Previous chapter: Infiltration of Soma's Secondary Healthcare Facility in Sector Three revealed the horrifying truth that lower-class children had been scanned and tagged from an early age, including Mira Vance's physical file, labeled *High Resonance Capacity Subject*.
The antiseptic smell in the old archive room felt increasingly suffocating. The brown folder in Aira's hands trembled faintly, reflecting a dull blue glow from her neck onto the photo of little Mira's face.
“Kaelen...” Mara whispered from the main console, her fingers freezing above the terminal screen. “I've secured today's scanning logs. But... this terminal's circuitry suddenly experienced a power surge. Hidden data was injected from the files you're holding.”
Before Kaelen could respond, Aira touched the corner of the physical folder. Embedded there was an invisible old-generation micro-memory chip—hidden inside the fold of the paper.
*BZZZZZT!*
The organic connections in Aira's fingers reflexively drew power from the memory chip. In an instant, every light in the archive room went out, replaced by a pale blue holographic glow radiating directly from Aira's eyes.
A three-dimensional projection blossomed in the dim room.
The hologram displayed the main research laboratory of Soma Corp ten years earlier. Its walls were made of sterile glass shining brilliantly. In the center of the room stood a steel-plated extraction chamber, upright and fed by bubbling liquid coolant made from liquid nitrogen.
Inside the chamber, the figure of seven-year-old Mira floated slowly.
*“Dad...”* Little Mira's holographic voice rang out, trembling and crystal clear, breaking the silence of the room. *“It's so cold... You promised you'd come before they turned off the lights, right?”*
Kaelen froze where he stood. The pistol in his right hand slipped free and struck the concrete floor with a sharp metallic clang. His dead left hand hung stiffly at his side, while his chest heaved with held-back breaths.
“Mira...” Kaelen called, his voice hoarse, shattered by the guilt that had tormented him for the past seven years.
He stepped forward, reaching out with his right hand to touch the shadowy figure of his daughter floating in the air. But his fingers passed only through empty particles of cold light.
*“I drew birds on the closet door, Dad...”* Mira's recording continued in a heart-wrenching child's voice. *“The people in white coats said... if I went to sleep for a little while, you could buy a new arm that wouldn't hurt anymore...”*
Kaelen squeezed his eyes shut. Tears traced paths down his rough, scarred cheeks. Mira's sacrifice—the little girl willing to undergo that cruel experiment to heal her father's injury—shattered the last remnants of the former investigator's emotional resilience.
But the moment of emotional warmth was abruptly destroyed.
*KLIK.*
The hologram's visual display distorted violently. The soft blue turned blazing red. Mira's gentle voice was replaced by the sharp hiss of medical instruments and the thunderous pounding of a gigantic power-draining machine.
The projection showed Mira's brainwave patterns being forcibly extracted. Her neural signal lines were severed one by one, compressed, and transferred into a digital imprint container. Red technical text flooded the air around the hologram:
**CORE EXTRACTION PROCEDURE: 78% COMPLETE.** **PSYCHOMOTOR STRUCTURAL DISRUPTION DETECTED.** **ACTION: DELETE SOURCE IDENTITY. PRESERVE ELYSIUM RESONANCE PATTERN.**
Little Mira's body arched in agony inside the chamber's fluid before the projection exploded into pixel fragments that went completely dark.
The archive room sank into total darkness again. Only the red glow of the emergency lights illuminated Kaelen's deathly pale face and Aira's hand, still trembling in the air.
Kaelen's breathing came in ragged gasps. His knees gave out, forcing him down onto the cold floor, where he stared at the concrete where the projection had just vanished.
“They... they didn't just take her,” Kaelen whispered, his voice filled with anger so cold it seemed to freeze the air. “They dismantled her soul... piece by piece... right in front of my eyes.”
Aira stepped closer to Kaelen, staring at the broken man before her. The lines on Aira's neck trembled, emitting brief, uncontrolled currents of data in the wake of the memory surge her organic systems had just processed.
“Kaelen...” Aira called softly, her voice filled with profound emotional confusion. “Inside my chest... this pain you're feeling... I feel it too.”
Kaelen slowly looked up. His reddened eyes fixed on Aira's face—the face made too perfect, the face that held the imprint of his daughter's suffering.
What showed in Kaelen's eyes now wasn't pity, but a storm of chaos and trauma that could no longer be contained.
“You...” Kaelen whispered, his voice trembling with grief transformed into accusation. “You carry the final moments of my child's death inside your body.”