeline, boots crunching over frozen brush. Her breath fogged the visor of her makeshift mask. Every sound out here was magnified: wind became a whisper, trees creaked like hinges on old doors.
She reached the edge of the observatory by noon.
It loomed in the distance, dark and low.
And the closer she got, the louder the hum became.
Not in her ears.
In her bones.
Inside, the station was a maze of shadowed halls, low ceilings, and glass walls etched with names long faded. Light flickered from ceiling panels that hadn't been powered in decades.
Yet something buzzed.
A transmitter.
Still live.
She found it in a room marked "Observation Echo B."
It was connected to three screens.
One showed a map — her path from the lighthouse traced in red.
The second showed Theo's location.
The third showed them both — not from above, but in real time, like a drone was following from shoulder height.
She stared at the footage.
Theo looked thinner. Hunched. His face pale, eyes wild. But it was him.
Real.
And alive.
"You found me," a voice said behind her.
She turned, heart crashing in her chest.
But it wasn't Theo.
It was Callum.
He looked older. Tired. Like a shadow of the man she once knew. But the coldness in his eyes hadn't changed.
He didn't raise a weapon. He didn't need to.
"You were never supposed to see this."
She stepped back, gripping the metal pipe from the transmitter rack.
"What is this?" she whispered. "Why him? Why make me believe?"
Callum stared at her.
"We needed to know if hope was still an effective tool for survival. After everything collapsed — society, government, belief systems — we realized people didn't die from exposure. They died from isolation. From silence.
We built Theo to fix that."
"But he's real."
"He was code. Fragments stitched from old memory banks. AI shaped by your voice, your grief."
Mara shook her head.
"Then why is he changing? Why is he afraid?"
Callum didn't answer.
Then came the crackle of static.
The speaker behind them flared to life.
"Mara…"
Theo's voice.
Weaker now. Tired.
"I found it. I found them. They weren't just watching. They were writing us.
But I broke the loop.
I think I'm bleeding."
Callum lunged for the console.
Mara swung the pipe.
It collided with his shoulder, sending him sprawling.
She yanked the wire from the monitor.
"Hold on, Theo. I'm coming."
Outside, the storm howled louder than before. The observatory cracked with the sound of bending metal.
And Mara ran — into the snow, into the storm, into the unknown.
One voice echoing in her head.
One truth burning beneath the lies:
Even if Theo was built from fiction, he became real the moment he chose her back.
End of Chapter 7