Chapter 14 - THE THIRD CHILDThe machine shut down.
Gabriel collapsed.
Claire rushed to him.
“Gabriel!”
He opened his eyes.
His father's screen was gone.
The vault was silent.
Then Gabriel whispered:
“There were three.”
Claire froze.
“What?”
“Three children.”
Claire's face changed.
“No.”
“The third survived.”
Julian stepped forward.
“How?”
Gabriel stared into nothing.
“I saw the memory.”
He remembered.
A hospital.
Claire unconscious.
Two newborn babies.
Then another cry.
A nurse carrying a third infant.
The nurse said:
“Subject Three is viable.”
Gabriel's father answered:
“Take it.”
Claire never knew.
She had given birth to triplets.
Eli.
Noah.
And a third child.
The vault door opened.
A man stepped inside.
He looked around fifty.
Thin.
Gray hair.
Cold eyes.
Gabriel stared.
He recognized him from the memories.
His father's chief scientist.
Dr. Marcus Vale.
“You shouldn't have survived the transfer,” Marcus said.
Gabriel stood.
“You're the third child.”
Marcus smiled.
“No.”
“I remember you.”
“You remember what they wanted you to remember.”
Marcus walked closer.
“I was the doctor who helped your father.”
He looked at Eli.
Then Noah.
“And I was the physician who took the third child.”
Claire's face went pale.
“Where is he?”
Marcus smiled.
“You've already met him.”
Gabriel felt dread crawling up his spine.
“Who?”
Marcus pointed at Julian.
Julian froze.
“No.”
Marcus nodded.
“Julian isn't Gabriel's brother.”
Gabriel stared.
“Julian is the third child.”
Silence.
Claire covered her mouth.
Gabriel looked at Julian.
Their entire family history had been a lie.
The three children had been separated.
Gabriel.
Julian.
And Eli?
No.
Eli and Noah were the twins.
Julian was their biological sibling.
But why had he believed Julian was older?
Because memory had been manipulated.
Julian had been raised as Gabriel's brother.
Gabriel had been raised believing he was alone.
Three children.
Three experiments.
Three different identities.
Marcus continued.
“The real test was never memory.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes.
“Then what?”
“Identity.”
He looked at all three.
“We wanted to know whether identity could be rewritten completely.”
Claire stepped forward.
“You turned children into experiments.”
Marcus shrugged.
“And it worked.”
Gabriel looked at Julian.
Julian was crying.
For the first time, he looked like a frightened child.
“I don't remember being a baby.”
“You weren't meant to.”
Marcus pressed a button.
A door opened behind him.
A massive archive appeared.
Thousands of memory chips.
Every chip labeled with a human name.
Marcus smiled.
“Your father didn't want immortality.”
Gabriel looked at the chips.
“He wanted a person who could contain everyone.”
Marcus nodded.
“And now you have transferred the entire archive into yourself.”
Gabriel's eyes widened.
He understood.
The machine had not failed.
It had worked.
Gabriel now carried every memory.
Every crime.
Every secret.
He was the archive.
Marcus reached for him.
“Give me the memories.”
Gabriel stepped back.
“No.”
“Then you'll die.”
Gabriel smiled faintly.
“For eleven months, I thought I lost everything.”
He looked at Claire.
“Turns out I was the thing they were terrified of.”
Marcus raised a gun.
Julian stepped forward.
Marcus fired.
Julian fell.
Claire screamed.
Eli and Noah ran toward him.
Gabriel attacked Marcus.
The two crashed into the control panel.
Sparks exploded.
The archive began to overload.
Marcus shouted:
“You'll destroy the entire facility!”
Gabriel looked at the rows of memory chips.
Then he saw something.
One red light.
DELETE ALL.
He reached toward it.
Marcus screamed:
“DON'T!”
Gabriel pressed the button.
Every screen went black.
The vault began collapsing.
Claire grabbed Gabriel.
“Run!”
They fled.
Behind them, the archive burned.
The secrets of twenty years disappeared into fire.
But one thing remained.
Julian.
Alive.
Barely.
As they reached the surface, Gabriel looked back at the burning estate.
Then his phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
One message.
YOU DELETED THE ARCHIVE.
Another arrived.
BUT YOU FORGOT ABOUT THE CAMERA.
Gabriel stared.
A final message appeared.
A video file.
He opened it.
The footage showed him standing beside his father's machine.
Except the timestamp was tomorrow.
And in the video, Gabriel was saying:
May you like
“I remember everything.”
Then the screen went black.
