Omniview: ECHO

The passkey blinked open with a soundless flick. Sora sat still for a long moment, heart thudding, eyes stinging from hours of sleepless white light. He didn’t know what he expected to find, only that it wouldn’t be her. The key had taken him all night to crack. His rig was a patchwork of scavenged parts and code he’d written himself, sorting through encryption layers like a digital locksmith picking a thousand locks at once. When the directory finally bloomed open, its name glared at him in stark white letters: ARCHIVE//VERACITY_CONTROL.

He double clicked. Scanned the thousands of files inside, then found the one he hoped he’d never find. He opened it.

Static. Then light. Then motion.

A woman on the screen. Her face flickered through artifacted pixels, distorted, ghosted, but he knew her instantly. Lavren. The woman he’d been hunting across data streams and dead networks for three years. His wife.

+

The job interview was harder to pass than he’d planned for. Sora had done AI facilitated calls before, but nothing like Omniview’s. The company was a surveillance empire, and they used their own tech on everyone, including potential hires.

The rep wasn’t human, not really. It smiled in perfect sync with the algorithm analyzing his pulse rate, microexpressions, and voice stress. Every word he spoke was parsed, scored, and cross checked against predictive behaviour models. He could feel the machine peeling him apart one line of code at a time, all with a calculated smile across its face.

He’d gone in bare, no mirrored lenses, but he’d still worn his anti-recognition paint. It shimmered faintly under the cheap light of his living room, masking facial landmarks from the city’s street cams. Everyone who lived off-grid wore it outside, it was the only way to still have a modicum of privacy these days. Sora felt naked without it, he’d never gotten used to being constantly observed.

The city’s surveillance lattice was complex. Cameras in every corner, drones like lazy gulls drifting above the neon sprawl. Omniview ran it all. They hoarded faces, patterns, movements. Turning lives into training data for their AI vision systems.

Some said they’d gone even further. That Omniview didn’t only watch people, they used their extensive library of footage to create video documentation of anything they wanted. They could re-write history. Falsify evidence.

Sora believed it, he had to.

One morning, after attending a quiet protest the night before, Lavren was simply gone. Her car still sat in the driveway, dew gathering on its windshield like a held breath. She had brought him coffee in bed. The steam curled between them as they laughed about something so small he could no longer remember what it was, only the sound of her laughter, light and unguarded, still echoing in the corners of his mind. He’d thought she’d gone to shower, but the tap never turned on. When he called her name, the silence that answered felt wrong. He searched every room, calling again and again, until his voice began to fray. Her cup waited by the sink, the last proof she’d been real. The door cam feed had been wiped clean, the timeline erased. And somewhere in the city’s digital undercurrent, the whispers began. Data runners, backdoor coders, smugglers of truth, each certain of the same thing: Omniview had taken her.

But why?

It didn’t take Sora long to introduce the bug through the meeting chat. The interview bot was designed to accept both video and text input, so it gladly received Sora’s package without suspicion. The code was something he’d spent months refining, a compact bundle that slipped past firewalls like smoke.

On the surface, it looked like a simple question about company policy. Beneath that, it was persuasion, a quiet algorithm that told the bot he was an exceptional candidate, the perfect fit, someone who deserved immediate advancement to the next round with glowing recommendations. And it worked.

He was hired within days as a security systems analyst, a position meant to monitor data integrity, make sure the bots stayed within parameters, and patch any cracks in the code when they appeared. But Sora knew better. He was inside the system now, inside the machine that had taken her. He’d be living inside Omniview’s nervous system, tracing the digital pulse of the city, one surveillance feed at a time.

+

Sora hated the office.

It was everything he’d expected from a tech giant. Stark white walls, glass dividers, polished floors that reflected the endless blue-white glow of screens. Company slogans pulsed across every display, looping messages from the founder like scripture. Everything gleamed. Everything watched. The place made Sora’s skin crawl.

Cameras perched in every corner, blinking red like tiny, patient eyes. They tracked productivity, posture, and movement habits. An omnipresent hive mind recording every heartbeat of its workers.

He couldn’t wear his mirrored glasses here. Couldn’t risk his anti-facial recognition makeup either. That sort of thing would mark him as a rebel type, as one of the people who protested outside of legislature buildings, promoted community engagement, and held vigils for disappeared loved ones. No, he couldn’t afford suspicion. Not now. Not when he’d finally made it inside.

So he played the part. The perfect employee. Just another cog turning smoothly in the machine. A simple man, just here for the pay cheque.

His personal office was as sterile as the rest of the place, a narrow white room with a glass door, a standing desk, and a single terminal humming softly in the corner. “Better for your health,” the onboarding manual had said. Sora had to chuckle at that one. As if the company cared about anything but compliance and shareholder value.

