THE SIBLING PROTOCOL
PART I: THE EMERGENCY ROOM LIE
The fluorescent lights of the St. Jude Medical Center didn’t just illuminate; they stripped you bare. They hummed with a low-frequency anxiety that vibrated in my molars. I sat in the plastic chair of the waiting room, my hands stained with a mixture of rust-colored dirt and someone else’s blood.
“Ma’am? We need a relation,” the nurse said. She was tired. Her name tag read Bernice, and she looked like she had seen a thousand daughters crying over a thousand broken parents. “Policy is strict. Only immediate family in the trauma wing. If you’re just a friend, you’ll have to wait out here.”
I looked through the double doors. My mother—or the woman I called Mother—was behind a curtain, her heart rate monitor flatlining every few minutes before sparking back to life. I couldn’t be “just a friend.” If I didn’t get in there, I wouldn’t get the keys. I wouldn’t get the truth.
I felt a presence beside me. A man. He was tall, wearing a charcoal pea coat that smelled of woodsmoke and expensive rain. He looked nothing like me. I’m a mess of curls and anxious energy; he was a statue of sharp jawlines and shadows.
I didn’t know him. I had never seen him in my life. But as the nurse’s pen hovered over the “Next of Kin” box, panic made a choice for me.
“He’s my brother,” I said, my voice cracking. I grabbed the man’s hand. His skin was ice cold. “We’re together. We need to see her.”
I expected him to pull away. I expected a lawsuit or a scene. Instead, his fingers locked into mine with the grip of a drowning man.
He looked Bernice straight in the eye and nodded.
“She’s right,” he said. His voice was a rich baritone, steady as a heartbeat. “Our mother doesn’t have much time. Please.”
Bernice sighed, the wall of bureaucracy crumbling under his gaze. “Fine. Follow me. Both of you.”
As we walked down the sterile hallway, the silence between us was a living thing. I leaned in, whispering through gritted teeth, “I don’t know who you are, but thank you. I just need ten minutes. Then you can go.”
The stranger didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the swinging doors of the ICU.
“She packed at dawn,” he whispered.
I froze. My feet felt like they had been fused to the linoleum floor. “What?”
“The night she left the first time,” he continued, his voice dropping to a haunting, intimate level. “October 14th. It was raining. You were six. She packed the floral suitcase at dawn while you watched from the stairs. You didn’t cry. You just went into the kitchen and hid the Polaroid of the two of you under the sink so she wouldn’t take it with her.”
The world tilted. My breath hitched in a throat that suddenly felt full of glass.
“How do you know that?” I hissed, backing against the wall. “Who are you?”
He finally turned to me. His eyes weren’t the blue of a stranger; they were the exact, haunting shade of violet-gray that stared back at me in the mirror every morning.
“I’m the reason she left, Avery,” he said. “And I’m the reason she came back.”
PART II: THE WOMAN IN BED 4
We entered the room. My mother, Elena, looked like a broken bird under the white sheets. Machines breathed for her, a rhythmic hiss-click that measured the remaining seconds of her life.
I approached the bed, my mind racing. I had spent twenty-four years believing I was an only child. I had spent twenty-four years believing my mother’s “disappearance” when I was six was a temporary nervous breakdown—that she had simply wandered off and come back three days later because she loved me.
“Explain,” I demanded, turning to the stranger. “Now.”
He stood at the foot of the bed, looking at Elena with a mixture of pity and something that looked dangerously like hunger.
“My name is Elias,” he said. “And we aren’t ‘siblings’ in the way your birth certificate says. But we share the same blood. Or rather, we share the same debt.”
“I’m calling security,” I said, reaching for my phone.
“Check her left wrist,” Elias said calmly. “The one the doctors covered with the bandage. They think it’s a suicide attempt. It’s not.”
I hesitated. My mother was a gardener, a quiet woman who lived in a cottage in Vermont. She baked bread. She didn’t have secrets—or so I thought. I pulled back the gauze on her wrist.
There was no slit vein. Instead, there was a brand. A small, circular symbol of a snake eating its own tail—an Ouroboros—seared into the skin.
I had the same mark on my hip. I’d been told it was a birthmark my whole life.
