POV: Selene Arctis
They called it Project Lyra—the first sanctioned attempt to retrieve a soulprint from another universe.
Officially, it was an experiment in quantum memory transfer. Unofficially, it was a desperate gamble: pulling a human consciousness from a dead Earth timeline and embedding it in a custom-made splice-body.
Selene Arctis had made it work.
And she hadn't told anyone that she used her own genome as the base template.
Seven Years Ago — Valtherion Deep Splice Lab
The soulprint came first.
A raw entanglement signature—quantum echoes from a dying girl's brain moments before death. The extraction algorithm had scraped it from the bleed layer between parallel timelines during a rogue black hole observatory test.
The girl's name had been Aika Yamasaki. Age 23. Sexual orientation: homosexual. Brainwave signature: highly integrative, emotionally resonant, vivid memory retention even under trauma.
Selene had stared at that data for hours.
She hadn't meant to get attached.
But there was something about it—this flicker of identity beyond death, this refusal to go quietly—that reminded her of a long-lost someone.
A woman with almond eyes and callused hands. Someone Selene had dreamed of for years. Someone who had never existed in this timeline.
Mia?
No.
Aika.
The first few splice attempts failed.
Either the neural graft rejected the host genome or the body collapsed under resonance feedback. They'd tried hundreds of gene templates, but only one produced viable results: a recombinant genome containing sequences from Selene herself.
It wasn't vanity.
It was compatibility.
Her own neural code was the only thing stable enough to sync with the foreign soulprint.
So she used it.
And in doing so, she created something impossible—a hybrid of Earth-21 humanity and Nexus Primaris genecraft. A body unlike any that had come before. Biologically female in structure but enhanced, seeded with dual reproductive traits, extreme neuroplasticity, and embedded pleasure-response networks.
Originally designed for conditioning, control, and loyalty.
But Selene broke that protocol.
She deleted the control loops. Burned the backdoors. Lied to the board.
Because she didn't want a weapon.
She wanted her.
Three Years Ago — Valtherion Memory Crypt
Selene sat alone in the archive, watching old cortical recordings from the Aika clone. Not yet awakened, but already dreaming.
The dreams weren't random.
Cherry blossoms. Warm hands. A kiss in the rain.
Selene had never programmed those.
And that terrified her.
Because she remembered those dreams too.
But she had never lived them.
She ran DNA integrity checks again and again.
There was no contamination. No false positives.
And yet…
Aika remembers me.
From another life.
From another universe.
That's when Selene stopped pretending this was just science. It wasn't curiosity anymore. It was longing.
One Week Before Aika's Awakening
Selene received the recall order from Valtherion's executive council.
The subject was to be terminated.
Classified as "unstable." Her existence threatened legal boundaries on splice autonomy, bioethics, and AI integration. Her pleasure-neural systems were considered a moral liability.
They would dissect her. Archive her. Erase her.
Selene refused.
She encrypted the awakening protocols, burned the biometric logs, and set the cryo-chamber to emergency unlock mode.
And waited.
When Aika's fist shattered the cryo-glass, Selene felt a pull in her chest she couldn't explain.
Recognition. Guilt. Desire. All braided together.
She saw not just the girl she created.
She saw the woman she had once loved.
In another life. Another universe.
And now, maybe—just maybe—in this one too.