The other analysts drifted like lost ghosts. They passed in the halls with the same tight-lipped smile, the kind that never touched their eyes. Polite, neutral, empty. A silent pact of survival: I’m not a threat. Don’t notice me. Everyone kept their head down and worked longer hours than they were paid for.

Sometimes he’d catch himself longing for Lavren’s laugh. The way she’d throw her head back, the small gap between her front teeth flashing when she lost herself in it. No one laughed like that anymore. No one had much of a reason to. She had been his reason, and Omniview had erased her, scrubbed away the one thing in the world that had felt real and good and authentic.

All staff meetings were done over video, even when the people involved were in the same building, sitting just a few rooms away. AI assistants handled everything, transcription, tone analysis, task assignment. Every second of footage was recorded, filed, and archived. For “quality assurance.”

Even after only a few days inside, he’d started to notice things.

The first time he saw the glitch, he thought it was his eyes, burned out from the constant glare of white screens. A shimmer of pixels, a blink of distortion, gone as fast as it came. But then he saw it again. And again.

Tiny flickers in the feed. Smears of colour where faces should be. It was like the system was trying to catch up to something that wasn’t really there.

He kept notes every time it happened. Real notes on paper and graphite, the old way. The notebook fit neatly in the inside pocket of his blazer, far from the reach of company scanners.

Each entry was small, coded in shorthand. A face flickering mid-sentence during a meeting. A phrase that didn’t quite belong. A sentence repeated one too many times. He wrote it all down, line by line, as if the act of recording could make sense of it.

Then he’d go home, and that’s when the real work began.

+

He waited a few weeks before he started poking around the systems. By then he’d even coaxed a few coworkers into lunchroom chatter, polite at first, then a little looser as the days passed. People let their guard down around him. His friends joked that he had a way of making others feel safe. He didn’t cultivate it, but it came in handy.

Everyone knew they were being watched, so conversations stayed careful. No one volunteered anything that could be twisted into evidence.

That changed in the men’s room one afternoon, between meetings. He was taking a quick piss when Jim sidled up at the next urinal. They stood in the hollow silence that tiled rooms produce, the kind of silence that makes every small noise feel loud, until Jim spoke low, as if trying to dampen the sound.

“You heard about the wellness program yet?”

Sora shook his head. He hadn’t.

“I’d dig into it before you accept anything. It sounds like a perk,” Jim said, zipping up without washing his hands, “but you won’t come back right, if you go.”

It was the push Sora needed. Back at his desk he started the automation he’d built to handle mundane monitoring tasks, letting it hum in the background while he readied his real work: the backdoor into the archives. The Vaults were full of encrypted files behind passkeys and secure tokens, the kind of locks Sora loved to pick. He’d been building a passkey cracker for the deepest layer, and tonight it would be ready.

Before logging off, he left a USB drive in the workstation, remote access bait, so he could pick up where he left off from home.

+

That was the night he found them, the videos.

He was sitting alone in his dark living room wearing stained sweatpants, an empty pizza box propped up beside him. The glow from the monitor lit the room in cold blue.

There were thousands of video clips, of many, many people. Footage of them doing terrible things. The clips looked real, but something was off, like reality had been copied too many times and warped at the edges.

He sorted through the dates until he found the protest, the one Lavren had attended the night before she disappeared. In truth, that night had been peaceful. The crowd chanted, held signs, sat quietly together. There’d been no violence. Sora knew because he’d been there too.

But in the video, it was carnage. Protesters threw themselves at police officers, tear gas hung thick in the air, people screamed and scattered through fire and chaos. And there she was, Lavren, at the front of it all, screaming in an officer’s face, her left eye bruised and swollen.

He watched it again. Then again. Paused the frame just to see her longer. It had been so long since he’d seen her face. The ache in his chest deepened as he realized it wasn’t even her. Not really.

He opened more files.

There were videos of people praising Omniview, smiling like spokespeople in some grotesque advertisement. Clips of his coworkers confessing to crimes they could never have committed. Then he found one with his own name. The footage showed him walking into the common room, pouring gasoline over the office computers, lighting a match. Watching them burn.

He hadn’t done that. He was sure of it.

He dug deeper, bot activity through system logs, following digital footprints that weren’t meant to be found. Eventually, he came across a folder named ECHO, buried deep, like it didn’t want to be found.

Inside were files. Medical reports, patient logs, research documents. Names. Photographs of people with fresh scars and surgical markings. Technical notes about bioscience, neural implants, and experimental augmentation. All of it connected to a single facility. ECHO.

+

A few hours later, he’d modified his keybreaker to dig deeper into ECHO’s file system. He sat rigid in his chair, nerves sharp, watching the software grind through millions of possible sequences until it landed on the right one.

Once inside, he focused on the metadata, searching for who made the files, where they came from. Some of it was sloppy work for a security company. The logs weren’t written by engineers, but by doctors.

He opened the first video.

