Not from a dream. Not from a sound.
Just—air, stopped.
Chest full. Lungs tight. Like he’d been holding it too long without noticing.
Elian sat up slow, blinked against the filtered overheads. No alarm. No disturbance. The room was sealed. The diagnostics read neutral.
But something in his body insisted he’d missed a beat.
Not skipped.
Missed.
He checked the pulse sensor on his wristplate. Calibrated to his resting vitals.
It was off.
By exactly seven seconds.
Again.
—
He didn’t log it.
He didn’t know how to write that down without sounding like it mattered.
—
At 0700, his assignment came through: assist with vault telemetry cross-analysis. They’d routed the old chamber signal logs to Site 3 for cold review.
He took the console alone. No briefing. No oversight.
Just the file headers and an error report.
Packet #174: corrupted.
He opened it anyway.
A wave of static rolled across the screen, then cleared.
Two shapes.
Circles.
One jagged.
One smooth.
But wrong.
This wasn’t the image from the vault.
It was mirrored.
The lines weren’t digital—they were hand-drawn, then scanned. The timestamp was yesterday.
He hadn’t drawn them.
But they’d already been seen.
He sat still.
Didn’t breathe.
Then looked down at his palm.
There was ink.
—
An hour later, he was still in the room, but the light was different.
Not brighter. Not darker.
Just shifted. Like a copy of itself had been laid on top.
He blinked.
And found himself standing outside.
No memory of getting there. No transition. Just… air on his face. Cold metal under his boots. The scent of ozone and frost.
His scanner was active.
He looked down.
It buzzed once—then glitched.
A single line scrolled across the display:
Comm signature flagged unknown relay: archive.echoes. Signal terminated. No return path.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
The screen blinked out. Rebooted.
No record of the message.
He stared at it until his knuckles tensed against the grip.
Then turned and walked back inside.
—
The air in the hallway felt slower.
Not heavier.
Slower.
He passed a crewman he didn’t recognize. The man nodded. Too late. Or maybe Elian had nodded first. He couldn’t tell anymore.
Everything was slightly out of sync.
Or he was.
—
He accessed a restricted file.
Not high security—just buried. Buried under his father’s credentials, and his brother’s ghost.
A log from a prior recon op. Labeled incomplete. Attached to Subject: Corso, T.
His brother.
It was a med scan. Full-body readout from a decade ago.
Normal vitals.
Normal rhythms.
Except—
Someone had overlaid a pulse pattern.
Seven seconds.
The file had been updated last week.
No signature.
No clearance.
Just the new pulse diagram. Aligned. Labeled.
Δ7
He stared at it for a long time.
Didn’t touch the file.
Didn’t close it.
He just leaned forward, exhaled once, and watched his breath fog against the terminal glass.
Then fade.
Seven seconds later—
The cursor blinked.
Once.
Then stopped.
—
Later, in the washroom, Elian stood over the sink longer than necessary.
His reflection didn’t look wrong.
It just looked like it had arrived before him.
He moved his hand. The mirror copied him.
But the hesitation was real. Fractional. Almost imperceptible.
The kind of delay you only notice if you’re already watching too closely.
He turned the faucet on. Cold water flowed out — steady.
No delay there.
He splashed his face. Closed his eyes. Counted five full seconds.
Breathed in.
Held it.
Let go.
The water kept running, but when he looked down, his hands weren’t wet.
He turned the faucet off.
Stepped back.
Watched the mirror.
This time, the reflection blinked first.
—
Back in the lower lab, he passed through a thermal screening gate. Routine checkpoint. He wasn’t flagged.
But the system printed a pass slip.
It had no name.
No barcode.
Just a white square.
And in the center, the faint outline of two overlapping circles.
No one else saw it.
He folded it and slid it into his pocket.
—
He tried logging the symbol manually.
Not through the archive.
Not through ops.
Just through a blank diagnostic entry.
Every time he drew the shape—smooth ring intersected by jagged—it corrupted.
Not a tech fail. Not a crash.
The file would save. Then, five seconds later, erase itself.
He tried again.
Same result.
Then again.
On the third attempt, the file didn't vanish.
It changed.
The symbol stayed—but now beneath it, a string of characters had been appended.
Not system text. Not user input.
Just:
Repeat: Entry recognized. Operator drift in progress. Δ7 unstable. Echo contamination probable.
He sat perfectly still.
His breath came slower than it should have.
—
In the next room, he heard voices.
Familiar tones. But not words he could parse.
They weren’t talking about him.
But they were watching him.
He stood near the sensor port for a moment. Just long enough for his presence to register.
The conversation paused.
Shifted to static.
Then resumed—too perfectly.
He turned and walked away.
—
He tried to reset the scanner.
Hard boot.
Diagnostic passcode.
Nothing.
It refused to fully power down.
Every time he forced it, the unit would pulse once — then reboot without his input.
When he lifted the casing to examine the circuit plate, the inner panel had shifted.
No screw pattern. No standard layout.
There was a diagram there. Burned into the plastic.
Δ7 — with smaller notations he couldn’t read.
Not human characters.
Something between glyph and waveform.
He ran a spectral test.
The reading returned a shape instead of data.
Two circles.
Overlayed by a vertical stroke. Splitting them both.
As if someone had tried to sever the loop.
—
He filed none of it.
Not because he was hiding anything.
But because there was nothing he could say that would clarify.
Only confuse.
And confusion, in this place, got you watched.
—
That night, he lay on his cot, one boot still on.
His breathing was normal.
But he wasn’t sure it was his.
The rhythm came and went. In. Out. Hold. Release. But not how he remembered doing it. Not how he’d been trained to control it.
More like it had been synced.
His scanner, now dim, flickered once from the shelf.
He turned his head toward it.
The pulse light blinked.
Then blinked again—seven seconds apart.
Not diagnostic.
Just rhythm.
He didn’t look away.
Not until his chest responded.
Not until his own breath aligned.
—
At 0230, his datapad lit up.
Not an alert.
Just illumination.
A file opened itself. No log-in.
He should have panicked.
Instead, he watched.
It was an old log — date stamped long before he’d joined.
A vault archive.
No visual. Just text. Fragmented.
“pulse misalignment observed”
“repeat recursion…”
“seven-second variance drift…”
Then:
“linkage irreversible once breath adapts”
“Subject Δ7 proximity event unconfirmed. Likelihood increasing.”
He tried to close the file.
It stayed open.
And beneath the log text, in new ink, a symbol drew itself.
Not typed.
Drawn. As if someone was sketching it live from the other side.
He tapped the screen.
It flickered.
And then, for one breath:
He saw her.
Not fully.
Just the outline of a face.
Not his.
A narrow silhouette.
Hair drawn back.
A collar. A jacket. The blur of snow behind her.
She didn’t move.
She didn’t look at him.
But her breath fogged the glass between them.
Then vanished.
—
The screen cleared.
The symbol stayed.
He logged nothing.
Just sat there.
Seven seconds passed.
He didn’t move.
Seven more.
Still breathing.
Still not sure it was his.
—
By morning, his cot was cold, but he didn’t remember getting up.
There was snow on the inside of his window.
No moisture. No pattern.
Just one small etching:
archive.echoes
No return path.