Echo Chamber

The heart stood massive, suspended in a tank of pale, viscous fluid, beating slowly and ominously. It dominated the compound's centre, an unnatural monolith that pulsed with a life force Lee could almost feel, even from where he stood. Around it, people in lab coats and military uniforms moved in hurried, organised chaos, as though this thing required constant attention, or perhaps restraint.

“What is this?” Lee hesitated

“Are you particularly religious, Mr Linden?” The Bearded Man questioned.

“No, I don’t think so” Lee answered.

“I'm not sure how familiar you are with this, but I'll give you a quick overview." The Man continued "That, Mr. Linden, is the heart of one of the old gods.”

"What do you mean 'old gods'? How is that even possible?"

The man clasped his hands behind his back, sauntering toward the heart, motioning for Lee to follow. "I suppose it's difficult to understand, given your current state of mind. We call them gods but they weren't like the deities of myth and legend, not in the way you might think. They were beings of immense power, asleep beneath the earth for millennia. We never knew of them, not until they were disrupted. And then... they died."

“This seems like a roundabout way to explain how this connects to me.”

“When their corpses surfaced after their deaths” he explained “We discovered that they started to release a residue, we call them ‘Echoes’ of the god’s original power. When a human is exposed to these ‘Echoes’, they get imprinted with an ability at seemingly random. ”

“And I assume that I was supposedly ‘imprinted’?”

“That’s what we think”

“How?” Lee demanded

“That is what we were trying to find out” The Man responded “That is until you woke up. We were planning to ask you but, for obvious reasons, that isn’t going to work. Most corpse sites are heavily monitored and an unknown individual like you shouldn’t have been able to just stumble across one of them”

“Unknown? I don’t know much about you guys but finding someone shouldn’t be tough for an organisation of your size.” Lee gestured around him.

“Exactly, it shouldn’t have been too difficult but you don’t exist anywhere”

“What?”

“Most of the world’s governments tried to run you through their databases. An unknown Echo-bearer is a unique circumstance that understandably has attracted the attention of some important people. Nobody could find anyone named Lee Linden who matches your description.”

“So you don’t who I am or how I got here, do you at least know what my ability is?”

“We’re going to find out tomorrow after you fully recover.”

The Man began to lead Linden back to the chamber. “I don’t think I got your name” Lee queried.

“Dr Holland,” he said.

“Holland, any first name for me?”

Dr Holland chuckled “None that you need to know right now.”

The next morning, Lee awoke to the sound of the door sliding open. Dr. Holland stood in the doorway, a clipboard in hand. “Good morning, Mr. Linden. Feeling rested?”

“Rested enough,” Lee replied, sitting up and running a hand through his hair. “Let’s get this over with.”

Holland’s mouth twitched into something resembling a smile. “Follow me.”

He was led to a large, reinforced door. Holland pressed a code into the panel, and the door hissed open to reveal an expansive chamber. It looked like some kind of testing facility - walls lined with monitoring equipment, cameras, and various technological apparatuses. At the centre of the room stood a circular platform, enclosed by glass panels with an opening at the front, which Lee presumed was meant for him.

He proceeded to step atop the platform and the opening closed behind him. “Good luck,” Dr Holland told him through an intercom system. Lee heard a whirring sound above him. A crash rang out in front of him, dust billowing around him. As the dust settled he saw what he would describe as a wolf.

This description was woefully unfit for what was standing in front of him. Its appearance made Lee want to throw up. Its visage as a wolf had been an insult to anything that could occur in nature. The snarling beast was about as tall as he was and appeared to have roots growing around it. This clicking, rumbling, stalking thing seemed to have been littered with eyes all over, closer to a depraved child’s art project rather than an actual creature. It almost physically draining to keep his eyes on.

The beast leapt towards Lee, clawing at him with enough force to separate his head from his body. What are they expecting from me Lee Linden thought Did they think I would just learn how to use my abilities because they locked me in here with this thing? Lee dodged out of the way and glanced towards the Doctor who was examining him from a booth in the room. I guess I just have to do what they want. Lee tried to feel that mass that he felt before but he couldn’t feel anything, if anything, his mind was strangely clear.

Lee thought that he might be able to fight it with his bare hands but the creature gnashing its teeth towards him quickly dispelled the thought from his mind.

The beast lunged again, its gnarled roots twisting like grotesque tendons as it closed the distance between them. Lee barely managed to throw himself to the side, feeling the rush of air as claws swiped just inches from his body. His heart pounded in his chest, the adrenaline dulling the edges of fear, but his thoughts raced uncontrollably. What did they expect him to do? There was nothing in him—no power, no force to draw on. The room was silent, except for the monstrous growls of the wolf-like thing and the pounding in Lee’s ears.

Think, Lee. Think.

He staggered back, his eyes darting around the enclosed space, looking for anything - anything - he could use. But there was nothing. Just the monstrous, snarling abomination and the cold, sterile walls.

Another lunge. This time, Lee wasn’t fast enough. The creature’s claws grazed his shoulder, sending a sharp pain shooting through him as he stumbled to the floor. His body hit the ground with a thud, the air knocked out of him as his vision blurred momentarily. He could hear its low growl, and feel its predatory eyes trained on him. It was toying with him. The beast stalked closer, slow now, deliberate like it knew the fight was already won.

It plunged a claw into his chest, exposing his internal organs to his onlookers. He looked over to see that he wasn’t being watched from that alcove. The Doctor and a couple of other similarly dressed people rushed in front of the structure. It was then that Lee had felt a small but distinct tug at the back of his mind. It was like the experience in that granite box but this time it felt more docile, like it was more symbiotic with him rather than parasitic. The creature was blasted away and pinned to the glass walls of the cylinder by some invisible force. Lee looked down, he should have seen his entrails pouring out of him but what he saw instead was his bare chest. His clothes had been decimated by that thing but for some reason, he was relatively unharmed. What was this? Why wasn’t he dead? These thoughts ran through his mind as he was carried away by the staff in the chamber.

