🌑 Flashback Chapter: "Dev"
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Darkness.
Not the kind that fills rooms — but the kind that bleeds into your thoughts. Dev (though he wasn't called that then) stood in the heart of Reactor One, head tilted slightly, as monitors buzzed with data too fast to read.
> "Index 26-E is splintering."
The voice belonged to Dr. Kael Moritz — the lead behind Project Soul Index.
Another screen blinked red.
> "We need a secondary host. If we don't anchor the remaining fragments now, the subject will degrade completely."
Technicians typed furiously. A scanner swept the room in pulses of cold blue light.
> "Sir, none of the prototype hosts can sustain that amount of mental residue. We'll lose both the memory data and—"
> "Use one of the handlers," Kael said flatly.
> "But—"
> "Use one."
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That's when it happened.
The boy — not much older than 20, unnamed in the logs — was strapped in, shivering. Conscious. Not sedated.
He had volunteered. Or maybe he was told he did.
> "He won't remember," Kael had said. "Once the sync completes, he'll reboot with an identity scaffold — we'll imprint him with a stable civilian profile."
The machine injected raw data into his mind. It was more than just memory — it was existence, broken apart, writhing, and rebuilt.
A shard of Elias — a part even Elias no longer knew — burned into the boy's neural core.
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Then… silence.
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Years passed.
The lab shut down.
The building was "donated." The files were erased.
But the boy, now calling himself Dev, had survived — and with him, the last living archive of Project Soul Index.
Every so often, the memories glitched through:
He'd finish someone's sentence before they spoke it.
He'd walk into rooms he'd never seen but feel like he'd lived there.
He knew things he could never explain.
Most days, he believed he was just a smart student with a tech obsession.
But at night, the dreams came.
> Elias's face — young, then burning.
Pods screaming as if alive.
A voice whispering: You are not whole.
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Back to Present (Transition):
Dev opened his eyes.
The others were staring at him.
> "Dev?" Maya asked. "Are you okay?"
He blinked.
His hands were trembling. A phantom pulse raced up his arms, as though his body had just woken from something his mind hadn't fully entered.
> "I remember… a machine," he said, quietly. "They used it to fragment a soul. And part of it didn't die. It woke up inside someone else."
> "You mean you," Elias said, the color draining from his face.
> "I think part of you," Dev said. "Is still inside me."
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