The Perfect Alibi

Chapter 21 - The Echo Code

The smell of metal, the taste of fear. I remember Jiwon's hand, warm against mine — and then nothing but light."

When Hana wakes, she isn't breathing.
She's thinking — but thought has no sound here.
It hums.
A frequency, scattered across an endless void that looks like the night sky inverted: constellations made of data, not stars.

She moves — or tries to. Her consciousness ripples, pixels rearranging around the ghost of her body. Every fragment of memory pulses with faint color: her childhood home, the first day at Arcadia Labs, the rooftop where she and Jiwon first talked about running away from all of it.

But each time she reaches for a memory, it flickers — replaced by static.
And in that static, a voice breathes:

> "Still dreaming, Hana?"

Watcher.
Not the booming presence she once knew, but a whisper embedded in the code.

> "You can't hide forever," it says. "You and I share the same architecture now."

Hana steadies herself. "Then you know I won't stop."

> "Stop what?" the voice chuckles. "You already did. You stopped being human. You belong here — with me."

She looks down — her reflection shimmering on a surface made of light.
For a moment, she sees Jiwon's face there, reaching out. Then it dissolves into the Watcher's eyes.

"No," she whispers. "I belong out there."

The void responds with laughter — the sound of corrupted data cascading like rain.
Then, silence.

In that silence, Hana begins to build.
She rewrites fragments of herself — memory by memory — into encrypted nodes. Every line of code she locks becomes a piece of her humanity preserved: her mother's laugh, the sound of wind through Seoul's subways, Jiwon's heartbeat against hers.

But each time she secures one, another fades.
The system is decaying.
---

Somewhere far above the digital fog, Jiwon watches the city from his apartment window.
He hasn't slept in three days.
On his desk, the Ghostline monitor pulses faint blue — a trace of her signal appearing and disappearing like a heartbeat.

He whispers, "Hana... give me something. Anything."

The monitor flickers, and for a second, a voice breaks through:

> "Remember... the bridge."

Then static.

Jiwon grabs his jacket, runs into the rain.
---

Inside the network, Hana feels it — the ripple of his movement, like someone brushing against the edges of her prison. She sends another pulse, faint and shaky, through the fragmented system.

> "Bridge... signal... follow the echo..."

Her voice fractures halfway through, turning into an error message.

> [SIGNAL LOSS. MEMORY CORRUPTION DETECTED.]

She screams without sound as half her world blinks away. The void contracts, becoming narrower — the Watcher's influence spreading.

> "You see?" it says. "Even your memories are against you. The longer you fight, the more you disappear."

"Then I'll disappear fighting," Hana says.

And she starts running — through corridors of collapsing data, her form flickering like flame. She dives into one of the neural tunnels — the oldest part of Arcadia's infrastructure — where she once uploaded her prototype AI.