Lee woke up to a familiar face.

“I’m kinda sick of passing out and waking up in front of you.”

The Doctor shook his head, “I admit, the test could’ve gone better.”

“So?” Lee said, “Did you learn anything?”

“We saw a spike in activity when-”

“When that thing almost murdered me?”

"‘Almost’ being the key word there," Dr. Holland repeated with a slight smirk, but his eyes remained focused, analytical. “When we reviewed the results from the test we found something, let’s say, peculiar."

“Well don’t keep me waiting.”

“You regenerated, Mr Linden”

“So is that my power, what was with the explosion before then?”

“Let me continue” Dr. Holland retrieved a tablet from the table behind him. “We managed to record the activity of Echoes with our equipment.” The tablet displayed a greyscale video of Lee’s fight with that wolf-thing. A bright blue colour appeared over Lee’s chest after the creature plunged its claw into him. Was that the ability that healed Lee? Moments later, a pale red colour appeared around the creature as it flew through the air.

“I hate to sound like a broken record, Doc, but you’re gonna need to explain this to me”

“From what we can tell those are two different powers from two different people.” Holland explained, “The blue one seems to be from the creature that you fought. The red was from one of the employees that you might have seen outside.”

“So I didn’t end up using my powers?”

“That’s the odd part,” the doctor continued “The guard has no recollection of using his Echo and the creature’s regeneration should be contained to itself”

Maybe amnesia was common in this place? It would explain a lot of his experiences.

“...which means you must have harnessed it, Mr. Linden,” Dr. Holland finished, tapping the tablet screen to pause the video. “Our running theory is that you used some kind of mind control to tap into the guard’s Echo in the heat of the moment, and it saved your life."

As if on cue a man walked into the room.

“Ah, Alexander, we were just talking about you.” Dr. Holland brought him before Linden, “This is the man whose ability you used.”

Alexander shook Linden’s hand, “Alexander Alpis”

“Lee Linden”

“Today must be the day of alliterated names” The doctor joked. “We thought that Alexander here might be able to help you with your abilities, You might have an affinity for abilities like his”

Lee sighed, he wondered if Alexander was just there to keep an eye on him or whether he was just being paranoid. He couldn’t get his cell out of his head.

Alexander was annoyed, being forced to babysit the new guy essentially. He, of all people, shouldn’t have been assigned to this. He thought that he had won the lottery when he was chosen for the trip to one of their company’s sites, and then that stupid explosion happened. The accident was big news… for a week. Nobody was even harmed. Alexander’s “incident” just embarrassed him rather than making him look cool, maybe he should have gotten a sick scar or something. Luckily nobody here knew about that time. However, the guys in monitoring are assholes and would probably have a field day if they decided to dig stuff up on him.

As soon as he got his licence he was out of here.

Alexander sighed, casting a sidelong glance at the new guy walking a few paces behind him. Lee Linden, the name was already grating on his nerves. Fresh out of nowhere, not even in the system, yet he was being treated like some sort of valuable asset. And here he was, Alexander, stuck playing tour guide to some amnesiac experiment with zero field experience.

He rolled his eyes. Babysitting was not in his job description. He wasn’t some kind of handler. He was a field agent, and field agents were supposed to be doing real work—not babysitting Echo-bearers with unstable powers.

As they walked through the sterile halls of the facility, Alexander muttered under his breath, “Of all the people they could’ve picked…”

Lee didn’t seem to notice his irritation, though, or at least he wasn’t reacting to it. He just kept following along, his eyes scanning the facility like he was trying to figure out where he was—or maybe who he was. Whatever. Alexander wasn’t interested in getting to know the guy’s sob story.

“So,” Alexander said, trying to break the awkward silence, even though he didn’t really care for conversation, “what’s it like? Waking up and having no idea who you are or what’s going on?”

Lee glanced at him, looking just as annoyed to be here as Alexander. “Not great, if you can believe it,” he replied, his voice flat.

“Yeah, sounds rough,” Alexander said dismissively, waving a hand in the air. He had zero sympathy for the guy. Echo-bearers came in all shapes, sizes, and stories. This one wasn’t special. “Look, let’s just get this over with. Dr. Holland said I have to show you around, make sure you don’t, I don’t know, blow up the facility or something.”

“I’m not planning on it,” Lee muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets. His gaze lingered on the doors they passed, most of them sealed shut, labelled with security codes and symbols Lee didn’t recognize.

“Good. Last thing I need is another ‘accident.’” Alexander sneered, the bitterness evident in his voice.

Lee raised an eyebrow but didn’t press further. “So, what is this place really?”

Alexander groaned inwardly. The new guy clearly had no idea. “It’s a facility,” he said, his tone laced with sarcasm. “You know, a place where people like you and me—people with Echoes—get ‘help.’”

Lee wasn’t buying it. “Help? That doesn’t sound like the full story.”

“Yeah, well, there’s more to it,” Alexander admitted reluctantly. “But if you haven’t figured it out by now, they’re not exactly gonna sit down and give you a full rundown. They’re more concerned with what you can do.”

“I feel like I've mostly been receiving explanations..”

“I mean you do have a lot to catch up on” Alexander stopped walking and turned to face Lee, crossing his arms. “I heard you got some kind of mind thing going on, right? Heard you did something crazy in the testing chamber yesterday. Bet they loved that.”

“Come on,” Alexander said, walking ahead again. “You’ve got places to be. Dr. Holland’s got some stuff lined up for you.”