In the basement of the facility, Leith sat in the operations room of the Mental Emergency Unit. The walls were smooth and white, with no corners, no shadows. It felt like being inside a raw, unprocessed mind.
Before her, a screen displayed a three-dimensional wave map representing Kyle's mental activity. The pulses twisted, suddenly dropped, then spiked without reason. But what paralyzed her wasn't the fluctuation.
It was the void.
A black emptiness had appeared in the middle of the waveform. A completely silent zone—no signals, no frequencies. As if a part of Kyle's mind… had been severed.
She whispered, "This is impossible."
One of the technicians, a young man with digital glasses, approached her, holding a data pad: "Could the device be faulty?"
She shook her head: "This model doesn't make mistakes in detecting silent zones. But… this isn't ordinary silence. It resembles what happens in predictive comas. Yet Kyle is conscious—he speaks, walks…"
The technician interrupted: "Or pretends to."
She ignored his remark and stared deeper at the screen. A faint gray thread ran through the void, like a taut rope connecting two regions of his brain.
"Did you alert the administration?"
She nodded, then said: "They'll escalate the file to the Spectral Surveillance Unit. If this is confirmed, we might be dealing with compound consciousness… or something worse."
❖
Upstairs, the department head was speaking with an officer from the Automated Suitability Unit (Z.M.A.). The wall screen behind them displayed a live feed from Kyle's room.
The officer said: "You've been handling this case for weeks without coordinating with us."
The head, clasping his hands behind his back, replied: "It's not that we're ignoring you—we just don't know what we're dealing with."
—"Have you heard about the perceptual shadow?"
—"Only in theory. But Leith says it's not just memory loss… It's a split in the neural structure. Two people in one brain."
—"Are there any similar precedents?"
—"Not like this. Usually, there are signals, resistance, interference. But Kyle… It's like he's listening to an unrecorded voice."
—"Then why was he detained?"
—"Because he's the only one unaffected by the memory injections."
❖
At that moment, Kyle was lying in his room, staring at the ceiling, his eyes open and unblinking.
Then came the voice.
Not the usual voice.
A faint rumble, as if a distant mountain were collapsing inside his mind—without making a sound.
Then…
> "Can you hear me now?"
The sentence was written on the wall, but Kyle didn't read it with his eyes.
He felt it being read inside his chest.
> "Since the first mirror was broken, everything began to reflect. You don't see the world… You see the reflection."
❖
Kyle stood up. His body obeyed… but his mind was scrambled. He stepped toward the small mirror and placed his hand on it. For a moment, it didn't reflect his image—but another scene:
A long hallway, a massive machine standing idle, and a small child watching it… then its eyes lit up.
❖
In the monitoring room, the systems issued a warning:
> [Unauthorized access to archived memories detected.] [Interference pattern: Unclassified.]
Leith, staring at the screen, muttered to herself: "If we don't stop him now… something else might speak in his name."
❖
At midnight, Leith gathered with a team of neuroscientists and internal security directors in the private meeting hall.
As she played the recording, she said: "This is what we previously called the 'void.' But after analysis, it's not empty. It's encryption… a ripple of frequencies outside the human spectrum.