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หน้าหลัก / Sci-Fi / Twisted Vines / Part Two - Chapter Eighteen

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Part Two - Chapter Eighteen

ผู้เขียน: Sophia Merrit
last update ปรับปรุงล่าสุด: 2025-10-28 00:57:04

He began by bringing her music.

Officially, it was a matter of data. A controlled variable. He wrote that the intricate structures of classical compositions might stabilize the fluctuations in her limbic system—the circuitry governing memory, emotion, and empathy. It was a sound theory, one his colleagues would nod at and quietly forget.

But even as he typed the justification, he could feel the lie breathing beneath the words.

He had spent nearly an hour in front of the speakers that first night, torn between two titans: Brahms, orderly and resolute, or Debussy, elusive and full of light. Logic urged Brahms. Yet something in Debussy’s melancholy lingered in his chest, like an ache he couldn’t name. When he finally selected Clair de Lune, it wasn’t reason guiding him—it was longing.

The first notes unfurled into the lab’s sterile air.

Monitors hummed softly. Her vitals fluttered, then settled into a rhythm that echoed the cadence of the piano. A faint twitch in her fingertips. A subtle
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  • Twisted Vines   Epilogue

    The rain has a different sound now.It used to be clean, disciplined — the kind of artificial weather that hummed evenly against steel and glass. But here, on the surface, it arrives in wild sheets. It drags the scent of soil and rust through the broken corridors of the old world, seeping into every fracture of the earth. Justin listens to it the way a man listens for a heartbeat he isn’t sure is still there.He tells himself he’s only surveying the ruins. The Foundation sent him to assess the damage, to gather what could be salvaged. He repeats this every morning, the words a mantra that dulls the throb behind his temples. But he knows he’s lying. He’s been lying since the day the facility fell.He isn’t here for data. He’s here for her. The vial.The compound is gone. What remains of it lies crumpled beneath layers of ash and twisted metal, a skeleton of glass that catches light and throws it back in fractured rainbows. He moves through it slowly, boots sinking into the wet earth. E

  • Twisted Vines   Part Two - Chapter Twenty Three

    After Eira's death, Project E-Series had fractured. Eira's consciousness—her neural imprint, the emotional core Justin had tried to excise—kept slipping into the new vessels. Every time, they woke up not as blank slates but as echoes. Fractured. Crying. Remembering things no memory trace should hold.One had whispered his name. Another had tried to crawl out of its pod before the lungs were even formed.But it wasn't until they used only the original DNA that it spiraled.He hadn't meant to.That's what he told himself.But the data from her tissues was too clean. Too alive. Her cells resisted degradation. Her cortex, even harvested postmortem, sparked with residual charge when placed near synthetic stem lattices."Full-body repurposing may be viable," the tech had said, eyes wide with greed. "We could build directly from her. Stabilize everything."Justin didn't answer.He just signed the order.The clones made from her biomass were unstable. Too emotional, too reactive. Every model

  • Twisted Vines   Part Two - Chapter Twenty Two

    They called it a neural harmonization trial. A fancy name for reanimation with restraints. They fed her core into the containment tank, wrapped her muscle structures in regrown tissue, and flooded the system with consciousness-binding gel.It was supposed to stay quiet.But nothing about Eira had ever stayed quiet.The room cracked open with screaming.Not vocal. Not human. A psychic shriek that vibrated through every monitor, set off every alert, made the air itself convulse. The vines burst from the pod like blood sprayed under pressure—glass shattered, lights flickered out, alarms howled.Security teams ran. One man's eyes were torn out by tendrils before he hit the ground.Justin watched from the upper deck with a stony face.She was standing inside it—or something wearing her face—glowing with impossible, green-white energy. The vines lashed not as weapons but as grief. As rage. As memory incarnate.And when she looked at him—Not the thing. Her.When she looked at him, Justin st

  • Twisted Vines   Part Two - Chapter Twenty One

    "They're taking it all away. You said they'd never touch this place. You said it was untouchable.""I was wrong."Her shoulders dropped.He stepped closer. Dropped to his knees beside her."They want control," he said. "They want security. A weapon that can clean up its own mess.""I'm not a weapon.""You're hope," he said."No," she said. "You used to call me hope. Now I'm just your leverage."He gritted his teeth. "If I give them a version of you—controlled, managed, sterilized—they'll let you live.""At what cost?"He hesitated."I'll make you a myth. The original. Untouched. One of a kind. I'll bury your real data, mask your prints, alter the logs. They'll think you were a concept that failed. You'll disappear. I'll protect you. That I swear."Eira was shaking her head before he even finished."I don't want to be safe," she whispered. "I want to be free.""Then you'll die.""I'd rather die than be the reason they make more like me."His chest ached."Please," he said."Please, wha

  • Twisted Vines   Part Two - Chapter Twenty

    The boardroom lights were too bright.They always were. Not just in wattage, but in tone—cold white, just clinical enough to make sweat seem like weakness and blinking feel like guilt.Justin didn't blink.He stood at the head of the projection table, palms flat against the glass, shoulders squared. His tie was slightly crooked. He hadn't slept in two days."—and so," he finished, voice cutting cleanly through the static silence, "we propose dual-purpose applications. Controlled adaptive creation: capable of both defense and environmental repair. Combat efficiency and bio-restoration. A self-regulating organism that heals what it breaks."No one spoke.The investors sat in their suits like they'd grown into them—aging ex-military types, corporate ghosts in flesh-colored skin. Not a scientist among them.He hated this part, but he also needed it.He tapped a command into the interface, and Eira's data came up. Not her, not her face—he'd scrubbed the visual files from this version of th

  • Twisted Vines   Part Two - Chapter Nineteen

    She found solace in the rain, Justin had noted.There was something sacred in the rhythm, the way the droplets scattered light and sound, weaving their own quiet symphony. She said it calmed her—the noise of it, the texture against her skin. It was an odd request, one that no subject before her had made.They lived miles underground, entombed beneath the weight of ancient stone and reinforced steel. The notion of weather—real or simulated—was forbidden by regulation. The governing boards had deemed it unnecessary, even counterproductive, to the controlled environment they required.But he built it anyway.It took months of quiet defiance, of requisitions disguised as maintenance projects and falsified environmental reports. When the dome was complete, it rose above the lab like a transparent cathedral. The first time the rain fell, it was hesitant—thin threads of water cascading down the curved glass, whispering across the metal floor. She had stepped into it as if crossing into a dre

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