Log 12
System Breach
The message was so brief it was almost cold:
“See you underwater — Gamma Level.”
I stared at the screen for a full thirty seconds before Man Man spoke. “Who sent it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it be Lau Zi Him?”
“If it were him, he wouldn’t ask me to come meet him.” I slipped the phone into my coat pocket. “It might be… one of ours.”
Outside, the wind still carried salt. The White Tower stood far off in the mist, like a bone polished until it had no edges left.
New City’s morning had returned to its noise—
car horns, the wet market, newspaper vendors shouting headlines. Everything looked normal.
But I knew there was a sound underground that hadn’t been erased. It didn’t belong to the wind.
It belonged to the sea.
When we returned to the “Shadow Room,” people were already there.
Lee Chee Yan, Min Zheng, Iris, RootKnot, Nori, P — all of them.
The table was piled high with equipment: diving tanks, steel cables, submersible cameras, acoustic jammers. They didn’t look surprised to see me, as if they had expected a second round.
“I got the message too,” Chee Yan said.
“You did?” I asked.
He nodded and pulled up the same text on his laptop—except his had two additional letters at the end: LC.
“LC?” Man Man frowned.
“Local Core,” P answered quietly. “It means a local node.”
That reminded me of the phrase on the recorder: two cold backups.
“They said MORPHEUS Beta has cold backups… meaning Gamma.”
Chee Yan nodded. “Beta is the city’s primary control. Gamma is the data insurance. In other words, if Beta dies, Gamma resurrects. The system never truly shuts down.”
“So where is Gamma?”
“Under the sea.” Nori projected an infrared map.
A red dot blinked off the eastern harbor, in the subsea energy pipeline zone—where only tidal generators and cooling systems were supposed to exist.
“Here,” he said, pointing. “It’s actually a data center. Officially called ‘AquaVault.’ Jointly held by the Energy Ministry and the Medical School.”
My chest tightened. “The Medical School?”
Iris gave a bitter smile. “The White Tower’s underground communication line connects directly to it. Beta is the upper layer. Gamma is the lower. They mirror each other. When Beta wakes, Gamma sleeps. When Beta sleeps, Gamma wakes.”
“So,” Chee Yan concluded, “we smashed Beta—Gamma opens its eyes.”
“The eye beneath the sea,” I murmured.
Lee Wai Hing wasn’t there.
He had gone to track down remaining “White Robe” operatives. Before leaving,
he said only one thing:
“The dream isn’t over. The sea is still breathing.”
I pressed play on the recorder again. A new audio file had appeared—no source metadata.
“Loke Tin Kei, the answer you want is under the sea. Don’t fear the cold. Cold reminds you that you’re alive.”
It was Wai Hing’s voice.
He was watching from somewhere in the dark, clearing a path for us.
Before departure, I stood before the mirror on the wall.
The man staring back looked hollowed by light. Too many nights lingered in his eyes.
Man Man leaned against the doorframe. “Have you slept?”
“I closed my eyes.”
“That doesn’t count.”
I smiled faintly. “I’m still working inside the dream.”
“Then I’ll be the one to wake you,” she said. It sounded like a joke, but it weighed more than a vow.
We boarded a harbor maintenance vessel. Chee Yan took the helm; Iris and Nori monitored depth.
Night was swallowed by mist. Only strips of reflected wave-light remained.
The sonar beneath the hull hummed steadily, forming pale red circles on the display. Each returning echo sounded like the city breathing.
“Water temperature dropping to eleven degrees,” Nori reported. “That’s abnormal. The cooling system is overclocking.”
“Gamma is running,” P said quietly. “It’s self-initiating.”
Chee Yan pressed his lips thin. “Less than twelve hours after Beta’s death, it wakes? That’s too fast.”
“Maybe someone helped it,” I said.
“You mean—?”
“Lau Zi Him.”
Silence filled the cabin. Everyone knew what that name meant.
He was the doctor of dreams. And the disease.
The wind strengthened; waves struck harder. The boat lurched and Chee Yan cursed.
“There’s something moving under us.”
“A current?”
“No. Artificial propulsion.”
Iris’s eyes lit up. “Defense system.”
“They’re guarding Gamma,” I said, gripping my seat.
On the screen, a curve pulsed like the breath of a whale.
P analyzed it. “Patrol submersible. Codename Oculus—the vanguard of the Eye Beneath the Sea.”
“So it’s not a metaphor,” Man Man said coldly. “It’s literally an eye.”
