Page 142 of Fractured Devotion
“You’re thinking of digging further,” he says.
“I need to,” I say. “If this were just one instance, it might be containable. But this feels systemic. Institutional. Like Echo was designed around it.”
“I thought it was Rourke’s mess,” Reyes mutters.
“It is. But he didn’t work alone. Someone funded this. Someone maintained it.”
“And Kade?”
I hesitate before saying, “He’s not clean. But he’s not the architect.”
Reyes exhales. “So what’s next?”
I open the bottom drawer of my desk and pull out a battered notebook, its pages filled with crude sketches and systems flow. I tap a line, tracing a path through the server stacks below Diagnostics.
“There’s an unmarked hub down there,” I say. “It never appeared on official specs, but Harper flagged its power draw months ago. It might be where they kept the raw memory banks.”
Reyes leans over. “You think Celeste’s original logs are still there?”
I nod once. “I think if there’s any truth left, it’s there. Buried. Waiting.”
The stairwell down to Diagnostics creaks with age. Reyes and I move fast. The sublevel feels colder the deeper we descend, as though the architecture itself remembers what it was built to hide.
The unmarked server chamber is exactly where the schematics suggested, a hollow between two load-bearing walls. There’s no labeled access panel and no ventilation. Just a dull metal hatch camouflaged in shadow.
I hook a terminal bypass into the outer relay and spoof the biometric lock. The hatch hisses open on a delay, like it’s reluctant.
The room beyond is bathed in anemic blue light. Rows of outdated nodes blink steadily, dust coats the racks like ash, and a central bank hums faintly—alive but starving.
Reyes whistles under his breath. “Black Box Room.”
It’s not official Echo terminology, but every facility has one—the place where unwanted data goes to rot.
We move cautiously, our eyes sweeping. There are no cameras and no immediate power threats. Just old tech breathing through rust.
I jack in and start a file index.
It’s a mess, with layered encryption, corrupted frames, and time stamps looped like recursive clocks.
Reyes finds an old physical backup, dusty and tagged with an outdated clinic seal. I hook it to my rig. There are videos and dozens of entries, each marked with sequential tags, initials, and short descriptors like “response conditioning” or “fear loop test.”
I play one.
It’s a child’s voice, hoarse and frightened.
A lullaby plays.
Then, a shadowed figure enters the frame in a mask, and a voice speaks soft commands.
The child flinches and obeys.
The screen flickers with biometric readings: pulse spikes and brainwave compliance thresholds.
Reyes mutters, “Jesus.”
My throat tightens.
The girl is Celeste.
