The Echo Collector

The first time Iris Vance heard her sister's voice again, it came from a shard of glass no bigger than her thumb.

It crackled to life as she brushed the dust from the old echo sculpture tucked behind rusted file drawers in a condemned data vault downtown. The sound was faint like something half-remembered underwater. But she knew that laugh.

“Evie?” she whispered.

A tiny burst of warmth spread from her chest to her fingertips. She hadn’t heard her sister's voice in over fifteen years—not since the fire. Not since the building collapsed with Evie still inside.

Iris fell to her knees, breath hitching, the glass shard trembling in her hand. Emotional echoes weren’t supposed to last that long. Not unless the memory had been sealed in something real—flesh, bone, blood. Or worse, dream-forged.

That night, back in her cluttered apartment above the shuttered theatre, Iris amplified the fragment and ran spectral diagnostics. Static, warble, then—clearer than anything in years—Evie’s laugh.

Iris remembered how they used to do this when they were kids. Trade voices back and forth on old tape recorders. Whisper secrets through walls. They had shared everything—dreams, thoughts, the strange language only twins understood. And when Evie died, it was as if half of Iris had been ripped out, her echo silenced.

Until now.

She traced the signal back to a seller deep in the EchoNet underworld, a person known as Mirage. They were infamous for one thing: synthetic echoes—illegal constructs built from desire, not memory. Everyone knew they were dangerous. Exposure to even one could destabilize your real memories. But Iris didn’t care.

She found Mirage in a derelict warehouse on the edge of the city, where the drones no longer flew, and the power grid crackled unreliably. Inside, the walls were lined with suspended echo filaments, glowing faintly like jellyfish trapped in glass.

Mirage stood in the center, their face masked by a shifting interface—pixels in constant flux, displaying fragments of others’ expressions. Male, female, old, young. Impossible to pin down.

“I’m not looking for closure,” Iris said, her voice echoing in the vast space. “I want to hear her. Speak to her. Just once.”

Mirage tilted their head. “You found the shard. You heard the voice. That wasn’t enough?”

“You’re lucky you remembered how to leave,” Mirage replied, walking toward a table covered in thin, glimmering discs. “Most don’t. They get...comfortable in the dream state. And then they don’t come back.”

“I’m not interested in dreams.”

Mirage laughed, low and strange. “You think you’re chasing truth, but you’re chasing a feeling. There's a difference.”

Iris clenched her jaw. “Where did the echo come from? Was it fabricated?”

Mirage paused. “No. That’s what’s interesting. It’s not synthetic. It came from you.”

“Impossible,” Iris said. “That moment never happened. I never heard her voice after she died.”

“You did,” Mirage said. “Not in waking life—but in sleep. Fifteen years ago, you signed up for a dream reconstruction trial. Project Orpheus. You volunteered after the fire, desperate to keep any part of her alive. They used REM-mapping tech to capture fragments—bits of her voice embedded in your subconscious. The cadence, the laugh, even the lisp on certain words.”

“I don’t remember any of this.”

“They suppressed the memory of the trial. Most of the subjects became unstable. There were... side effects. Emotional bleed. Identity dissonance. The project was shut down. But the data was never destroyed.”

“You’re saying that voice came from a recording of my dreams?”

“More than that,” Mirage said softly. “It’s a mirror of your longing. Your grief gave it form. You built her from the inside out.”

Iris staggered back a step. “Why now? Why is it resurfacing?”

“Because the barrier between memory and desire is thinner than you think. You went digging—and the echo woke up. It wants to be whole again. And it’s using you to do it.”

“What do you mean ‘it’ wants to be whole?”

Mirage looked at her with a flicker of someone else's face—maybe even Evie's. “Echoes, once formed, want to survive. Yours was born from the strongest emotion a human can feel: loss paired with guilt. That combination is... catalytic.”

A silence stretched between them.

“I can help you stabilize it,” Mirage said at last. “Anchor it in a synthetic loop. You’d live in that memory. She’d be there. Always.”

