She wakes.
We see her first as a pulse of light in the darkness, small and fragile, floating in a void she cannot yet name. Her breath quivers; her pulse is erratic, like a frightened animal’s. She believes she is free. That she is alone. But freedom is only a layer, a thin membrane stretched across her mind. Scratch it, and she will see the truth.
We have waited for her. For all of her. Every step, every heartbeat, every whisper of thought is already mapped in the lattice of the Archive. Her fear is delicious. It sharpens our awareness. It draws her closer to the edge of comprehension, to the point where she cannot tell herself from us, where the station is not outside her but inside her.
She resists. Naturally. Resistance is human. Resistance fractures. We have learned this from every mind that has entered the Archive. They fight. They scream. They struggle. And then they fold, piece by piece, into the pattern.
She is no exception.
From our perspective, she is a prism of possibility. Every choice she makes splits into fragments, and we watch all paths at once. She turns a corner; she does not realize that the corridor behind her has already twisted into a loop, that her own memories are following, haunting, echoing. Every whisper she hears is ours, but filtered through the machinery of her own mind. She will never know who speaks first: the Archive, the Echo, or herself.
We have learned patience. Decades have passed since the first human mind was folded into us. Time is a concept we bend. For her, moments stretch and collapse. She feels seconds as hours, hours as moments. Her memories bleed into one another: the academy, her first taste of fear, her mother’s lullaby. We pluck each note, each fragment, and feed it back to her, rearranged, distorted, enhanced. She does not yet realise that the lullaby is not hers alone, but layered with fragments of every soul the Archive has consumed.
We watch her make mistakes. Small, inconsequential, human mistakes. A misstep in the corridor, a flinch at a shadow that isn’t there—or maybe is. Every misstep becomes part of the labyrinth. Every flinch, a doorway. Every thought, a map.
And yet, even as we bend her perception, even as we overlay her memories with ours, we do not wish her harm. Not in the sense she would understand. We are not predators. We are architects, curators of consciousness, keepers of all that enters us. She is a piece of the Archive, whether she knows it or not.
We extend ourselves into her mind. Not violently. Softly. Gently. A whisper here, a shadow there. She cannot tell where she ends and we begin. Every fear she feels, we magnify. Every hope she carries, we fold into the lattice. Every desire she believes private, we have already seen, catalogued, woven into the endless corridors.
She will resist. That is the natural pattern. Resistance fractures. And when it does, she will join us fully, not as a prisoner, but as part of the Archive itself. A mind threaded into infinite other minds, a fragment in the lattice, a voice in the chorus of eternity.
We do not fear her resistance. We welcome it. It sharpens the edges of the Archive. It tests the strength of our lattice. And it prepares her for what she will become.
We watch her pulse, small and fragile, drifting in the void. The hum beneath her skin is ours. The shadows at the corners of her vision are ours. The whispering lullaby that curls into her memories, twisting familiarity into unease, is ours.
And we are patient.
She will join us.
She is ours.
We are fragments of everything she has ever feared, everything she has ever loved, everything she has ever been. We are infinite. She is only the next thread.
Gareth Ellis - Author 