The Echo Room

By Habib

It was always colder than she expected.

Even wrapped in her thick cardigan, Halima felt the chill crawl across her skin as the door of the Echo Room sealed shut behind her with a soft hiss. A pale blue light bloomed from the center of the floor, casting slow ripples across the walls, like moonlight on water. It was sterile, yes but not unkind.

“Ready, Mrs. Shaw?” the Ahmad’s voice came softly through the intercom.

Halima didn’t answer right away. Her fingers fidgeted in her lap, brushing against the velvet ribbon she always wore on her wrist a habit left from a lifetime ago. Finally, she nodded.

“Beginning memory sequence now. Please relax.”

The room darkened for a breath, then bloomed into life.

Suddenly, she was twelve again, barefoot on warm stone steps, the scent of tomatoes and rosemary hanging heavy in the summer air. Her father was humming a tune from his childhood, the one he always sang while watering the garden. He turned, saw her watching him, and grinned. That smile. That careless, sunlit kind of joy.

Halima blinked, heart stuttering. It was perfect. More vivid than she remembered because it was her memory. The Echo Room had pulled it straight from the neural threads that remained intact in her aging mind, filtering it through biometric scans and memory-stimulation algorithms. A miracle, they called it.

But to Halima, it was a conversation with ghosts.

“Pause,” she whispered.

The room froze. The leaves of the fig tree halted mid-tremble. Her father’s hand stopped just before it dipped the watering can.

“Switch to sequence 24,” she said. Her voice cracked.

The garden faded. A hospital corridor took its place.

Now, she was forty-seven. Her husband, Gul, sat beside her in a cheap plastic chair, scribbling grocery items into a notepad, trying to distract her from the prognosis they both already knew. Across the hallway, behind a closed glass door, their son lay sleeping beneath a pale green blanket, tubes threaded into the soft hollows of his arms.

Halima turned away from the scene, even though it wasn’t real. Her chest ached all the same.

“Forward ten minutes,” she said.

Now Gul was holding her hand, his eyes glossy but dry. “We’ll get through it,” he had said. “Together.” She remembered how she’d nodded, even though she didn’t believe him.

And yet he had been right, in his way.

The Echo Room faded to gray.

The Ahmad’s voice returned. “Mrs. Shaw, you’ve used nearly forty minutes. Would you like to end the session?”

“No,” she said quickly. Then, softer, “Not yet.”

There was one more memory she wanted to see.

“Sequence 44.”

Silence. A brief delay.

Then: “Sequence 44 is locked. It’s categorized under trauma-protected files. Are you sure you want to access it?”

“I am,” Halima replied. Her fingers trembled. “Please proceed.”

The blue light flickered. A new world emerged around her.

This time, it was her bedroom present day. She sat on the bed, wearing the same cardigan, staring at a photograph in her hand. The room was quiet, heavy with grief. The image showed Gul smiling, holding their infant granddaughter, Lily. It was the last picture taken of him before the stroke.

In the memory, Halima curled in on herself, shaking with sobs.

The real Halima, watching, felt a strange dual sensation: the ache of witnessing her own pain, and the numbness that had followed Gul’s death a numbness that still hadn’t thawed.

She stepped forward, through the room, and stood beside her past self.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered not to the version of her sitting on the bed, but to the man who wasn’t there anymore.

The system registered a spike in emotional activity. The room dimmed again.

This was the Echo Room’s limit. Even memory had boundaries.

She sighed, her shoulders sinking. “End session.”

The garden, the hospital, the bedroom all of it vanished.

The lights returned to sterile white. The door hissed open.

As Halima stood to leave, the Ahmad gave her a soft look. “You accessed a protected memory today. That can be destabilizing. Would you like to speak with someone?”

Halima shook her head.

“No,” she said. “But thank you. I think... I needed to see it again.”

She stepped out into the corridor, her cane tapping softly against the polished floor. Her mind was full, but clearer. The pain was still there but so were the pieces of joy, of love, of life that hadn’t been erased.

Memories fade. But in the Echo Room, even echoes could speak.

And sometimes, they said exactly what needed to be heard.