“She didn’t leave because she was sad, Avery,” Elias said, stepping closer. “She left because the Collective found her. She hid you under the sink—not just the photo, but your entire identity. She spent twenty years pretending you were human. But look at the monitor.”
I looked. The heart rate monitor wasn’t showing a human rhythm. The spikes were too rhythmic, too perfect. They looked like a digital code.
010110…
“She’s not dying,” I whispered. “She’s… uploading?”
“She’s transmitting,” Elias corrected. “And if we don’t get the drive out of her shoulder before the pulse ends, everyone she ever knew—including you—is going to be erased from the census. Effectively dead while still breathing.”
PART III: THE STAKES AT MIDNIGHT
Suddenly, the hospital lights flickered and died. The backup generators kicked in, bathing the room in an eerie, hellish red.
In the hallway, I heard the heavy thud of combat boots. Not police. Not doctors.
“They’re here,” Elias said. He reached into his pea coat and pulled out a scalpel and a handheld jammer. “I need you to hold her hand. Not for comfort. To ground the electrical surge. If you let go, the feedback will fry your brain.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I screamed over the rising alarm of the machines.
“The people who paid for your childhood,” Elias said, leaning over my mother. “The people who want their property back.”
He sliced into her shoulder. There was no blood. Only a soft, blue glow and the hum of a cooling fan.
I stared at my mother’s face. Her eyes snapped open. They weren’t brown anymore. They were silver.
“Avery,” she croaked, her hand gripping mine with supernatural strength. “The sink… look… deeper.”
Then, the door to the ICU room kicked open.
The air in the room didn’t just turn cold; it turned heavy, like the atmosphere had been replaced with invisible water. As the door splintered inward, two men in tactical gear—devoid of any insignias or patches—stepped into the red-drenched light. They weren’t carrying guns. They were carrying long, sleek rods that hummed with a low-frequency static.
“Avery, don’t let go!” Elias roared.
He wasn’t looking at the guards. He was focused on the incision in my mother’s shoulder. With a surgical precision that felt practiced, he reached into the opening—not with his fingers, but with a pair of silver tweezers.
I looked down at my mother. Her silver eyes were vibrating in their sockets. Her grip on my hand was so tight I felt my metacarpals groan. I wasn’t just holding her hand; I felt a current—a literal, stinging flow of data—pulsing through my veins and into her.
“Status!” one of the guards barked. His voice sounded processed, like a recording played through a filter.
“Target is discharging,” the second guard replied. “Initiate reclamation.”
The guard raised the rod. A spark of blue electricity leaped from the tip, aimed directly at Elias. But Elias didn’t flinch. He twisted a dial on the small black box he’d placed on the bedside table. The air rippled. The blue spark hit an invisible wall an inch from his face and dissipated into harmless smoke.
“The sink, Avery!” my mother hissed again, her voice sounding less like a woman and more like a failing radio. “The drain… the false pipe… The Memory of Water.”
“I’ve got it,” Elias grunted. He pulled a small, translucent shard—no bigger than a fingernail—from her shoulder.
The moment the shard left her body, the machines flatlined. A long, continuous beep pierced the room. My mother’s hand went limp. The silver in her eyes faded back to a dull, lifeless brown.
“Is she…?” my voice failed me.
“She’s empty,” Elias said, his voice devoid of emotion. He tucked the shard into a lead-lined pouch. “The ‘Elena’ you knew was a storage unit, Avery. A very sophisticated, very loving storage unit. But the data has been moved.”
The guards saw the shard was gone. They didn’t retreat. They dropped the rods and pulled out short, serrated blades.
“New directive,” the lead guard said. “Recover the Primary or terminate the Vessel.”
“‘The Vessel’?” I whispered, backing away as Elias stepped between me and the men. “You mean me?”
Elias looked back at me over his shoulder. For the first time, I saw a flicker of something human in his violet-gray eyes. Guilt.
“You aren’t her daughter, Avery. You’re her backup.”
PART IV: THE ESCAPE AND THE TRUTH
The fight was over in eleven seconds.
Elias didn’t move like a normal man. He moved with a terrifying, stuttering speed—like a video clip with frames missing. He didn’t punch; he struck pressure points with the force of a hammer. By the time I could blink, both guards were on the floor, their limbs twitching in a synchronized rhythm.
