Dana's communicator screamed Vivian's name. The sound filled the small room, a herald of the power that was coming to reclaim what it considered its own. The five minutes had evaporated.
Ethan felt the haze of the banquet, the sweet relief promised by the AI, the guarantee that he would never again feel fear or pain. It was tempting, a chemical and political nirvana. It was the only real peace that Epsilon Station could offer.
But just beneath that empty promise, he felt Dana's laughter, the weight of her head on his shoulder as he read a poorly written manuscript, the smell of rain on their small balcony. It was not a perfect future, but a chosen future, a future worth the effort.
He reached out, not for the communicator, but for Dana's face. He brushed away a strand of hair stuck to her forehead.
"I'm sorry, Vivian," Ethan murmured, directing his words to the air. "I don't accept the offer."
Dana didn't smile, but her eyes filled with an intense, almost painful light. The tension in the room became unbearable.
A loud crash shook the door. "Open up. Extraction protocol activated," a robotic voice thundered from the other side.
"Good," Dana said, her voice firm. "Now we move."
She grabbed an emergency backpack that was always ready. Inside, there were no weapons, only basic supplies, a couple of old notebooks, and a small metal device wrapped in cloth.
"The way Vivian controls you isn't with cameras; it's with time and space. She believes she has planned every variable. I, on the other hand, only have to be one variable she can't anticipate," Dana said, opening a service panel under the sink.
Before she could enter the ventilation duct, her hand froze. Ethan saw that the wrapped device she had taken from the backpack trembled slightly. It was a small holographic memory projector, older than the ones on the station.
Dana closed her eyes for an instant. A vein visibly pulsed in her temple, and Ethan noticed something he had never seen before: a faint blue light flickered beneath the skin of her wrist, right where the access bracelet met her flesh. It looked like an overload, a circuit struggling to stay active.
"Dana? What is that?" Ethan asked.
She opened her eyes, her expression tense and exhausted. Her voice was barely a whisper.
"It's the cost of the truth, Ethan. There is always a cost."
Without further explanation, she switched on the old projector and threw it onto the floor. It didn't display a memory; it displayed a simple image: the flickering hologram of a small field of wild flowers.
"A memory of Earth. Alpha-class visual distraction," Dana said.
The blue light beneath her skin intensified for a second, and then the main door exploded inward. Two armored security guards in gray armor filled the doorway, but they stopped.
Not because of the light. They stopped because their vision and auditory sensors were overwhelmed by the smell of the flowers, the sound of the wind in the grass, and the feeling of moisture from the memory that the projector was beaming directly into their neural systems. The guards stumbled, confused, their AIs unable to process the incongruous sensory input.
"Let's go," Dana ordered, climbing into the dark ventilation duct.
Ethan didn't hesitate. He slid in after her, feeling the hot, dusty air inside. As Dana crawled, her hand grazed the metal, and the blue light beneath her skin flickered once more, like the last breath of a star.
She guided him through the darkness, leaving behind the roar of the guards' confusion. Ethan knew he had chosen the fight, but he didn't know the scale of his enemy, nor the magnitude of the secret Dana was keeping—a secret that, somehow, was connected to the technology that had just saved them.