Chapter 5: Echoes of Earth

The sterile white walls of the Avatar Control Room on the orbital station held none of the organic warmth of the Pandoran jungle. Here, the air was cool, processed, and lifelessly clean. Dr. Elias Vance, a neuro-physicist whose face was permanently set in a look of pragmatic scepticism, stood over the still-open transfer pod. The room’s monitors glowed a cold, uniform blue, displaying static neural data and flatlining biosignals.

"Confirming status," Vance droned into his comms unit, his voice clipped.

"Pod designation 407. Subject: Dr. River Thorne. Termination confirmed. Consciousness transfer attempt: Failure."

A technician, his face pale beneath the fluorescent lights, whispered, "She never even registered a flicker in the Avatar body. The connection initiated, the power surge was nominal... and then nothing. It was like the signal hit a brick wall."

Vance ran a gloved hand over his thinning hair. This wasn't supposed to happen. The Avatar program had a low success rate for full consciousness integration, but failure usually meant the Avatar body went catatonic, or the human consciousness fractured. Complete physical termination of the human subject with zero transfer was an anomaly. It was terrifyingly definitive.

"Run the diagnostic logs from the second the neural link engaged," Vance commanded,

His scientific curiosity overrides his usual professional detachment. "There was a massive power spike, anomalous energy readings... It wasn’t a standard neural collapse. It was a rejection. Something on Pandora’s end pushed back."

Vance’s attention, however, was focused purely on the technical malfunction. He saw a glitch in the expensive machinery, a variable they hadn't accounted for in the bio-bridge equation. The concept of a consciousness being reborn—radically transformed into a mythical male Omega, dressed in ceremonial tribal attire—was a realm far outside the clean data streams of his lab. The most he could fathom was a massive energy fluctuation from the planet’s magnetic fields, corrupting the human psyche.

Down the hall, in the small, glass-walled observation lounge reserved for the science team, the news of River’s death had already spread like an ice-cold virus. A small group of young researchers, the ones who had shared synthetic protein meals and endless hours poring over bioluminescent data with River, huddled together in shock.

Among them was Kai.

Kai was a data analyst, quiet and intensely observant, with a perpetual air of reserved melancholy. He had known River since they both entered the Pandoran initiative. They had bonded over their mutual fascination with the planet, a fascination that, for River, was a desperate hope, but for Kai, was simply a job. Yet, somewhere between sharing late-night coffee and debating the optimal frequency for bio-signal transmission, Kai's professional admiration for River had curdled into something far deeper and infinitely more painful: unspoken love.

He stood near the reinforced window, his back to the others, his knuckles white as he gripped the rim of a cold metal console. Failure. The word was a razor in his chest.

"It can't be real," whispered Dr. Lena Rodriguez, tears streaming down her face.

"She was the best of us. She deserved to see the world she saved."

Another colleague, Marcus, mumbled, "They'll blame the power surge. Say it was a technical fault. It's always a technical fault."

Kai finally turned, his face devoid of tears, but etched with a rigid, contained agony that was far more disturbing than the others' open grief.

"It wasn't a fault," Kai said, his voice flat, resonating with a terrifying certainty. "It was the pod. The older model. They risked her."

He knew that wasn't the whole truth. River had insisted on the transfer, desperate for a clean break from Earth. He had begged her not to go, had almost confessed his feelings in a desperate, last-minute plea, but his courage had failed him. Now, that cowardice was a lead weight in his gut.

She's gone. The one person who saw the world the way I did, the one person who I—

He cut the thought short. He couldn't even allow himself the luxury of completing the declaration now that she was just a line of dead data in a server farm.

His grief wasn't just loss; it was a furious, frustrated anger directed inward. He felt robbed. Robbed of the chance to tell her, robbed of the chance to be near her, even if she was light-years away in a different body. Now, only the memory of her drive, her idealism, and her soft, kind eyes remained.

A new determination hardened his resolve. If the official inquest was going to dismiss her death as a simple technical failure, Kai would not. He would find the real reason. He would comb through every log, every line of telemetry, every single anomalous reading from Pod 407. He would not stop until he uncovered the true cause of the transmission rejection.

He walked away from the grieving group and headed straight for the Diagnostics Bay. The scientific world believed River Thorne had died trying to bridge the gap between two worlds. Her colleagues mourned the loss of a brilliant mind and a kind friend. Kai mourned the loss of his singular love.

And none of them—especially not Dr. Vance, who was already issuing orders to scrub the pod and prepare it for the next subject—had the faintest clue that River Thorne had indeed crossed the gap. They were looking for a technical fault when what they needed was a mythologist. They had no idea that their subject had not failed to transfer, but had simply been intercepted, rewritten, and reborn as a sacred, impossibly rare Male Omega on the very world they sought to exploit.

Kai sat down at his terminal, pulling up the enormous log files for Pod 407. He wouldn't mourn in silence anymore. He would find the truth. And if he found evidence that someone or something had caused her death, he would make them pay. He didn't know it yet, but his obsessive grief was setting him on a collision course with the very paradox that now defined River’s existence.

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