Echo Chamber

Lee was led down a labyrinth of hallways, he didn’t even attempt to memorise his way down. He was growing a bit tired of this place and desperately wanted a change in scenery.

As they approached the training area, the doors hissed open, revealing a large room with reinforced walls and an observation deck overlooking the space. The room had an array of obstacles — metal barriers, dummies, and targets — all designed for testing abilities under controlled conditions.

A few other Echo-bearers were already in the room, engaged in their exercises. Their powers lit up the space with flashes of energy, fire, and movement.

He heard Alexander call out, “Ms Burke!”

“It’s Dr Burke and you know that,” Lee saw a woman who was dressed a lot like Dr Holland.

“We both know you never went to medical school. You also never got a PhD.”

Dr Burke ignored him, “Is this the new guy?” Alexander nodded.

“I’ve got a name, you know” Lee complained. He hoped that the name, “new guy”, wasn’t going to stick.

A blue rectangle appeared in front of him. The panel displayed multiple words:

Name: Lee Linden

Age: ???

Gender: Male

Place of birth: 34.12831739458567, -177.23361948855825

Echo: ???

General Evaluation: ???

“Huh, weird”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

“Doesn’t work on him, Alexander. I can’t see anything about him” Dr Burke looked worried, “Let me try on you”.

The panel disappeared, and Dr Burke sighed, a similar blue panel appeared before her, this time filled with detailed information about him:

Name: Alexander Alpis

Age: 26

Gender: Male

Place of birth: Boston, USA

Echo: Kinetic Manipulation

General Evaluation: Echo-bearer with above-average control over kinetic energy, potential for higher-tier abilities.

Dr Burke flicked the panel away casually, her brows furrowed in frustration. "It works fine on you, as expected.” She turned her gaze back to Lee, her eyes narrowing slightly as if scrutinizing him for the first time. “But you… you’re something else.”

Lee’s confusion deepened. “What does that mean?”

Burke crossed her arms, looking unsettled. “My Echo allows me to pull up personal information about people, usually things like age, location of birth, even a rough estimate of their Echo’s type and strength. But when I try it on you… I get nothing.”

Alexander shrugged, unimpressed. “So he’s off the grid. It happens. Maybe the system’s glitching out.”

Burke shook her head. “No. This isn’t a system failure, Alexander. The fact that I can’t read anything about him suggests something else.” She looked at Lee, her eyes searching for answers. “You might not be registered in any global databases, but that doesn't explain why I can't even detect your Echo.”

“You got my name and gender. That’s something, isn’t it?”

“I couldn’t even get that much”

Lee shot her a confused look, “But I could have sworn that I saw the blue rectangle with my information on it”

“I’ll try again then, tell me what you see.” She snapped her fingers and that same menu appeared before Linden again. He wondered why it was showing a coordinate in front of his date of birth instead of a place. He observed that Alexander was born in Boston instead of 42.362318376324495, -71.06917144270973. This made Lee feel like he wasted an undetermined amount of time wandering around this clandestine facility. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t know whether this place was clandestine or not. This place could’ve been fully open to the public. Lee thought that he should probably ask about this the next time he saw Dr Holland. Unfortunately, the panel didn’t give him any more information than last time, but he still read out the information displayed in front of him to Alexander and Burke.

“So you have a bunch of question marks and I cannot see your information at all.”

Lee nodded, and a new thought entered Lee’s mind, “Wait, why didn’t they try to get you to use your power on me earlier?”

“I’m a busy person.” Dr Burke said, “Things to do, places to be”.

Lee looked at the panel in front of him, the familiar feeling of confusion and frustration settling back in. He had no memory, no clear understanding of his powers, and now even the people in charge of figuring out what he was couldn’t make sense of him. The question marks in his data felt like some kind of cruel joke about his entire situation — blank, mysterious, and, frankly, irritating.

“Maybe you’re broken,” Alexander chimed in, trying to sound nonchalant, though Lee could detect a hint of intrigue in his voice. “Or maybe you're some kind of special case. I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had an Echo-bearer that didn't fit the usual mould.”

“Yeah, it's rare, but not completely unheard of. I think there was somebody in development who I couldn’t analyse.”

“Was there anything special about the people you couldn’t read?”

“Nothing that I can think of off the top of my house.”

Lee felt a familiar tingle at the back of his head. Something compelled him to move out of the way. This instinct proved ultimately beneficial as a pen was flung towards him. Lee scowled at Alexander, thinking that he was the one who did it. Alexander was not looking back, in fact, he was looking right behind Lee. A, to be perfectly honest, very forgettable look was looking towards him. Alexander was even thinking that he looked like the background character of a “Where's Wally?” and Lee was certain that Dr Burke hadn’t even noticed the man. The three of them were somewhat, but not completely, surprised when they were approached by the children’s book page-filler.

