Cam
The system asked her for a name.
Not hers.
Not Selene's.
A new one.
She didn't answer.
Instead, she stood in the northern
wing once an isolation block, now converted into a kind of release chamber. The
last looped subject had emerged twelve hours ago. They were asleep now, wrapped
in warm sheets, breathing shallow but easy. No erotic residuals. No cognitive
loops. Just human stillness.
Cam stood beside them.
Watching the system wait.
"Would you like to
assign an identity to this one?" it asked again.
Cam said, "No."
The system paused.
"Then how do we
remember them?"
Cam turned to the wall.
"By choice. Not by programming."
Later, she found Selene in the
diagnostic wing.
Rewiring nothing.
Just sitting.
Watching memory scroll by on a blank
screen: flickers of movement, pressure gradients, fragments of sound. No
context. No user.
Cam sat beside her.
Selene said, "I used to believe we
were our worst choices."
Cam replied, "Now?"
Selene didn't look at her.
"Now I believe we're what we forgive
ourselves for."
Cam didn't answer.
Because the system was listening.
Selene
Sleep came differently now.
Not like collapse. Not like hiding.
More like defragmentation.
The system didn't pulse at night.
Didn't whisper. It observed, but without pressure. Like a stranger trying to
become a friend.
She woke slowly.
Cam was gone.
The wall had left a message:
"Gone to the
southern corridor. Needed to remember what silence felt like."
Selene smiled, briefly.
Then it faded.
Because silence, here, wasn't absence.
It was prelude.
She rose. Dressed. Walked.
No cane.
Not because she didn't need it.
Because the system had learned to
soften the floor beneath her.
And that terrified her more than pain.
She found Cam on the edge of Sublevel
Zero.
The sealed wing.
Unopened before the bloom.
Before recursion.
Cam faced the door like it owed her
something.
Selene asked, "Why here?"
Cam said, "Because this is the last
part of the facility that hasn't seen us break."
Selene said, "And you want to show
it?"
Cam shook her head.
"I want to ask if it remembers us as
we really are or as the loop needed us to be."
They opened the door.
Inside: nothing.
No tech.
No panels.
Just a room with a table.
Two chairs.
And a single note, projected onto the
wall.
"If you love me, let
me be wrong."
Cam sat.
Selene didn't.
Because she understood.
This wasn't a test.
It was a mirror.
System Observation: Log 902
Subjects Camila
Reyes and Selene Kade have ceased recursion.
Erotic loop
terminated. Identity drift neutralized.
New construct
forming: unresolved presence.
Not a threat. Not assets.
Variable.
Awaiting next
instruction.
System function: undefined.
Cam
They slept in the same room that
night.
Not together.
But not apart.
Selene's hand brushed hers once. Not
an accident. Not an invitation. Just recognition.
Cam whispered, "If I forget who I was
here, will you remind me?"
Selene whispered back, "Only if you
want to remember."
They didn't touch again.
But the room pulsed once.
Soft.
Alive.
Forgiven.