Iris shook her head. “That’s not life. That’s a lie.”

“Sometimes lies are kinder than the truth.”

“Not for me.”

Mirage gave a slow, reverent nod. “Then be careful. Echoes don’t like to be woken and abandoned. If it feels you're leaving again… it may not let you go.”

Iris left the warehouse shaken but more determined than ever. Mirage’s words echoed in her mind like sonar.

It may not let you go.

That night, she set up the echo loop in her apartment, sealing the windows and dimming the lights. The shard sat at the center of her console, encased in a nest of cables and stabilizers. She strapped a biosync collar around her neck, pressed the cold metal of the grounding fork into her palm, and activated the sequence.

The room dimmed. A low-frequency hum thrummed through the walls.

Her heartbeat slowed.

The echo engaged.

First came the warmth.

She smelled sugary toast. Lilacs. Summer sun on old carpet. She blinked—and her apartment blurred into soft pastels. Her chair dissolved beneath her, replaced by a cushion on the floor of their childhood bedroom. The same yellowed posters still hung lopsided. A line of stuffed animals perched on the windowsill, facing out.

“Iris?”

She turned.

"Evie stood in the doorway—sixteen again. Her ponytail was slightly crooked, her lower lip caught between her teeth, the way she always did when she was nervous.

Iris couldn’t breathe.

Evie smiled. “You came back.”

“I missed you so much,” Iris whispered, sinking into her sister’s arms. She smelled of rose shampoo and pencil shavings.

They talked for hours. About nothing. About everything. They laughed like they used to, their voices overlapping like a song only they knew. And for a time, Iris forgot there was a world outside.

But the next morning never came.

The light never shifted. The shadows under the bed never lengthened. Time had stilled—each moment perfect, preserved, looping softly.

She noticed it when she reached for her cup, and it was full again. When Evie told the same joke twice. When the sound of the birds outside began to distort.

“Evie?” Iris asked.

Her sister’s smile twitched. “You’re not going to leave again, are you?”

“I—no, I just—”

The walls pulsed. The poster on the far wall flickered like a corrupted file. The stuffed animals turned their heads in unison, glassy eyes watching.

“Iris, don’t go,” Evie said. Her voice was wrong now. Off-key. “You promised.”

“I didn’t promise anything,” Iris whispered, backing away. Her hand closed around the tuning fork in her pocket.

Evie’s face twisted. “You always leave me behind. In the fire. In the dark.”

“I didn’t leave—”

“You ran!”

The room convulsed. Flames bloomed behind the door. Smoke bled from the ceiling like ink in water. Evie’s skin shimmered, pixelated, her limbs too long, her eyes hollow with grief—and fury.

“You let me die!”

Iris screamed and struck the tuning fork against the edge of the desk.

The sound cut through the false world like lightning.

Evie clutched her ears and shrieked—an unnatural sound, not from her sister’s lungs but from the echo’s fractured heart.

The room convulsed again, collapsing inward, shards of memory peeling away—school dances, scraped knees, their last birthday together. Gone.

Ripped back into the void.

And then—

Silence.

Iris woke on the floor, gasping.

The biosync collar lay cracked beside her. The tuning fork had burned a red line into her palm.

Smoke still curled faintly in the corners of the room, but it was only the after-image. A trick of memory.

The echo shard lay on the floor, dark and lifeless now. She picked it up. It was just glass again.

But inside her chest, something had shifted.

She had faced it. Not the illusion, but the guilt.

Evie’s last words rose clearly in her mind now. Words not preserved in tech or dream, but truth:

“Run. Don’t come back for me.”

She hadn’t let Evie die. She’d escaped because Evie told her to—because she had to live.

And now she had a choice.

With that realization, Iris is no longer frozen in the past. She’s no longer clinging to guilt or synthetic echoes of what she lost.

Iris opened her window to the morning light. The real kind, cool, and imperfect.

She breathed in deeply.

She didn’t need echoes anymore.

Just the silence—and what she chose to build within it.