“Alex,” the marginal character shouted, “Is this the new guy I heard about?” to which Lee feigned offence.

“Scott, we’re not nearly close enough for you to be using nicknames.” Alexander shook his head. “So, why are you trying to pick on the new guy?”

This guy? Lee was thinking, Why does he seem vaguely familiar? These thoughts were expelled as an odd, albeit weak, pressure tried to push him down. The man, Scott presumably, must have thought he was childishly weak. Unfortunately, being that he is obviously not a child, he wasn’t really affected. Scott nodded in mock approval. An alarm blared in the nearby area with a red light flickering to life, pulsating, painting a faint but harsh tone over their section of the training area. Some other people turned to see what was going on. Lee had only just noticed the supervising agents as one of them approached the group, telling them to leave the training room and that they should consider taking this to a sparring arena. They were starting to garner an audience, and the training area was almost completely silent.

“Alright, let’s go, meet us in the sparring arena in an hour,” Alexander said.

“What the hell?” Lee didn’t like the guy, but he had just met him and had no reason to fight him. Not to mention the fact that he did not know how to fight.

“Yeah, Alex, What the hell?” Dr Burke interjected, her tone sharp as she crossed her arms and shot Alexander a glare. "This isn’t some schoolyard brawl. We don’t need unnecessary fights breaking out, especially with someone like Lee who doesn’t even fully understand his abilities yet."

Alexander shrugged, a lazy grin creeping across his face. "It’s not a fight, Doc. It’s a sparring session. Big difference." He turned back to Lee. "You’ve got to learn to control whatever you’ve got sooner or later. Better with me around to make sure you don’t blow anything up, right?"

Lee frowned, his mind racing. The idea of facing off against anyone right now, especially in front of an audience, felt like walking into a disaster. But something about Alexander's taunting and Scott’s smug attitude made it hard to back down without looking weak.

Scott, who had been smirking in the background, chimed in with a casual wave. "Relax, man. It’s just practice. No one’s expecting you to do anything crazy. I just want to see what the new guy’s got."

Lee shot a glance at Dr. Burke, hoping for backup, but she sighed and shook her head. "As much as I don’t like this, maybe it’s not the worst idea. Controlled sparring is one way to learn under pressure, and you might get a better sense of your Echo when you’re forced to use it. Also, Scott only got here a couple days before you did, and I already don’t like him. But…" she paused, eyeing Alexander and Scott, "...if this gets out of hand, I’m shutting it down immediately. Understood?"

Alexander and Scott nodded in unison, though Lee could see a flicker of excitement in their eyes. He could tell they were already itching for the match, more interested in showing off than actually helping him.

Chris Burke’s imprinting had been somehow both under and overwhelming. Her father proposed the idea to her, and as the daughter of a relatively high-ranking WERA agent, she felt some pressure to follow in his footsteps. She really thought the process would be way more intense. In her mind, she was expecting a dirty chamber and considerably more needles. But no, they flew her out to one of the sites, first-class and all, and after they gave her multiple lengthy forms to sign they just got her to sit close to one of the ribcages.

It was massive. Chris had gone to the Washington Monument went she was little and she was immediately reminded of it when she first set foot on the site. Surrounded by a massive dome of glass, large spikes of bone jutted out of the ground. The flesh around it, harvested and used. She thought she knew about the imprinting process and it seemed simple enough, she had some of the relevant materials, but nobody had warned her about how uncomfortable it was. It started with a buzzing, a high-pitched hum that reverberated in her bones but she didn’t think anything of it. She thought that maybe she didn’t get enough sleep that night.

And then it was amplified.

She hadn’t noticed how bad it was until she was almost keeling over. It felt like a fog had come over her, invisible but thick. She stumbled, almost planting face-down on the ground, her heart threatened to leap out of her chest. Her vision blurred and she couldn’t move.

And when she thought it finally subsided, she was wrong. Everything felt like everything was splitting apart. Like reality was splitting apart, for an agonising second. For that single second, time itself felt like it ground to a halt. Before the feeling was almost numbing, now it was like she was hyper-aware of every part of her body. She could have sworn that she could probably feel the blood flowing through her veins. The sheer information that she suddenly had might’ve collapsed her brain under its strain.

When it stopped, she hadn’t passed out but she almost wanted to. Being around people was almost entirely out of the question for her since she was just flooded with incomprehensible knowledge about themselves. She couldn’t be bothered maintaining her relationships with anyone. Trust was impossible. Intimacy, a distant concept. The imprinting had left her permanently apart from others. She started locking herself up, training herself until it became manageable and even useful, perhaps not to its full potential but useful nonetheless. She wanted to be the best, and she was. There was almost nobody else who could do what she did as well as she could. Eventually, she gained the trust of her coworkers, even befriending some of them but anxiety still gnawed at her. She was still afraid that nobody could fully trust her.