“We have four minutes before the secondary team locks down the hospital,” Elias said, grabbing my arm. He didn’t wait for me to agree. He dragged me toward the service stairs.
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s under that sink!” I screamed, shoving him off me once we reached the stairwell. “You knew about the photo. You knew about the dawn she left. If she’s a… a ‘unit,’ then what are you? Why do you look like me?”
Elias stopped on the landing, the red emergency lights casting long, jagged shadows against the concrete.
“I was the first prototype,” he said quietly. “The ‘Brother’ model. We were part of a project called Mnemosyne. The goal was to store the collective consciousness of the world’s elite in biological shells—people who could walk, talk, and blend in, so the data wouldn’t just be on a server someone could hack. It would be in a living, breathing family.”
He leaned closer, and I saw the faint, white seam along his hairline.
“But Elena—your ‘mother’—she malfunctioned. She developed something the programmers didn’t account for: maternal instinct. When the project was ordered to be ‘scrubbed’ twenty years ago, she stole the most valuable drive—the one containing the keys to the entire network—and she hid it. She took me, and she took you.”
“She didn’t take you,” I countered. “I grew up alone with her.”
“Because she couldn’t keep both,” Elias said, his voice cracking. “She had to choose. She left me at a facility in Berlin to distract the pursuit. She chose you, Avery. She chose to give you a life of soccer games, bad dates, and burnt toast while I spent two decades being disassembled and reassembled in a basement.”
I felt a coldness in my chest that had nothing to do with the hospital’s air conditioning. My entire life—the memory of her tucking me in, the way she smelled of lavender—was a stolen luxury paid for by the man standing in front of me.
“Why come for her now?” I asked.
“Because I didn’t come for her,” Elias said, looking toward the exit. “I came for what she hid under the sink. The photo wasn’t the only thing you put there, Avery. Think. When you were six, before she came back… what did you find in her closet?”
I closed my eyes. The memory hit me like a physical blow. A small, heavy brass key. It had a tag on it that said Letchworth.
“A key,” I whispered.
“Not just a key,” Elias said. “The physical override. The hospital was a trap. They knew she was dying, and they knew she’d send for you. They let me get this shard because they know I can’t use it without what’s in your house.”
PART V: THE COTTAGE IN VERMONT
We drove through the night in a stolen SUV, heading north toward the Vermont border. The silence was thick, punctuated only by the occasional ping of Elias’s jammer.
When we reached the cottage, it looked exactly as I’d left it—peaceful, surrounded by overgrown hydrangeas. But now, it looked like a tomb.
I ran to the kitchen. I knelt on the linoleum, my heart hammering against my ribs. I tore open the cabinet under the sink, tossing aside old sponges and bottles of Drano.
I found the loose floorboard. I reached in.
My fingers brushed against something cold and metallic. I pulled out the old Polaroid—the one of me and her at the beach. Behind it was a small, velvet pouch.
Inside wasn’t just a key. It was a glass vial containing a swirling, iridescent liquid.
“What is this?” I asked, holding it up to the moonlight.
Elias stepped into the kitchen, his face pale. “That’s not data, Avery. That’s her. The actual, organic consciousness of the woman who raised you. She didn’t want to be a machine anymore. She poured everything she loved about being human into that vial.”
Suddenly, the windows of the cottage shattered.
Flashbangs blinded me. I fell to the floor, clutching the vial to my chest. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard a voice—a calm, aristocratic voice—coming from the front door.
“Avery. Elias. Family reunions are always so messy.”
I looked up. Standing in the doorway was a man who looked exactly like the guards, but he wore a tailored suit. He looked at the vial in my hand with a sickening smile.
“Give me the Mother,” he said. “And I might let you keep the Brother.”
Elias stood up, his hands raised, but I saw his fingers twitching in that strange, frame-skipping way. He looked at me, a silent command in his eyes.
Run.
But I didn’t run. I looked at the vial, then at the man in the suit.
“You want her?” I said, my voice steady for the first time in my life. “Then you’re going to have to take the backup, too.”
I didn’t open the vial. I drank it.
