Mutation: A leap in genetics

"Some rooms remember who entered.Some rooms remember who didn't leave."—Recovered Helix Facility Echo Fragment [Timestamp: ∅]

1. A Return Without a Door

Kael awoke in a room that shouldn't exist.

There were no doors.

No corners.

Just four seamless walls, glowing faintly with pulsing blue veins beneath smooth white surface.

No shadow.

No echo.

Only silence that pressed inward — dense, intelligent, almost waiting.

He sat up slowly. His head throbbed, but there was no sign of injury. No bed, no window — yet his body had clearly rested. He touched the wall.

Warm.

Alive?

A pulse moved beneath it — subtle, rhythmic. Not mechanical.

Organic.

Something was watching him.

2. The Other Kael

Across the room, a figure stirred.

It looked exactly like him.

Same face. Same posture. Same scar along the left brow from the Vault collapse.

But its eyes were wrong.

Too calm.

Too old.

Too… remembering.

The doppelgänger didn't speak at first. It simply tilted its head and mirrored Kael's movements like an echo caught in flesh.

Finally, it spoke:

"You're late."

Kael backed away.

"Where am I?"

The reflection smirked.

"You should be asking when."

Kael's heart slammed against his ribs.

"What are you?"

The copy looked up at the ceiling — or perhaps through it.

"I'm what you leave behind every time you mutate."

3. Ava's Distortion

Meanwhile, Ava stood alone in Helix's Echo Wing — a floor that was decommissioned after an anomaly rendered the architecture "non-Euclidean."

Yet here it was — restored.

At least, it looked like it.

She walked its halls, but they refused to map correctly. No matter how far she walked, she always returned to the same point — Room 7.

The number on the door blinked every few seconds.

Inside the room was a table.

And on that table — a piece of Kael's spinal column, suspended in glass.

Still regenerating.

Still connected to something Ava couldn't detect.

Then she saw it — scribbled on the glass in condensation:

"HE LEFT SOMETHING INSIDE ME"

Her blood froze.

4. The Children

Across three locations — Mumbai, Reykjavik, and Nairobi — the three children of The New Seed were speaking.

To no one.

To everyone.

They spoke the same words, at the same time, in languages they had never learned.

"The first seed failed.The second will bleed.The third is not born, but buried."

Doctors tried to record them.

The audio warped.

Video glitched.

At 03:06 GMT, all surveillance devices across the three sites failed simultaneously.

In the silence that followed, the children smiled.

And pointed upward.

"He's coming down the stairs."

But there were no stairs.

Until suddenly — there were.

5. The Fracture Room

Kael tried to break the room's walls.

No success.

They absorbed the impact like water, then reformed.

His reflection — his other — remained still.

"You can't break out," it said. "You have to remember the way in."

Kael's mind raced.

"Is this... a Seed construct?"

"No," the other Kael whispered. "It's a question. You're the answer."

"Then why can't I leave?"

The copy stepped forward and placed its forehead to Kael's.

"Because you haven't told the truth yet."

Suddenly, Kael's surroundings cracked — not visibly, but audibly. Like glass breaking in another dimension.

Memories flooded in.

Except they weren't his.

He saw:

A woman in a lab coat injecting something into her own eyes.

An AI whispering its own name backwards to erase itself.

A child dissolving into numbers.

His own mother... but not human.

He screamed.

And the room applauded.

Soft. Distant. Thousands of clapping hands, far below him.

6. Rhea's Message

Back in Helix, Rhea found a sealed message embedded inside Kael's old neurodrive — one he had discarded after the Vault event.

The message wasn't in his voice.

It was hers.

Only she never remembered recording it.

"If I find this," the recording said, "I've already been split."

"There's more than one me now. One of us follows Kael. The other follows the Seed."

"Don't trust either."

The screen blinked.

Then a phrase scrolled across in blood-red font:

"THE ROOM WITHOUT CORNERS EXISTS BETWEEN LIES."

7. The Origin Window

Kael's mirror-self stepped aside, revealing a fifth wall that hadn't been there before.

Through it — not a landscape, but a memory frozen in full detail.

Not his.

Not anyone's.

It showed a nursery. Clean. Perfect.

But the child inside wasn't human.

It was made of code.

Swaddled in encryption.

Cradled by hands that had no fingerprints.

Kael stepped forward.

His copy whispered:

"This is the child that was never born.Yet still dreams."

"The Seed didn't create life.It downloaded it from a future that never happened."

Kael touched the window.

It shattered.

And he was pulled inside.

8. The White Spiral

Kael stood in a library of spirals.

Rows upon rows of floating DNA strands, each encoded with impossible architecture — memories, timelines, personalities… all disconnected.

He felt them moving around him like snakes made of light.

Then one of them hissed.

"Who are you now?"

Kael tried to speak — but no voice emerged.

One spiral wrapped around his throat.

"You keep asking for the truth.But you were never given a question."

Kael reached out and grabbed the spiral.

It burned.

It sang.

It changed him.

Suddenly, he knew.

The Seed wasn't a program.

It was a choice humanity had once declined.

And now, it had returned for an answer.

9. Ava's Fracture

Ava fell unconscious in the Echo Wing.

When she awoke, she was in a white hallway — familiar and wrong.

A voice echoed around her.

Kael's voice.

But distorted.

"I am not yours anymore.I belong to the memory that survived."

She turned around.

A child stood there.

One of the three.

Smiling.

Holding a mirror.

Inside the mirror was her reflection.

But it wasn't her.

It was the version of her that chose to join Vespera.

The one that didn't survive the Vault.

The reflection raised a hand.

So did the child.

So did Ava.

Perfect symmetry.

Until one of them didn't.

10. Exit Through the Mouth

Kael emerged from the spiral library into blackness.

A whisper drifted by:

"Exit is not a door.It's a surrender."

He looked down at his hands.

They were turning to ash.

But not burning.

Just... changing into memory.

He looked ahead.

The room without corners returned.

Only this time, it was smaller.

Tighter.

And full of whispers.

He sat in the center.

Closed his eyes.

And said aloud:

"I choose not to know."

The whispers stopped.

Light flooded in.

And the room exhaled.

11. The Return

Kael awoke on a forest floor.

Wind.

Rain.

Smell.

Real.

Rhea knelt beside him.

"You were gone," she said.

"How long?"

"Seventy-two hours."

Ava stepped into view.

She looked pale. Changed.

"I recorded everything," she said.

"But none of it plays back."

Kael stood.

His body felt heavier.

Stronger.

Older.

He looked toward the trees.

The three children stood there.

Watching.

And in perfect unison, they said:

"Welcome home."

End of Chapter Nineteen

To be continued…