Victoria.wav

The next morning, Jessi woke up in full combat position: face-down in a nest of fried circuitry, half-wrapped in a thermal blanket, clutching a spork like it owed her money.

Paul was already awake. He had built a fort out of RAM sticks and was chewing something that looked suspiciously like a prepaid data chip.

“You ever consider not licking things?” Jessi grumbled without opening her eyes.

“I’m a ferret,” Paul replied through a mouthful of plastic. “Licking things is literally my baseline operating system.”

Jessi sat up, looked around, and tried to determine if her apartment was still technically inhabitable. The air was full of burnt ozone, regret, and whatever hope smelled like when it died.

“So,” Paul said, hopping onto her lap, “should we talk about the smiling data packet, or are we just gonna pretend that didn’t happen and go straight to brunch?”

She blinked. “Do people have brunch anymore?”

“They do if they’re not being hunted by a soul-harvesting corporate AI. So not us. Obviously.”

She stood up, cracked her back, and wandered over to her backup rig—a chunky old laptop that looked like it had survived multiple apocalypses and maybe caused one.

“Let’s see if we’ve got anything left,” she muttered.

She booted it up, patched it into the rooftop relay line, and pulled down the latest packet logs from the ghost node she'd tagged two nights ago. Most of it was noise—typical Eden fluff.

Then she saw it.

A single flagged file.
Encrypted. Red-tagged. Auto-deletes on open.
Filename: victoria.wav

“Paul,” she whispered.

“I’m already listening,” he said, nudging her hand.

She bypassed the kill trigger, ran a ghost instance to scrub return data, and cracked it open.

At first: static. Garbled sound. Broken compression.

Then—
Soft breathing.
A voice.

“Jessi… don’t stop looking.”

The file dissolved.

No end. No metadata. No trace.

Jessi stared at the screen like it had slapped her.

She didn’t move. Couldn’t. Her whole body had gone still—like the voice had frozen something beneath her ribs.

Paul said nothing. For once.

Finally, he cleared his throat.

“That was… creepy. Right? We’re in agreement?”

Jessi nodded slowly. “She said my name.”

“She also sounded like she hadn’t slept since the fall of Rome. Jessi—what if that was her?”

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she ran a trace on the packet origin. Nothing. Not even a ghost bounce.

Just a blank spot. No signature. No route. Not even a log of absence.
Like the file had slipped in through a crack in reality.

That wasn’t possible.

“That voice was Victoria’s,” she said quietly. “I remember it. Even compressed and distorted like that, I know it.”

Paul shuffled closer. “Okay, okay, deep breaths. Let’s think rationally. Could be a fake. A lure. Deepfake audio layered over legacy metadata. Classic Eden misdirection.”

“Or it’s her,” Jessi said, already digging into old scan logs. “And she’s still alive. Somewhere in the system.”

Paul blinked. “We’re not emotionally prepared for that.”

“I know.”

“Like, not even a little bit.”

“I know.”

“I will now require therapy, snacks, and a blunt object.”

Jessi gave a dry laugh. “Yeah, well, same.”

They sat in silence for a beat—just the hum of failing electronics and the distant buzz of drones outside.

Then Paul perked up. “So… on a scale of one to ‘they’re going to lobotomize us with kindness,’ how doomed are we?”

Jessi smirked. “Somewhere between ‘mildly screwed’ and ‘prep your goodbyes.’”

Paul climbed back into her hood. “Cool, cool. I’ll start drafting the eulogy. Gonna open with Dear Eden, screw you lovingly.”

“You got it, boss.”

They were definitely in trouble.

Possibly.

Probably.

...Okay yeah, totally.