Echo Protocol

He ironed his slacks the same way every morning—four strokes on each leg, crease sharp enough to split atoms.

Routine kept the silence away. On Base 42A, buried beneath acres of winter wheat and official denials, routine was doctrine.

Lately, though, the others had changed. Minor things. Rogers, the launch officer in Cell 3, no longer whistled Take Me Home, Country Roads—now it was something without melody, more like breathing through a straw. Sandoval from systems didn't blink for entire briefings. Nobody said anything, of course. Not out loud.

There was the night the console lights all flickered, just once, at 02:17. In sync with that pale flash in the sky. Everyone claimed not to see it, but the cameras caught the reflection in three retinas. He watched the footage twice before deleting it.

The wheat outside stopped growing. No one commented.

He went home on rotation and found his toothbrush already wet. His freezer was full of meals labeled with his handwriting, dated three weeks ahead. At the diner, the waitress said, “Back so soon?” though he hadn’t been home in months. She smiled a little too long, a little too wide, and plucked a stray hair from his collar like it meant something.

Back underground, the men and women wore his face behind their eyes. They moved right, spoke right, but the cadence of their words had turned—flat, like newsreaders practicing sympathy. One by one, their laughter fell out of sync.

He cracked eventually. Not with a scream, but with a question: “Where did you bury the real me?”

They just looked at him. Not with confusion—just…disappointment.

Now, Base 42A runs smoothly. Reports come in clean. No odd power surges. No missed drills. The crops outside are monitored by satellite, but no one touches the soil. The workers smile on cue, salute with precision, and file their nails with quiet competence.

The silos are still armed. But the men inside them were never born here. They were cultivated in sealed labs outside Harbin, printed cell by cell from decades of surveillance—fast food napkins, hotel pillowcases, cigarette butts scraped from embassy ashtrays. No birth certificates. No mothers. Just biometric replicas, trained to smile in English and dream in Mandarin.

And somewhere, in a vault beneath Shenzhen, the original hair samples are cataloged by scent.

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