And somewhere, in the fourth layer, Arthur smiled.
Then she found it. Buried beneath the math was a single, looping error. A memory fragment that didn't fit. A door that shouldn't exist in the lattice.
The technology was simple in theory, brutal in practice. A Reflect4 Proxy used a quantum entanglement lattice—four layers of reflection: Neural, Mnemonic, Emotive, and Volitional. When a client lost someone, they didn't want a therapist. They wanted an echo. So they hired Mara. She would sit in a dim room, plug the cortical shunt into her mastoid process, and the lattice would overwrite her with the departed.
Mara felt Arthur's emotions flood in—not grief or love, but hunger . A cold, architectural hunger. He hadn't wanted to escape death. He had wanted to become the medium of death itself.
She opened the door anyway.
"Mara," her handler said through the speaker, "this one is different. Arthur was a quantum architect. He helped design the first Proxy mirrors. His ghost might fight back."
