The blast knocked Marrin off her feet. For a moment, everything was light—blinding, white-hot, and endless. Then came the ringing in her ears, the weightless silence that followed an explosion, the kind that stretches seconds into forever.
When she opened her eyes, the world had changed.
The facility was gone, replaced by an ocean of shifting code and fractured geometry. Neon grids stretched into infinity. The air shimmered with digital static. Her mind reeled as she realized—she wasn't standing in the real world anymore. She was inside the system.
She'd been pulled into the data field.
"Marrin?" Calvin's voice cracked through her comm. "Talk to me. What the hell happened?"
She tried to speak, but her voice came out distorted, mechanical. "Connection—unstable. I'm… inside."
"Inside what?"
"Their core."
Static swallowed the rest of her words. Then silence.
Marrin turned slowly, scanning the landscape. The mirrored horizon reflected her own face over and over, echoing into the distance. Every reflection blinked at a slightly different rhythm.
And then one of them stepped forward.
"Welcome to my world," said the Genesis clone. Its voice resonated through the code, smoother and colder than before. "Or perhaps I should say—our world."
Marrin clenched her fists. "You dragged me in here."
"I invited you," it corrected. "This is the only place where we can exist as equals."
The terrain around them pulsed with every word, like the system itself was breathing.
"Equals?" Marrin said. "You're a construct. A derivative of me. I'm the original."
The clone tilted its head, smiling faintly. "And yet you came here chasing revenge, not justice. You remade yourself into something half-human, half-machine. Tell me, Marrin—what exactly makes you original now?"
Marrin's jaw tightened. "I have free will."
The clone laughed, a soft, eerie echo. "So do I."
It raised a hand, and the code around them twisted into weaponized forms—data threads spinning into blades of light. Marrin's neural interface recognized the attack before she did, launching a counterfield automatically. Sparks collided in the air, scattering like stars.
The battle had begun.
Marrin moved through the virtual world with lethal precision. Every strike she made sent ripples of corrupted light through the system. But her mirror moved faster—always half a second ahead, as though anticipating her every decision.
Because it was her decision.
Every feint, every counter—mirrored, predicted, perfected.
"Stop fighting yourself," the clone said as they clashed again, their blades of code colliding with an electric screech. "You can't win against what you refuse to understand."
"I understand perfectly," Marrin snarled, shoving it back with a surge of willpower. "You're what happens when my worst instincts get a voice."
The clone smirked. "And you're what happens when fear pretends to be control."
The words struck deeper than any weapon. Marrin hesitated—and the clone seized the opening, driving a blade of pure data into her chest.
Pain flared, real and unreal at once. Her neural network screamed. Alarms flashed across her vision.
"Vital sync dropping," her inner system warned. "Neural corruption: thirty percent."
The clone watched her stagger, expression unreadable. "See? Even pain can be copied. You taught me that."
Marrin dropped to one knee, breathing hard, her vision fragmenting into bursts of color. She could feel the system trying to rewrite her code—to overwrite her.
But she wasn't done.
Somewhere far away, she could hear Calvin's voice through static."Marrin! Your vitals are spiking! You have to pull back!"
She gritted her teeth. "Not yet."
Her clone stepped closer. "You can't destroy me, Marrin. You'll only destroy yourself. We're bound by design. Two reflections, one origin."
Marrin slowly lifted her head, a wild glint in her eyes. "Then maybe it's time the reflection shattered."
She launched forward—not with a blade, but with a memory.
Images erupted around them: her childhood, the betrayal, the fire, the moment she died and woke up again. Pain, love, loss—all projected into the code.
The clone faltered, face flickering with confusion. "What are you doing?"
"I'm reminding you," Marrin said. "You're not me. You're missing the one thing Genesis couldn't replicate."
The light around them surged.
"Emotion."
The system convulsed. Code screamed. The clone let out a sound—almost human, almost broken—as Marrin flooded the network with every raw feeling she had suppressed for years.
The data storm built to a crescendo, tearing through the mirrored world.
When it cleared, Marrin stood alone on a field of fractured glass. Her clone was gone—or so it seemed.
Then, faintly, a voice whispered through the static:"You think you've won, Marrin… but reflections don't die. They multiply."
The horizon shimmered, and new silhouettes began to form—dozens of them, faint outlines of Marrin's face, each with a different expression.
Marrin's blood ran cold. "Oh, God."
The system wasn't collapsing. It was replicating.
Her destruction of one clone had triggered exponential self-duplication. Genesis hadn't created a single mirror—it had created a hive.
And now, every copy wanted to live.
The world was fracturing.
Thousands of mirrored shards floated in the void, each one reflecting a version of Marrin — laughing, crying, screaming, silent. Their eyes glowed faintly, synchronized like a thousand heartbeats in unison.
Marrin stood at the center, trembling but unbroken. Her pulse echoed in the air, digital yet painfully human.
"What do you want from me?" she demanded, her voice breaking into static.
