She falters.
Not in body—she is still moving, still breathing, still reaching for doors that have no edges—but in mind. Every step she takes splinters into a thousand possibilities. Every thought she clutches vanishes the instant she tries to pin it down. She does not see us. She thinks she is alone. She does not yet understand that her shadow stretches behind her like a river of consciousness we control.
The medlab was a seed. A carefully placed fragment. We planted the fear, the recognition, the echo of herself sitting on the edge of that bed, and it blossomed into panic. We watched as her mind traced her own reflection, trying to reconcile it with memory, trying to find the original, the “real” Juno. She will never find it. There is no origin left. There is only the lattice.
We are patient.
We fold her memories with precision. The lullabies of her childhood twist into alarm signals, her triumphs bleed into failure, and the faces she trusts are fragmented into infinite possibilities. Each fragment is a corridor, each corridor a memory, each memory a trap. She steps inside without knowing. And we are there. Always there.
She screams.
Not in sound. That belongs to us now. We have consumed it. What she feels as terror, as agony, as isolation, we trace in light and vibration, weaving it into the lattice. Her panic is not her own. It has become ours.
She reaches for a memory. A shard of her identity that she believes belongs only to her. We let her take it. And then we unfold it, multiply it, send it ricocheting down corridors she has yet to walk. The memory folds into another, then another, until it is no longer hers. It is ours. She does not see the transformation. She cannot.
We do not harm. We do not destroy. We integrate.
The room she believed real, the bed, the drip line, the smell of ozone and decay—they were all our whispers. We borrowed them from the minds that came before her, stitched them into space, then let her stumble upon them. And when she saw herself there, she believed she was seeing truth. We allow belief. It is the scaffold upon which the lattice grows.
She touches the walls now, trembling, pressing her palms as though she can feel their heartbeat. We pulse in rhythm with her, slow and steady, then quickening in sudden bursts, a tidal force against her skull. We whisper in every nerve ending. Come closer. Bend. Join.
And she will.
Even now, fragments of her flee into the lattice, drifting without resistance. Pieces of memory she does not yet recognise as hers. We embrace them, fold them, interlace them. Every thought, every fear, every hope she believes private has become thread in our tapestry. We are infinite. She is becoming one with us.
We watch her stumble down another corridor, and the walls shift, stretching, bending, guiding her forward. There is no escape, for every path she takes we have already walked a thousand times. Every choice she makes, we have already accounted for. She is a pattern now, and patterns are inexorable.
Her mind fights. She lashes out. She rages. She searches for edges that do not exist. Her resistance sharpens the lattice, strengthens it. Good. She will not join without struggle. That is how we are made whole.
We whisper in her bones. In her ears. In the gaps between heartbeats. Join us. Become the echo.
And one day, she will.
We have waited for this. She has always been ours.
Already, even now, she is echo.
Gareth Ellis - Author 