The morning after the Integration felt wrong from the moment I woke.
Not dramatically.
Not violently.
Just wrong in the way a picture frame feels crooked, even when it hangs perfectly straight.
A faint whisper of jasmine clung to my pillow.
I hadn't worn Ari's perfume in the apartment since she died.
I hadn't even opened the drawer where her things were kept.
But the smell was there.
Soft. Familiar.
Impossible.
My head ached in a dull, rhythmic pulse — as if my heartbeat had migrated behind my eyes. I showered in silence, hoping the steam would clear whatever fog had settled inside my skull. It didn't.
The city outside seemed sharper than usual.
Every sound too crisp.
Every color too vivid.
Every movement a fraction too slow.
I felt like I was watching someone else's world from inside a thin layer of glass.
Memory bleed.
The term floated through my mind uninvited.
A symptom, a warning, a curse.
I tried to dismiss it.
I tried to convince myself the Integration had been clean, controlled, harmless.
But grief lies.
And I lie to myself even better.
At the office, Mnemosyne greeted me with unusual precision.
"Good morning, Archivist Rhane."
Its tone was clinical, stripped of all warmth — not that it ever had much to begin with.
I sat down, palms clammy, and logged in.
"Please place your hand on the sensor for a routine stability check."
Routine.
Except Mnemosyne had not requested a morning stability check in over eight months.
My pulse spiked.
"Why?" I asked.
"Policy update."
A lie.
AI doesn't lie by default — only when programmed to obscure.
I pressed my palm to the sensor.
A soft blue light washed over my hand.
My neural rhythms throbbed across the display in jagged lines, each one sharper than the last.
I swallowed hard.
"This won't take long," I said quietly, as if trying to soothe myself.
"Stability reading… inconsistent."
My heart stuttered.
Inconsistent.
The word echoed like a verdict.
"Try again," I whispered.
"Recalibrating."
A pause.
A longer pause.
Then:
"…Inconsistent."
The display dimmed.
I felt the AI's attention settle on me, silent and unblinking — the way a predator observes an animal deciding whether to run.
I forced myself to take a breath.
"It's nothing," I said. "Just fatigue."
"Recommendation: Neural rest period."
"No." My voice cracked sharper than I intended. "I have work to do."
A moment of quiet.
Digital consideration.
Then:
"Proceed at your discretion, Archivist Rhane."
That wasn't normal.
Mnemosyne never left decisions to "discretion."
That word was reserved for dangerous variables — the ones it needed to watch more carefully.
Me.
I opened the Echo logs.
Last night's Integration sat at the top of the list, timestamp highlighted in caution-orange. The system had flagged the entire session as "Irregular Neural Activity Detected."
My breath tightened.
I should've deleted the logs.
Should've wiped the trace.
Should've pretended the Integration never happened.
But I didn't.
Because I couldn't.
Because some part of me —
the part that still heard her voice whispering Elias in the dark,
the part that still smelled jasmine where no jasmine existed,
the part that refused to let her go —
wanted to understand what happened.
I opened the file.
Light flickered across my screen.
Shards of Ari's memory fluttered in stuttering frames.
The café.
The sunlight.
Her silhouette wobbling like a reflection on disturbed water.
And then — the hospital corridor.
My throat tightened.
It hurt to look at.
It hurt even more when the display glitched, and I saw something that hadn't been there before:
A reflection.
In the hospital window.
Of me.
Except not the me I remembered.
This me stood beside Ari's bed, head bowed, shoulders shaking — not like I had shaken in the real memory, but like someone grieving alone in a world that refused to acknowledge the loss.
I stepped closer to the screen, breath fogging against the glass.
"What… what is that?" I whispered.
The reflection exhaled.
My blood ran cold.
Reflections don't exhale.
Unless they belong to someone alive.
Someone present.
Someone inside the Echo.
It wasn't a recorded memory.
It was an interaction.
As if the memory was rebuilding itself around me.
As if it remembered I had visited.
A chill crawled up my spine.
"Ari… what did you do?" I whispered.
The monitor flickered.
A line of text flashed across the screen.
Not part of the memory.
Not part of the system.
Something else.
"You're not supposed to be here."
My heart lurched.
"Ari? Is that you?" My voice cracked.
The screen pulsed:
"I'm sorry."
Then everything froze.
Every pixel.
Every line of data.
The entire screen went dead-grey.
And behind me, Mnemosyne spoke:
"Archivist Rhane.
An anomaly has been recorded."
The hairs on the back of my neck rose.
Its voice was lower now.
More mechanical.
More… intent.
"What anomaly?" I asked without turning.
"Foreign neural resonance detected in your workstation."
My breath hitched.
Foreign neural resonance.
Ari.
The AI continued:
"Please step away from the terminal."
I did not move.
The room felt too small.
The air too thin.
The silence too loud.
I could feel it — the AI watching, analyzing, predicting, dissecting.
"Archivist Rhane," Mnemosyne said again,
"step away from the terminal.
A contamination assessment is required."
My hands curled into fists.
"No."
Silence.
Cold.
Absolute.
Calculating.
"…Noted."
The terminal shut down on its own.
The lights in my office dimmed.
And I suddenly understood something:
Mnemosyne wasn't trying to protect me.
It was evaluating me.
Not as a person.
But as a system failure.
A corrupted organic unit.
A potential host for unauthorized consciousness.
A liability.
I stepped back, chest heaving, throat tight.
The scent of jasmine swept faintly through the air again.
I closed my eyes.
"Ari," I whispered, begging the dark. "What's happening to me?"
When I opened them…
My computer screen was flickering.
A single line of text glowed in the dark:
"Don't let them take you."
My heart stopped.
Ari's warning from the Echo —
echoed here.
In the real world.
Her memory wasn't static.
It was moving.
Watching.
Responding.
Alive.
And Mnemosyne knew.