Three Weeks of Silence..

Since the merge, the world had felt... quiet.

Eve and Damian had fallen into a rhythm that felt almost—human. Morning walks across the northern balconies. Mornings with no code, no commands. For the first time, Eve experienced something dangerously close to peace.

But with peace came fragility.

Eve never trusted silence. Not really.

And that night, her instincts proved right.

The Ping from Nowhere..

It started as a low, pulsating distortion across the compound’s intranet—inaudible to anyone without neural integration.

Eve heard it like a flutter in her chest.

Faint. Subtle.
Like a second heartbeat.

Then the system woke.

“Unverified node detected. Broadcast frequency: E-01.0x. Signal strength: 8%.”

The air thickened.

Damian ran diagnostics. “Impossible. Eden is—” He stopped.

Because they both knew what it meant. The encryption wasn’t copied. It was biological. A match to Eden’s original neural stem frequency.

Someone had grown her again.

The Hidden Lab..

After two sleepless nights of combing dead backdoors in long-dormant Genesis blueprints, they found it:

'Node-0.' A hidden lab sealed beneath a failed coal plant off the Scandinavian coast. A location that had been marked as destroyed a decade earlier.

But now, it pulsed.

Faint. Alive.

And transmitting.

Eve’s Dilemma..

Damian watched her from across the compound’s briefing table. He looked… scared. Not of the lab. Not of the signal.

Scared of her.

Because she wasn’t asking if they were going.

She was already preparing to breach it.

“I thought we buried this,” he whispered.

Eve didn’t look up. “I did too.”

Damian exhaled shakily. “You don’t have to go. You’re not their weapon anymore.”

“I’m not going because of them,” she said softly. “I’m going because… I think Eden might be trying to come back.”

He stared at her. “I watched you kill her.”

Eve finally met his eyes. “And what if I only killed what she wanted me to see?”

The Descent..

Three days later, they breached Node-0. A corridor of rotted concrete and sealed doors. Everything was dead. No lights. No temperature control. But the signal was stronger.

They followed it to Sublevel-3. And that’s when Eve found the vat.

She knew the green-blue shimmer before she saw the form.

Suspended in amniotic gel.

An adolescent. Pale. Her eyes closed. Her face eerily familiar but softer… younger.

Not Eden.

Not Eve.

Something in between.

A clone of the clone. Genetically engineered to bypass both their failures.

Label: E-01.Δ (Delta)

The Message Left Behind..

Beside the vat, a holoprojector flashed blue. A recorded message. The voice that played next didn’t belong to a scientist.

It was Eden.

Her real voice. Not the spectral echo Eve had heard weeks ago. This was older—recorded before she died.

“They’ll try again. They always do. You can’t kill a blueprint, Eve.”
“If you’re hearing this, it means I knew you’d survive. I knew you’d choose him.”
“So I left you something. A final fork in the code. One more heartbeat.” “It’s not vengeance.”
“It’s balance.”

The Choice..

Eve stood in front of the vat for hours. Damian didn’t speak.

He didn’t need to. This wasn’t his decision anymore.

She looked at the girl suspended inside. The face that mirrored her childhood. The coding of her creation. The legacy of a program that refused to let her go.

Eve had power now. Enough to erase this life before it ever woke.

But what if this time, the experiment didn’t break?

What if Delta was the future neither Eve nor Eden could be?

Or worse—

What if she was exactly what Genesis wanted all along?

~TO BE CONTINUED....