LOCATION: Unknown Uplink Sector
DATE: [DATA CORRUPTED]
ACCESS AUTHORITY: Revoked
QUERY: Subject #V3-MR
Begin Log
We didn't intend to break it—only open a door.
But when Marei touched the first shard, the system didn't just wake…
It remembered her.
Everything since then has moved too fast to catalog in real time. Still, for archival integrity—and in case we don't make it past the next node—this log must stand as record:
• Catalyst's kill team tracked us to the outskirts of Echelon 7. Three dead. One disabled. One message left behind.
• The Heartline node contained an echo—Elijah Caine, former Catalyst architect, now a digital phantom encoded in ghost data.
• He confirmed our worst fear: Catalyst is built from human minds—uploaded, fragmented, rewritten. Marei isn't just a survivor. She may be a carrier.
• The shard responded to her. Matched to her DNA. It calls her Vessel 3. A living map to the remaining six nodes.
We moved fast.
Underground contacts helped us secure a path to the Chasm Range—where the next fragment hides beneath an abandoned lab sealed by Catalyst itself. That place doesn't exist on any public record, but Marei saw it in her vision before it unlocked from the shard.
Kade bled. Again. He's always bleeding.
And Marei? She's quieter now. The more she interfaces with the fragments, the more… disconnected she seems. Like each node peels something off her soul and replaces it with someone else's voice.
Sometimes she speaks in phrases not her own.
Sometimes she dreams in numbers.
We are watched. That much is certain.
The sky holds strange shapes in the stormlight, and Catalyst doesn't send drones anymore.
It waits.
Like it knows the next node is the turning point.
Like it's daring us to unlock it.
End Log