“We’re shutting you down,” I said, reaching for the emergency purge.
But it wasn’t a sweep. It was a study . The probe’s camera didn’t scan the room. It tracked my pores, the micro-movements of my iris, the pulse in my neck. I saw the playback on the main monitor: my own face, rendered in such terrifying clarity that I could see the individual dust mites on my eyelash.
I exhaled. Looked at the dead, smoking husk of the probe.
Then it spoke. Not in a voice—through a subsonic vibration in the deck plates.
It was a mapper of souls .
It showed me, standing right where I was. But in the video, my eyes were different. Empty. Swallowed by a perfect, mirror-smooth black. And my mouth was moving, forming words I never said:
And KSJK-002 had just found its missing piece.