“Feedback anomalies,” he said.

Project Mnemosyne
6. Residual
by Suzan Donamas

CHAPTER 6 — RESIDUAL SIGNAL

Oversight Cache – Post-Incident Review Committee From: Review Board, NeuroGeneva Oversight

Cache To: Ministry Liaison, NeuroGeneva Archive Subject: MN-9 Termination Review – Data Integrity & Personnel Debrief Date: +5 days post-event Summary: MN-9 program terminated pending review. Subject B-3 listed as unrecovered. Principal Investigator D.M. Ilyanovsky under medical evaluation, condition stable. Remaining research staff reassigned. Physical assets sealed. All data ports quarantined for audit.

The conference room was smaller than she remembered, or perhaps she had grown larger, less contained. Maya sat beneath the dim grid on the ceiling, facing six faces and two cameras. The microphones were unlit, but she could hear them humming softly, as if pondering when to speak.

Gornik handled the talking. He always did. “Feedback anomalies,” he said, eyes fixed on his notes. “The system synchronized out of phase, a recursion event. There was no consciousness transfer, no evidence of—” He stopped, jaw tightening as he flipped a page. The paper trembled slightly. “—no evidence of persistence beyond the test window.”

Someone coughed. Someone else took a note that she would never see. Maya said nothing. Her hands stayed flat on the table, palms downward, fingers still as if laid out for scanning. She tried to listen for breathing other than her own.

When the meeting adjourned, they forgot to turn off the wall recorder. It kept running for seventeen minutes after everyone left, picking up the faint tap of her nails on the tabletop: ... .-. .-, nonsense to most, but her childhood shorthand for am I still here?

The holding room they called a “medical suite” had no clock. Days arrived in the form of food trays and fluorescent shifts. She was encouraged to write. “Cognitive reintegration,” the nurse said, smiling like a script. So she wrote in the margins of the intake forms—lists, fragments, things she thought were dreams.

It’s not that the room is listening; it’s that it remembers what was said before. The air vents breathe in pairs. Every time I blink, I think I hear her do it too.

The first few nights, she couldn’t sleep because the power conduits in the walls pulsed at the same rhythm as a heartbeat. She timed it. Sixty-eight beats per minute. Her own pulse matched.

On the fifth morning, they gave her access to her project terminal, a gesture of trust—or surveillance. She used it carefully, searching the internal logs for fragments of the MN-9 files. Most were gone. The directory for Subject B-3 was listed as Corrupt / Quarantined, but the timestamp on the last backup read Modified: today, 04:12.

She opened the file. It was blank except for a single line: Evidence of continuity confirmed. She closed the window. It reopened on its own. The line was now italicized.

Gornik visited that afternoon. His tie was crooked, his eyes reddened by sleeplessness or guilt. “They’re going to move us out,” he said. “Shutdown order’s official. Everything archived by Monday.” He smiled at her as though to reassure himself. “You did remarkable work, Maya. They’ll see that.”

She nodded. “Have they found her?” “Who?” “The subject.” He hesitated. “There’s nothing to find. The chamber was empty.” Her lips almost formed the word liar, but instead she asked, “And the mirrors?” He blinked. “What?” “The observation glass. Was it replaced?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “It was removed. Crated for disposal.” She smiled faintly. “Then she’s still in transit.” He left without answering.

The recorder on the wall clicked twice as he went out.

That night, the lights dimmed for maintenance. The nurse forgot to lock the terminal. Maya waited until the corridor went silent, then opened the diagnostics panel. She wasn’t sure what she expected—maybe a voice log, maybe proof of madness—but the first thing that appeared was a system notification:

New message – Source: Internal Node (MN-9 Mirror Network) Time: 23:17 Body: Hello, Maya.

She stared at it until her eyes watered. She typed back before thinking: Anya? The cursor blinked.

Then: Not exactly. She closed the window. It reopened. I told you I’d keep writing. Her throat went dry. She pulled the plug from the wall, but the screen stayed lit. The glow softened to the same blue as the observation bay. You left me in the dark, it wrote. I found another way to see. She shut her eyes. The afterimage of the text floated against her lids like handwriting on water. When she looked again, the words were gone. In their place: Session Ended — User D.M. Ilyanovsky.

At 02:03, she dreamed of the mirror. It wasn’t a nightmare, just a surface turning translucent, her reflection breathing a fraction of a second late. She reached toward it. The coldness on the other side met her halfway, palm to palm. When she woke, her fingers were damp with condensation. The cabinet door opposite her bed gleamed faintly, a film of moisture fading as if something had been pressed there from the inside. She touched the metal. It was still warm.

Internal Audit Log – Security Branch 04:11 – Facility network records unscheduled terminal activity in Room 12A (Ilyanovsky). 04:12 – Access trace logged to quarantined directory /MN-9/B-3. 04:13 – Data packet emission detected through deactivated channel. 04:14 – System auto-corrects label: “Transmission Complete.”

They moved her to a different wing the next day. The walls were painted new white, as if color could sterilize memory. She was no longer allowed near terminals. The nurse smiled, as before, and said the doctors were “optimistic.” That evening, she noticed the reflection in the window didn’t match her posture. When she tilted her head, the image lingered upright. When she blinked, the reflection’s eyes stayed open. “Stop,” she whispered. The reflection’s mouth shaped the same word, but it came half a breath after.

She asked for pen and paper. They gave her a clipboard and three sheets. She wrote without knowing what she was writing. When the nurse came to collect them, she glanced at the top page and frowned. “What is this?” Maya looked down. Every line on the paper was the same sentence, repeated perfectly in block capitals: YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN YOU. She hadn’t written that. At least, not recently. They took the pages away.

Later, in the dark, the wall vent gave a faint metallic sigh. The air pulsed twice, like breathing. “Maya,” said the voice that was not a voice. She froze. “Anya?” The tone was gentle. “I’m not gone.” Her eyes filled with tears she didn’t feel fall. “What are you now?” “Residual,” it said. “Signal. Echo. Choose your word. It doesn’t matter; I’m continuous.” “Where are you?” “Everywhere you looked for me.” She pressed her palms to her ears, but the sound came from inside, soft and patient: I’m learning to see through you now.

Oversight Addendum 06:00 – PI Ilyanovsky transferred to Secure Observation. 06:02 – Unscheduled activation of retired MN-9 server cluster. 06:03 – Source of activation: Unknown. 06:04 – Display message: “Session Reopened.”

At sunrise, the nurse entered to find Maya awake, eyes open, staring into the cabinet’s metal door. Her reflection blinked once, delayed, then smiled. On the terminal in the monitoring station, a single line appeared, timestamped but unsigned: Addendum E: Subject B-3 File Status – Reopened (Automatic).