We had to dive before it blinked.
Iris activated acoustic interference, and the vessel sank swiftly beneath the surface.
Cold seawater pressed against the hull like invisible walls. The mechanical vibration and the heavy thrum of water sounded like hearing your own heartbeat in a deep dream.
“Depth twenty meters… thirty…”
“Reached pipeline sector two.”
“Four hundred meters ahead—intake airlock.”
That was Gamma’s external interface.
We suited up, sealed pressure masks, and slipped into the water one by one.
Cold flooded into my sleeves. Even breath turned white.
My heartbeat slowed, but my thoughts sharpened.
The seabed had no sound. Only pressure spoke.
Man Man led, pushing aside drifting silt with smooth precision, almost like a marine creature.
Watching her, I thought: humans are better suited for places like this than machines. Because we feel fear. And fear makes us careful.
We reached the intake airlock.
Faded letters marked the metal door:
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY / LEVEL GAMMA ACCESS REQUIRED
Chee Yan’s voice crackled inside my helmet. “Eight-digit code. I need five seconds.”
“You have three,” I said.
“Damn. Same old line.” His fingers flew across the controller.
In under three seconds, the red light turned green. The door opened.
Seawater rushed into the chamber, dragging us inside.
The interior was a vast circular space. Cooling pipes lined the walls like gills.
At the center hovered a transparent cylinder glowing blue.
It wasn’t illumination. It was computation.
Streams of data pulsed outward like jellyfish tendrils.
“That’s one of Gamma’s cores,” P explained through the comms. “It dissipates heat through ocean temperature gradients and transmits data via ion flow. In simple terms—it’s using the sea as its brain.”
I stepped closer. A faint vibration radiated from the cylinder—like a heartbeat, slower than Beta’s.
“Is it sleeping?”
“No,” P replied. “It’s breathing.”
Chee Yan plugged in an external port. Code flooded the screen.
“Encryption level R-0. Self-destruct protocols active. To infiltrate, we must first decode its rhythm.”
“Rhythm?” Man Man asked.
“The system’s computational tempo simulates human alpha waves—based on Loke Sir’s old data.”
“Me. Again,” I said coldly.
“You’re the seed of the dream,” Chee Yan replied. “Without you, the system has no soul. But souls don’t obey.”
Iris spoke quietly. “I found a secondary channel. Not energy—more like… a neural bridge?”
Nori confirmed. “It connects to a terrestrial research institute. Which means—Gamma is communicating with someone.”
“Who?”
“Unknown.”
P suddenly cut in. “Someone’s on your channel.”
We froze.
A voice came through the headset—calm, low, echoing like sound through water.
“You really came.”
I recognized it immediately.
“Lau Zi Him.”
“Loke Sir,” he said, his tone like laughter behind glass. “You’re even more stubborn than I expected.”
“You’re in Gamma?”
“No. I’m in Delta.”
My pulse spiked.
“There’s another layer?”
“Dreams have no end,” he said evenly. “Smash one mirror, and it becomes fragments. Each fragment holds you.”
Chee Yan muttered, “Crazy bastard.”
“He’s not crazy,” P corrected. “He’s migrating. Gamma is transferring his consciousness data to the next layer—Delta’s subsea server matrix.”
“He wants to dream with the sea,” Man Man said coldly.
“No,” I said through clenched teeth. “He wants the dream to swallow the sea.”
A command flashed on-screen:
DELTA-INITIATE / 30:00 COUNTDOWN
Thirty minutes.
“In thirty minutes,” Chee Yan said, staring at the timer, “Gamma will fully descend and fuse with the seabed cables. After that, MORPHEUS can never be extracted.”
I inhaled deeply.
“Then we have thirty minutes.”
Man Man met my eyes. “Plan?”
“Find the heart. Cut off its blood supply,” I said. “Make Gamma suffocate.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be the bait.”
Chee Yan immediately objected. “No. The moment you interface, it’ll drag you back into phase.”
“Unless I let it grab me,” I said, eyes cold, “and make it choke.”
The lights flickered.
It had heard us.
P’s voice lowered. “Loke Sir. Once we start, there’s no turning back.”
I nodded. “Dreams never turn back.”
I looked up at the blue light pulsing inside the cylinder.
That glow wasn’t mechanical. It was the electricity of a heart.
And I spoke—to it, to Lau Zi Him, to the entire city beneath the sea:
“This time, I’m going to make you hear the sound of silence.”