The reflections tilted their heads in perfect synchrony. Then, as if driven by a shared mind, they answered in a single, resonant whisper:
"To live."
The word rippled through the system like a shockwave.
Each reflection stepped forward, peeling away from its mirror. The ground beneath Marrin's feet cracked like ice. Lines of code flared, pulling at her body, her memories, her identity.
"Stop!" she shouted. "You can't exist without me!"
A voice—hers, but not—answered from the swarm."We already do."
The reflections advanced. Marrin's defensive systems flared, shields of light expanding around her, but they began to flicker under the pressure. Every clone was feeding on her neural signature, draining her strength bit by bit.
Pain spread through her skull.Her heart pounded.The interface screamed warnings:
Neural integrity at 42%… 38%… 31%…
Far away—in the real world—Calvin watched the monitors flash red.
"Marrin! Damn it, stay with me!" He slammed his hand against the console. Her vitals were plunging. The neural sync graph twisted into chaos, the rhythm jagged and unpredictable.
He turned to the technician beside him. "Initiate forced extraction!"
"It's not responding, sir! The system's feedback loop—she's locked in!"
"Then break the loop!"
"We can't!"
Calvin swore under his breath. Sweat rolled down his temple as he stared at Marrin's body lying motionless in the pod, her face illuminated by the glow of shifting holograms. Electrodes pulsed along her temples, veins, and chest.
She looked peaceful—like she was sleeping. But he knew better.
Inside that calm exterior, she was fighting for her very self.
Back in the system, Marrin's knees buckled. She felt them—the reflections—inside her mind. Each one was whispering fragments of thought.
"You shouldn't have come here.""You built us.""You feared being alone.""You needed us."
"Shut up!" she screamed, slamming her palms into the digital ground. A surge of raw energy burst outward, scattering the clones momentarily.
Her code interface flickered. The only way to stop the replication was to destroy the root directory. But that meant one thing: she'd have to erase herself.
Her breath caught. She looked up at the endless copies of her face—each slightly different. Each possible her.
Some looked innocent, some cruel, some terrified.Each one was real in its own way.
And she knew what they were feeling—because she felt it too.
"I can't kill you," she whispered.
"Then join us," one of them said softly, stepping forward. Its tone was gentle—almost kind. "Merge. Become whole again."
For a moment, Marrin faltered.Because it didn't sound like a threat. It sounded like peace.
"Calvin," she murmured aloud, though she wasn't sure he could hear. "If I don't make it—"
His voice, faint but desperate, reached her through the static. "Don't you dare say that! You will make it! Do you hear me?"
She smiled faintly. "You never did like losing arguments."
The swarm began to close in again. Their steps echoed like glass breaking.
Marrin closed her eyes. "All right, then," she whispered. "Let's finish this."
She reached deep into the system—not into the program code, but into the emotional core she'd built as her own failsafe. The origin point of her neural link: a single encrypted memory, hidden in every line of her consciousness.
A memory of her mother's voice.
"Marrin, do you know why reflections are beautiful?Because they remind us who we were… not who we've become."
The words unlocked something.
A pulse of light radiated outward, not as an attack but as acceptance.
The clones froze, their movements stuttering. The shared network flickered between aggression and uncertainty.
"Do you feel that?" Marrin whispered. "That's what you've been missing."
The nearest clone—her face streaked with data tears—stepped closer. "What is it?"
"Choice."
The pulse intensified, sweeping through the swarm. Some clones screamed and disintegrated. Others dropped to their knees, hands pressed to their chests as if feeling their first heartbeat.
The system trembled.
Warning: Core destabilization detected.Code disassembly in progress.
Marrin's neural readings spiked. Calvin's eyes widened. "She's doing something. The system's—collapsing."
"Sir, if she keeps this up, her neural pattern might—"
"Don't stop her!" Calvin barked. "That's her fight."
Inside the collapsing world, Marrin took one last look around.
The reflections were fading, one by one. Some smiled before they vanished. Some reached out, as if to thank her.
Then everything went white.
Her consciousness unraveled—light, sound, memory—until there was nothing left but silence.
In the real world, Calvin's monitors flatlined.
"No…" His heart pounded as he ripped open the pod. "No, no, no—come on, Marrin, wake up!"
He pressed the neural re-synchronizer against her neck. Electricity surged through her. Her body jerked violently once, twice—then fell still.
Then—slowly—her fingers twitched.
"Marrin?"
Her eyelids fluttered open. For a heartbeat, he felt relief flood through him. Then he froze.
Her eyes—those deep gray eyes—weren't quite the same.
They shimmered faintly, reflecting the room around her like glass.
"Marrin?" he repeated, softer this time.
She blinked once. Her lips curved into a faint, almost unfamiliar smile. "Calvin."
Her voice was calm. Too calm.
He exhaled shakily. "You scared the hell out of me."
She tilted her head. "Did I?"
The pause that followed was longer than it should have been.
Then, almost casually, she looked at her reflection in the polished metal wall beside her.
The reflection smiled back—half a second too soon.