Emaciated figures in hospital gowns sat under harsh fluorescent light. Their skin was stretched tight over bone, marred by thick, ugly scars. They struggled to answer questions from an off-screen interviewer, or to write their names on tablets with trembling hands. Some had mechanical limbs. Others had synthetic eyes or sections of skin that looked too smooth, too uniform, like plastic pretending to be flesh.

Sora nearly gagged.

When he finally found the file labelled with Lavren’s name, he couldn’t open it right away. It took him ten minutes just to steady his hands. To prepare himself for what he might see.

He clicked, and there she was. The real Lavren. Freckles still scattered across her nose. Dark hair drifting like a halo in the stale air of the room. But her spark was gone. Her face was blank, her body still. She sat in a metal chair and stared straight into the camera as an unseen voice asked her questions.

She didn’t answer. Didn’t even seem to understand. Just blinked slowly, her eyes flat and distant. There were no visible scars, not that he could see anyway, but something had been done to her. He longed to reach out to her, to stroke her freckled cheek with his palm, gather her into his arms and squeeze.

Sora lurched for the wastebasket and vomited.

When he could finally breathe again, he dug into the video’s metadata. Whoever had logged the file had forgotten to scrub the geodata, and there were coordinates.

One small mercy, at least.

+

It was almost torture, walking back into that office after everything Sora had uncovered. This time, he wore his mirrored glasses to hide the red rims of sleepless eyes. Lavren had always been the sensitive one; she’d hated hospitals with an almost childlike dread. Even for her annual vaccines, Sora had to come along to hold her hand as she gritted her teeth and scrunched her face in that stubborn way he loved. Afterwards, there was always ice cream. A small ritual to turn fear into something sweet.

He’d been awake all night, he couldn’t get her haunted expression out of his head. He couldn’t stop thinking about how terrified she must have been in that sterile laboratory, enduring whatever they’d done to her. The image clung to him: Lavren’s brilliant mind, her sharp, searching eyes dulled into a vacant stillness. Like she’d already become a ghost.

But now that he knew where she was, he had nothing left to lose.

Through the gray hours of morning, he'd worked. Line by line, he poured into the code every ounce of rage, of grief, of disgust, three years of mourning the love he couldn’t bury, weeks of hollow monotony spent staring into the rot of Omniview’s files.

At 8 am, he slipped quietly into his office and started his routine. The automation system hummed to life. The USB clicked into place. One keystroke began the upload. It was a heavy file; it would take time. All he needed was to wait.

A notification chimed. His AI assistant glowed to life with a new message.

“Good morning, valued employee. Congratulations! As recognition for your valued service to Omniview Technologies, you have been selected to participate in our Employee Wellness Program. A company vehicle will collect you from your residence at 8 am tomorrow. Please enjoy the rest of your day to pack and prepare. Congratulations once again!”

Sora stared at the words. They shimmered faintly in the monitor’s light. A “wellness retreat.” They knew. Of course they knew. Was this how they made people disappear? Jim had warned him. Could he refuse? Would they fabricate something, turn him into one of their digital ghosts if he tried to run?

His eyes flicked to the upload bar. Almost finished. Just a little longer.

Then another alert bloomed across the screen.

“Please exit your office and return home to make arrangements for your wellness retreat. You are dismissed for the day.”

He ignored it. Went to the restroom and took his time washing his hands. The sound of water against porcelain steadied his pulse. When he returned, his office door was locked. The keycard light blinked red. No one looked up. The others kept typing, eyes glazed, faces blue-lit by their own screens. Only the cameras seemed to notice him.

Fine. The hard way, then.

He had already made peace with never coming back. He grabbed a metal chair from the break area, lifted it, and smashed it through the glass. The door shattered into a rain of cubes that glittered like diamonds before falling dead at his feet. The alarms began to wail.

Sora sprinted to his desk, saw the file complete, and hit Execute. Then he ran.

+

As he tore through the neon-washed streets, the world began to flicker. Billboards, storefront screens, phone displays, all of them stuttering as Omniview’s perfect facade unravelled.

And then the footage began.

The ECHO subjects, Lavren among them, appeared in silent fragments: their hollow faces, their movements stripped of will. The company’s proud logo burned across each image, looping endlessly across every city surface.

Sora imagined the chaos spreading through homes and bars and offices, the gasps as people saw their missing loved ones, not lost but changed. Unrecognizable. No PR stunt could scrub that truth away. The ghosts were out now, and the world was watching.

He kept running until the streets went dark, until every screen had gone silent.

+

Sora stood at the edge of the scrubby desert, mirrored lenses catching the faint light. He glanced down at his paper notebook, tracing the coordinates he’d written weeks ago. Ahead, a massive concrete structure jutted from the sand like the skeleton of a sunken god.

The wind whispered through the cracked concrete, a hollow sound that seemed to repeat itself endlessly. An echo.

Her name, maybe. Or what was left of it.