Chapter 1: The Box

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Maya’s phone buzzed at midnight. She squinted at the glowing screen, annoyed.

Kiran: I’m at the old factory near the railway tracks.

Her heart skipped a beat. The factory? Nobody went there anymore—not since the accident years ago.

She quickly typed back.

Maya: Are you insane? Alone? At this hour?

The three dots danced on her screen before his reply arrived.

Kiran: Relax. I found something.

Maya groaned, running a hand through her messy hair. Kiran’s “discoveries” usually turned out to be rusty junk or abandoned tools.

But this time his next message made her sit up straight.

Kiran: It lit up when I touched it. A hologram appeared.

Her breath caught.

Maya: A hologram?

Kiran: Yeah. Floating text in the air. It said: “ECHO Protocol Activated. 72 Hours Remaining.”

Maya felt the chill creep up her spine.

Maya: Seventy-two hours until… what?

Kiran hesitated before answering.

Kiran: That’s not the worst part. The message was signed with your name.

Maya’s fingers froze over the keyboard.

Maya: Stop joking.

Kiran: I’m not. It literally said: “Authorized User: Maya Singh.” And when I typed your name again, the box reacted.

Her pulse quickened. She wanted to deny it, to laugh it off, but Kiran’s words carried a weight she couldn’t ignore.

Another message arrived.

Kiran: The box just opened. There’s something inside. A glowing crystal.

She typed frantically.

Maya: Don’t touch it!

But his next reply made her blood run cold.

Kiran: Too late. It pulsed when I picked it up. My phone glitched. Your contact name just changed to… “Echo – Primary Host.”

Maya stared at her shaking hands. She didn’t know what this “Project ECHO” was, but one thing was certain—

It had chosen her.

The factory swallowed Kiran’s footsteps and gave them back as hollow echoes. Every sound arrived late, as if time itself was lagging. On Maya’s screen, his messages came in bursts—then a pause—then another burst, the typing dots blinking like a heartbeat that couldn’t decide on a rhythm.

Kiran: I’m here. The doors won’t open.

Maya sat up in bed, blanket sliding to her lap. “Don’t touch anything else,” she typed, then said it aloud to a room that smelled faintly of detergent and rain. Her reflection hovered in the dark window: wide eyes, hair a sleep-tangled halo, phone light cutting a wedge across her face.

His reply arrived with a photo that refused to render—only a grey box and a spinning circle.

Kiran: The crystal is glowing brighter… it feels alive.

Alive. The word lodged under Maya’s ribs. “Put it down.”

Kiran: Tried. It… stuck to my hand.

She imagined sticky resin, or industrial grease, or—she didn’t know. Static? Magnets? The words were useless against the cold pinpricks running down her arms. The typing dots trembled again.

A new line blinked onto her screen, not from Kiran but from nowhere, crisp and sterile as a hospital label:

System: Host detected. Awaiting instructions.

Maya’s mouth went dry. “No,” she whispered. The sound vanished into the room. She typed anyway: This isn’t funny.

Kiran: When I said your name out loud, it pulsed. Maya… it knows you.

Her father’s face rose uninvited—beard stubble, gentle hands, a laugh like paper pages turning. Aster Labs. White badges. Late nights. Locked desk drawers. The day he’d left had felt like a curtain pulled between rooms: she could still hear him sometimes, but only muffled.

The phone vibrated again. The timer she’d seen in Kiran’s first messages—72 Hours Remaining—jumped, as if it had skipped a step on a staircase.

System: Timer accelerating. 71:22:59.

“Accelerating?” Maya breathed. Since when did countdowns change their minds?

Another ping. The photo finally resolved—not a photo, a projection, captured poorly: light suspended in dusty air, lines and nodes floating like a constellation. A map, maybe. She couldn’t tell scale. Couldn’t tell if the bright pinpoints meant cities or rooms or cells.

Kiran: The box is projecting a map. Dots—red dots. One is moving.

Maya swallowed. Where?

There was a longer pause this time, long enough for her to hear the apartment’s small noises: the fridge humming, an upstairs neighbor’s sudden laugh, the delicate patter of rain resuming on the balcony railing. Her own breath, thin and high.

Kiran: Toward your neighborhood.

She stared at the words until they blurred. Then she pushed aside her blanket and crossed the room. Her curtains were already drawn. She checked the latch on the balcony door out of habit. Locked. She told herself not to look between the curtain edges. She looked anyway, opening a narrow seam. The garden below was a flat shadow, the street a suggestion beyond it. Nothing moved.

Her phone pulsed again, but the message belonged to her device now, not Kiran.

System: Secondary access unlocked.

“What does that mean?” she muttered. The phrase felt like fitting into a seat she hadn’t known was reserved for her.

Kiran answered as if he’d heard her.

Kiran: It’s linking to you. Try a command—tell it to show target details.

Maya’s throat worked. The room suddenly felt too full, too close. “Show target details,” she said, more to humor him than to obey a line of text. Her phone didn’t hesitate.

System: Vector 3. ETA 00:07:15. Objective: Acquire Host.

Host. The word slid through her like ice water. Seven minutes. The number shrank as she stared. 7:15 became 7:12, 7:09, a drip, drip, drip she could almost hear.

