"Echo Protocol: Δ-404"
They said Delta Station was abandoned.
Left to rot near the edge of the Perseid Rift after a reactor breach three decades ago. No survivors. No
black box. Just static.
But three days ago, it lit up.
A single distress signal—looping in a dead dialect of machine code.
“Echo Protocol: Δ-404… Initiated.”
They sent in one person.
Commander Iris Vale, ex-black ops, turned corporate recovery agent. She doesn’t ask questions. She
extracts assets—data, tech, secrets. Her specialty: going into dead zones and coming out breathing.
But Delta Station is wrong from the start.
No bodies. No decay. Just… everything preserved. Frozen mid-action. A cup of coffee still warm in the
lab. A chess game half-played in the rec room. Security doors unlocked.
And on every screen, that phrase:
"DO NOT WAKE THE COPY."
Iris digs deeper and finds something buried in the AI core—a hidden process cycling beneath the
operating system: Δ-404, an unauthorized consciousness backup.
The crew didn’t die.
They uploaded themselves to avoid a reactor meltdown.
But something followed them into the code.
Now, Iris is trapped in a loop of simulated reality, forced to relive the last 72 hours of the station—each
time slightly different. The crew speak in riddles. Some help her. Others try to kill her. None seem to
know they’re already dead.
And something’s hunting her in the echo layer—a glitched version of herself, burned, corrupted,
whispering backwards.
Each loop ends with the same warning written in blood on the med-bay wall:
“ONLY ONE VERSION CAN LEAVE.”
And Iris begins to wonder…
Did she ever leave the first time?