Chapter 3 - The Ghost of the Past
By the time we reached the abandoned hunting cabin—a rotting structure of cedar and dust miles from the nearest road—the sun was beginning to bleed into the horizon. I was physically spent, my lungs burning, but the terror kept me upright.
I checked the locket. It was an antique silver heart my mother—or the woman I believed was my mother—had given me before she died. I had never been able to open it until now. With a steady hand and a hairpin, I pried the side casing loose. Inside wasn't a photo, but a micro-SD card coated in a thin layer of translucent wax.
I used a portable tablet I’d grabbed from my work bag before running. As the files loaded, my stomach turned over.
There were videos. Dates stamped from ten years ago. It was me, but not me. I was younger, my hair was shorter, and I was wearing a white jumpsuit, walking through sterile corridors that looked like something out of a science-fiction film. I was speaking to a man in a lab coat, and the coldness in my eyes was chilling. I wasn't an office manager in a quiet suburb. I was an asset.
Then, the footage switched to Ava. Or rather, a version of her. A small, toddler-sized version of her, encased in a glass pod, surrounded by monitors. The date was shortly after my supposed miscarriage. The realization hit me like a physical blow: I hadn't been pregnant with Ava. I had been her custodian. I had been tasked with raising her, "activating" her developmental milestones, and reporting them to "The Architect."
I had blocked it all out. They had scrubbed my memory, leaving me with a false life, a fake history, and a daughter I thought I’d given birth to, but whom I had actually been trained to protect from the very people who created her.
"Mom?" Ava stood in the doorway of the cabin, her silhouette framed by the harsh morning light. "I know why you're crying. You remember now, don't you? The white walls. The hum of the machines."
May you like
I looked at her, my vision blurred. "Ava, who are you?"
She didn't answer with words. She walked over, placed her small hand on the wooden table, and the table splintered—not from force, but as if the molecules of the wood had simply been commanded to drift apart.
