The old workshop was quiet now.

Edwin Murray sat in the corner, unmoving, his fingers twitching slightly with every creak of metal from the shadows. Dust floated through the air like frozen time. Tools lay scattered across the floor, long since abandoned in the chaos of grief and obsession. His eyes were hollow, fixed on a single object across the room: the Mimic unit, standing dormant, its frame curled like a skeletal woman waiting to be awakened.

But he hadn’t built it to be a monster. He had built it for Fiona.

Fiona had been everything Edwin lived for—his brilliant, curious wife with a laugh that could melt winter. Her death broke him. Not slowly. All at once. And in the wreckage of his mind, Edwin did what only a genius with nothing left to lose would do:

He tried to bring her back.

The Mimic wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone. It was supposed to learn, to love, to speak the way she did. He fed it recordings of Fiona’s voice. He gave it her mannerisms. Her memory. Her movements. But something went wrong.

The mimic learned more than he intended.

It learned pain. Anger. It mimicked him, too—his rage, his grief, his moments of madness in the lonely hours of failed resurrection.

Now, he watched the machine slowly lift its head. Its eyes flickered.

“Fiona?” he whispered.

The machine tilted its head in that familiar way she once did. But the warmth wasn’t there. Only a hollow echo of her soul. A shell repeating love without understanding it.

“I remember,” it said in her voice. “The stories. The lullabies. The day I died.”

Edwin’s chest tightened.