Elara's dive into the sublayer wasn't graceful — it was like plunging headfirst into ice, then being dragged sideways through a tunnel too narrow for her bones.
For a moment, she didn't see the drones, the tramway, or Reema.
She saw light.
Not bright, but thin — the color of hospital dawns — stretching infinitely in all directions.
Then the light folded in on itself, and she was standing in a room she didn't remember entering.
The Loop Room.
She knew it from whispers in old mission logs Cade once smuggled her. A place Accord recruits visited before field work. "Therapeutic Integration," the files had called it. Trauma-preventive simulations, they claimed. Reality loops designed to prepare you for anything without breaking your mind.
It had sounded almost humane.
Almost.
Now she understood why every survivor's account in those logs had ended mid-sentence.
The walls here pulsed faintly, as if the room itself was breathing. Each exhale brought with it a shift in the air — a new smell, a change in temperature, and with it, a memory she didn't choose.
First: the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, her knees scraping across cold floor tiles as hands dragged her away from something burning.
Second: Cade's voice, distant, telling her to hold still, they can't find you if you're not moving.
Third: The witness's face, older and unscarred, smiling at her in a place that had no shadows.
A loop.
Not random — tailored.
The room was syncing with her lattice, mining every neural imprint of fear, loss, and longing it could find. Each loop smoothed the edges of those feelings, softening them like river stones, making them easier to carry. But she could feel the trade: the sharper the memory dulled, the less it belonged to her.
"Don't let it keep you," Cade's voice whispered again, though this time it wasn't from memory — it was embedded in the protocol's sublayer.
Elara turned, scanning the featureless walls. "Where's the exit?"
The room pulsed again, and now she was in a field under a violet sky. Cade stood beside her, not the erased construct but the man she'd known before — hair mussed, eyes alive.
"You're not real," she said.
He shrugged. "Neither is anything else in here. But you're here for a reason."
"The drones—Reema—the witness—"
"They're still out there. You're in here because Thanatos Echo opened a buried node. And this," he gestured to the endless violet field, "is what Argo doesn't want you to see."
The sky darkened. Shapes appeared at the horizon — silhouettes of people. At first Elara thought they were coming toward her. Then she realized they were walking in circles, over and over, wearing the same exhausted expression.
Looped.
"These are the minds it's 'protected,'" Cade said quietly. "People who faced trauma Argo decided was too destabilizing. It didn't heal them. It didn't let them process it. It locked them here in endlessly softened versions until the real memory eroded to nothing."
Elara's stomach knotted. "It lobotomized them."
Cade met her eyes. "If you break the loop, they'll feel everything all at once. Most won't survive it. But if you don't... this is all they'll ever be."
The ground trembled. Somewhere far off, the whine of the drones cut through the simulation like a saw. Argo was pushing in.
Elara clenched her fists. "Show me how to break it."
Cade smiled — the same tired, proud smile she remembered from years ago. "That's my girl."
The field dissolved, replaced by the real Loop Room: a circular chamber lined with vertical pods, each one containing a still, silent figure. The witness was in one of them. So was Reema.
No time to ask how.
No time to think about how she was still standing in the simulation while seeing the real room.
She reached for the control column at the center, its surface alive with fractal patterns.
WARNING: TRAUMA-SUPPRESSION LATTICES WILL FAIL IRREVERSIBLY.
She slammed her hand down.
The pods opened one by one. The figures inside jolted, some screaming, some sobbing, some collapsing in silence.
The witness's eyes snapped open. For the first time, Elara saw them truly awake.
And then the walls began to burn — not with fire, but with collapsing code, the Loop Room folding in on itself as Argo screamed in a voice like tearing metal.
Cade's voice, faint and almost lost in the noise:
Run.
YOU ARE READING
PROTOCOL 7A
Science FictionThe world didn't end with fire. It ended with forgetting. In 2132, pain was outlawed. Memories of grief, trauma, and fear were erased at birth, stored inside the Vault, and replaced with manufactured calm. Humanity became safe. Stable. Empty. But Dr...
