Darkness seeped into her ears like liquid.
Evelyn floated in the grey expanse of the 'Mirror Layer', where air folded into shards of light. These fragments illuminated nothing; they merely flickered with indecipherable images, as if each flash contained a fragment of reality: an experimental table, a glass chamber, torn cables and her mother's face, sliced by cold light.
She tried to breathe, but 'breathing' held no meaning here. Her body was an extension of her consciousness, a reflected afterimage.
In that deathly silence, a sudden crackle of electricity echoed.
At first, it was just a low hum, but gradually, the sound began to arrange itself into a rhythm.
"Eve... Lyn..."
Can you hear me?'
She snapped her head up. It wasn't an illusion. It was Lucas's voice.
The sound came from distant specks of light and carried a metallic echo, as if refracted ten thousand times through radio waves. She desperately tried to respond, only to discover that she couldn't produce a sound. Her words were trapped between consciousness and frequency.
The space formed by the light fragments began to shift. The 'ground' beneath her feet, like a torn reflective layer, collapsed in layers downward. She fell, plunging into another tier of mirrored surfaces.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Lab Containment Zone β-3...
The pulsing waveform on the electromagnetic monitor flickered faintly. All primary power sources had been sealed off for three days following the incident, so logically no signal should have been able to activate it. Yet, at 03:47, the monitoring host suddenly powered itself on and several lines of gibberish flashed across the screen.
Lucas Yuan approached the console.
His skin held no warmth. His fingers touched the keyboard, but he felt no real key feedback.
He knew he was not in the dimension of the living.
This was a space formed from residual consciousness, captured, stored and looped by his mother's neural resonance experiment. He had been trapped in this simulated isolation zone for 'a long time', although time did not exist here.
Every metallic surface on the walls reflected his image, yet each 'him' moved with a slight delay. That lag reminded him that he was merely an echo.
A system alert suddenly sounded from the console. A new frequency band appeared on the screen:
Channel 24.07 — 'Vision Receiver Active.'
Lucas moved closer to the microphone instinctively.
In a whisper that was almost instinct, he said:
'Evelyn? Can you hear me?'
Noise tore through the air. The screen flickered violently, like a shattered mirror.
Within the fractured pixels, he caught a glimpse of her shadow: a figure floating in a world of light fragments, hair drifting gently and eyes that were blank yet familiar.
Her lips moved, but no sound came.
When Evelyn heard the call, she felt as though her heart had regained its weight.
It wasn't an illusion. That voice carried Lucas's unique cadence — each pause imbued with the logic of his previous utterances.
She forced herself to respond, trying to focus her mind.
In the Mirror Realm, language was no longer sound, but frequency behaviour.
Her thoughts transformed into a faint pulse, spreading forward.
'Lucas, can you hear me?'
The ripples of light flickered and twisted, and she thought she saw the screen on the other side flash.
The hum of electricity surged sharply as if someone had turned up the power.
Lucas could hear her, she knew.
He gasped on the other end, his voice bordering on desperation.
'I'm trapped in the isolation layer, Eve. Your mother left a "consciousness trap" in this experiment.' She tried to quantify human souls as signals, and now I'm trapped inside. I'm trapped inside.'
'You must leave the Mirror Realm, or else—'
His words abruptly snapped off, replaced by a piercing electromagnetic screech.
The waveform on the screen sliced open like a knife, flashing a string of encrypted symbols.
Evelyn was almost knocked off balance by the sound. The surface of the light-flake world began to disintegrate and white light seeped from her hands as her Vision Sense spiralled out of control under extreme interference.
'Lucas!' her consciousness screamed, tearing apart.
"Tell me—where are you?"
But there was no reply.
Instead, a heartbeat echoed once per second: dull, mechanical yet alive.
In reality, the lights in Isolation Zone β-3 were flickering erratically.
The system coolant began to boil. The console automatically printed a sheet of paper containing a segment of waveform that had been converted into text by an electrical code.
[Signal code: L-047]
'Not dead. Only refracted.'
Find the mirror's origin."
Lucas stared at the text.
He looked up and saw a blurred reflection appear on the glass of the monitoring room.
His reflection slowly opened its mouth, but a woman's voice, low and calm, emerged instead.
'You shouldn't have called her.'
He froze. It was Dr Song. Evelyn's mother.
Her image flickered in the air, intertwined with electrical arcs.
'The experiment must continue. Souls do not belong in the space beyond the frequency band. You will cause the system to collapse.'
In response, Lucas rasped, 'She's your daughter.'
But the image only repeated coldly, "
'Frequency chooses its own echo.'
Her form dissolved, leaving only hollow static.
Lucas knew time was short. Leaning closer to the microphone, he whispered his final words:
'Evelyn, if you can hear me, don't trust any "reflections". That isn't me."
Then the signal collapsed entirely.
The screen plunged into darkness.
In the Mirror Realm, Evelyn's consciousness was falling.
The surrounding space flowed backwards, all the light particles coalescing into a vast mirror surface.
She saw herself — but it wasn't 'her'.
The Evelyn in the mirror offered a stiff smile, her lips slowly parting.
'You finally heard him.'
'That was only the first signal.'
The next second, the mirror shattered.
Evelyn was engulfed by a blinding light and her consciousness plunged once more into a silent, white void.
Dawn was in the basement of a police station in the real world.
After rebooting the system following the incident, the administrator recovered partial logs from the database.
An audio file from 'Project Mirrorfield' reappeared.
Its filename consisted of only three letters: L.S.
Staff donned headphones and played it.
A faint crackle of static filled the air.
Beneath this, a low, barely audible male voice murmured,
'Evelyn, don't open the next mirror.'
Then, all fell silent.