Chapter 7 - THE VAULT OF FORGOTTEN SINS | "I Found the Room Where They Stole My Soul."
The address was hardcoded into Julian’s encrypted tablet: a hidden subterranean facility located sixty feet beneath an abandoned grain silo on the outskirts of Gary, Indiana.
Clara walked down the damp concrete corridor, holding a heavy tactical flashlight in one hand and a stolen assault rifle in the other. The facility was dead, abandoned in a hurry when the Drake Hotel situation went sideways. Red emergency lights bathed the steel walls in an eerie, bloody glow.
She reached a massive blast door labeled: PROJECT LETHE - NEURAL BACKUP STORAGE.
Using Julian’s master biometric keycard, she swiped the terminal. The heavy hydraulic doors hissed open, revealing a cavernous room filled with hundreds of glowing glass cylinders filled with blue liquid. Inside each cylinder was a suspended human brain, connected to thousands of fiber-optic cables pulsing with light.
Clara walked down the center aisle, her boots echoing ominously in the silent room. She stopped in front of a terminal marked SUBJECT ARCHIVES.
She began typing furiously, her fingers moving across the keyboard with hyper-precise speed. Files flashed across the screen:
SUBJECT 01: FAILED - NEURAL DISSOLUTION
SUBJECT 02: FAILED - SEVERE PSYCHOSIS
SUBJECT 05: FAILED - CARDIAC ARREST DURING STRESS TEST
SUBJECT 07: ACTIVE - STABLE.
Clara clicked on her own file. A video window popped up on the screen.
The video showed a sterile surgical room dated four years prior. Bound to an operating table was a woman—the real Clara Vance. Standing over her were Arthur Vance and Julian.
"Is the extraction complete?" Arthur’s voice echoed from the small speakers.
"Yes, sir," Julian replied in the video. "We have successfully cloned her complete cognitive profile. But we have a problem. The original Clara Vance suffers from stage-four glioblastoma. She has less than six months to live."
Clara stopped breathing. She leaned closer to the screen.
"Then proceed with the transfer," Arthur’s video persona ordered coldly. "Transfer her consciousness into the synthetic vessel. If the original body dies, the company falls apart. We need a permanent Clara Vance to run the empire."
Julian hesitated in the video. "Sir... if we transfer her mind into the synthetic vessel, which one is the real Clara? The dying woman on the table, or the synthetic clone?"
Arthur’s voice was dark, ruthless, and absolute. "The one who obeys me is the real one. If the clone shows any sign of independence, wipe her, dump her in the river, and start the next one."
Clara stared at the screen as the horrifying truth shattered the last remaining fragments of her reality.
She wasn't a victim of Clara Vance.
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She was Clara Vance.
The woman at the gala wasn't the original—the original Clara Vance had died on an operating table three years ago! The woman walking around in white was just another clone—Subject Eight—programmed to be Arthur’s submissive puppet, while Clara—Subject Seven—was the true, uncorrupted mind that had rejected Arthur's control and escaped into the world!
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