She locked the front door again, then the inner bolt, then the chain, though she had already locked them earlier without thinking. She stood with her ear pressed to wood, listening for footsteps in the corridor. The building settled. A scooter buzzed far away, dopplered and gone.

Her phone chimed softly, a different tone. She looked down.

Kiran: Your dad—Aster Labs—did he ever mention ECHO? Anything? Files?

Maya pressed her palm to her forehead, pushing memory as if it were a bruise she could coax to reveal more pain. “He didn’t talk about work,” she typed. “He said it was temporary. Then he was… transferred.”

Kiran: Transferred?

“That’s what Mom said,” she typed, then deleted, then typed again. It felt flimsy now. Aster Labs had folded two years after, swallowed by something else, some merger that wasn’t a merger.

The timer on her screen coughed up seconds. 6:31. 6:30.

Kiran sent another photo, clearer this time: the projection filling a wall, red points blinking like irritated eyes. A label hovered over one: VECTOR 3. The moving dot crept along a gridline, then paused. Another microjump. Closer.

Maya stepped back from the door. Her legs didn’t feel like her own, like she’d borrowed them from a mannequin and hadn’t quite clipped them in correctly. She moved to the window again, resisting and failing. The seam in the curtains glowed faintly; a streetlight must have come on. She pinched it wider.

“Stop it,” she told herself. “Don’t look.”

She looked.

Rain stitched the air. The balcony rail shone with beads. A delivery boy pedaled past in a bright poncho, sodden and determined. A dog shook itself under a bougainvillea. Nothing that belonged to the word Vector.

Kiran: Maya…

The three dots pulsed. Then stopped. Then pulsed again.

Kiran: The label says “Acquire Host.”

Her stomach tipped. She went to her father’s desk—hers now, really, after years of dust and then, finally, dusted. Bare surface, a lamp, an old drawer that slid with a resisting squeal. Inside: a lanyard, sky-blue plastic gone cloudy with time. ASTER LABS – CLEARANCE E7. She pressed it like a talisman. It didn’t warm. It didn’t do anything.

Her phone lit her palm. A new line etched itself across the lock screen without a notification chime, as if it had always been there and she’d simply failed to notice until now.

System: Voice verification available. Host: Maya Singh. Command?

She almost threw the phone. Instead she sat, very carefully, as if any sudden movement might shatter the thin glass wall between normal and whatever waited on the other side.

“Cancel,” she said. “Cancel link. Cancel sync. Cancel everything.”

System: Error. Override in progress.

Of course it was.

“Maya?” Kiran wrote. Then, more urgent: Do you hear anything outside?

She held her breath. The apartment answered with silence, but the silence had weight now. She imagined the weight creeping through hallways, pooling at corners, slipping under doors. Her building’s outside camera was viewable from an app; she opened it with fingers that didn’t want to obey. The feed loaded and showed her a tilted view of the lobby: the parcel table, a patterned rug, the glass door sweating rain. Empty.

A flicker. The feed blinked to static for a heartbeat, then returned. Still empty.

Five minutes, the timer said. 4:59. 4:58.

“Show all targets,” she tried, because if the universe was going to ignore rules, she could, too.

A new map unfurled across her phone, more complex this time. Dozens of dots, most steady, some moving in fat, slow arcs. Her city was a nest of red pulses. The labels made no immediate sense: Vector 1, Vector 2, Vector 3… Far outside the city, a single blue point blinked with a label she had to squint to read. PRIMARY HOST: UNAVAILABLE.

Her breath snagged. “Dad?” she whispered to nobody. The word didn’t fit the room. It bounced and fell.

Kiran: I’m trying to override from here. It wants a Primary Host key.

She looked at the badge again. E7 sat there, bland and confident. She entered it into the voice prompt on instinct, then winced at herself, because who speaks numbers to a ghost in a phone?

System: Unauthorized attempt detected. Secondary Host compromised.

Maya fumbled the badge and it clacked against the desk. “Compromised how?” she demanded, because anger could be a rope thrown across a chasm, if you gripped it hard enough.

No answer. The timer sluiced down. 3:12. 3:11.

The refrigerator clicked off. In the sudden hush, something tapped the balcony railing. Rain? A twig? The tap came again, not quite rhythmic, more exploratory, like fingertips finding glass. Maya didn’t move. The curtain seam widened on its own; a draft? No—the air was still.

Her phone buzzed once more, not a message but a system change she felt more than saw, a shift in pressure. The outside camera feed went black, not static, not frozen—absent. The watchful eye had closed.

Kiran: Maya… someone’s outside your window.

She didn’t ask how he knew. The hairs on her arms were already answering. The tap sounded again, closer now, on the pane itself, a careful test. Maya’s reflection stared back at her from the thin slice of glass, eyes huge, breath fogging the seam. Behind the reflection, a darker shape gathered—too still for rain, too high for a dog, too patient for a person who’d taken a wrong turn in the storm.

She stepped back, heart climbing her throat, and the apartment, which had always been a place for mugs and books and small, ordinary rituals, felt suddenly like a box with a lid she could not lift.

The timer slid to 2:00, and in the red wash of numbers, she saw a silhouette turn toward her.

That it for now.

Bye guys

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