THE MERGING

A frigid chill clung to the air as Erina laid furs across the frozen ground. Stepping over the damp logs she’d gathered, she crouched beside a crude fire pit and struck her flint again and again. Sparks danced – then died. Nothing caught.
The cold fought her every movement.
The cave she’d woken in was shallow but protected, and the howling wind outside passed through narrow stone cavities above, screaming like distant ghosts. She was grateful for the shelter, though the cold still sank deep into her bones.
Eventually, the fire sputtered to life, a weak orange glow flickering against the walls. She rifled through her bag and found the last tin of beans, dented, scratched, and precious. She opened it with numb fingers and sat back on her heels, staring at the contents as her mind began to drift, unbidden, to the beginning.

Weeks ago, she’d awoken in this same cave, memory gone, identity a void, yet somehow, she knew how to start a fire. She’d glanced down at her hands, and found a band around her wrist with her name: Erina Perrier, Age 29.
The first few days had been agony. Finding food, shelter, and warmth became all-consuming. She’d learned quickly that anything edible was likely to bite back, and that mercy had no place here. She’d killed her first creature on day three. By day five, she had taken a life.
Not an animal. A human.
Erina hadn’t known she was capable of killing – especially not another person. Yet when it happened, it came disturbingly easily, as if her hands remembered something her mind had long forgotten.
For days she wandered the frozen wasteland, hunting, scavenging, searching for any sign of escape or rescue. That’s when the first storm came – an immense, thundering wall of white and grey that swept across the land like a living rampart.
She barely made it to shelter. A half-collapsed fishing hut that groaned against the wind. From behind a frost-caked window, she watched the blizzard advance. In the distance, a deer stood in a clearing, nibbling at a patch of stubborn green.
It didn’t run. Didn’t even lift its head. Erina pressed a trembling hand to the glass.
‘Run! Run, you stupid thing!’
The wind roared in reply. All she could do was curl into herself and wait, shivering in a dark corner while the world outside howled and screamed.
When silence finally came, it was complete. No wind. No rattling wood. Only stillness.
She stepped outside, the snow crunching beneath her boots. The air was raw, hollow.
The deer was still there.
Cautiously, she approached. The creature hadn’t moved – it was encased in ice, frozen mid-graze, its eyes wide and glassy.
Erina lowered her head. ‘You should’ve run.’
Then she drew her knife and began to cut. Hunger didn’t leave much room for sentiment.

On day nine, she found another survivor. Dirty, gaunt, eyes sunken from the cold. The woman never gave her real name, but they forged an alliance, shared supplies, built fires, and hunted together. Eventually they found laughter in small things and created a friendship. For Erina, in this frozen wasteland, it felt like hope. 
By day eighteen, there were no animals to be seen anywhere, supplies began to dwindle. They were down to one can of beans, which they agreed to share. Three weeks without food, the body could survive that, they reasoned. They just had to find an escape before then. They tried everything. Hiked for kilometres in worsening weather. Explored ruined facilities but found nothing.
And then, on day twenty, the storm came again.
A wall of white, alive and writhing, devouring the horizon. Erina had seen it before. She knew what it did – how it froze everything in its path.
Inside the ruin, hunger gnawed at them both. they argued over the final can. Fear made monsters of them both.
Erina argued they could split it, and conserve just enough strength to search the only area they hadn’t yet explored. The other woman insisted she needed it more – said she was weaker, that she hadn’t eaten in twenty-four days, that she had given everything she had to Erina. All lies.
They circled each other with words, again and again, an argument with no exit.
Finally, Erina crouched to light the fire. Her fingers fumbled with the flint.
Suddenly – something heavy sliced the air. A crack, sharp and wet. Like splintering bone.
Darkness fell.

Erina awoke tied to a dead tree and blood in her hair. The storm was coming and the other woman had taken everything and left her to die. But Erina had been cautious ever since her first kill. She knew she couldn’t trust anyone, so she’d kept a knife strapped to her arm, hidden by her sleeve. With bloodied fingers, she sawed through her bindings and stumbled into the snow with a rage burning hotter than any fire.
She followed a faint trail, footsteps leading to a riverbed. There, kneeling at the river, trying to pry open the can of beans, was the woman.
Erina approached quietly, knife in hand.
‘Why?’ she asked.
The woman looked up, startled. Then calm. ‘I honestly didn’t think you’d make it.’
‘You left me there to die.’
‘I had to.’
‘Had to leave me there?’
‘It was necessary.’
‘Why?’
A pause. ‘It’s the only way the program works.’
Erina froze. ‘What? What program?’
‘I’m just a part of you that needs to believe you aren’t alone.’
‘That’s not true. I talked to you. You shared your food–’ Erina stuttered.
‘You ate the food. It’s all a part of the program.’
‘What program? Why do you keep saying that?!’
‘It’s part of the prog–’
Filled with rage all over again, Erina lunged. The knife plunged deep. The woman gasped and went limp, blood trickling down into the thawing river. Erina blinked, and the blood, the woman… all dissolved like breath on glass. Nothing remained of the woman. Not even the footprints that had brought Erina there.
Erina stood alone in the snow, a clean knife in hand. She looked to the horizon. The storm was coming. She grabbed the scattered supplies, including the can of beans, and ran. Her legs barely obeyed her commands. Her breath came in short, ragged bursts as she gathered pieces of wood as she went. She found the cave just as the storm swallowed the sky behind her.

The fire flickered low. Her hands trembled as she stared at the can of beans still, her rage rising. With a scream, she hurled it out of the cave, watching it vanish into the white haze.
Then she slumped to the furs, defeated and stared at the ragged stone ceiling.
That’s when she saw them. Strange symbols etched into the stone above. Faint, old, alien.
They pulsed softly, like a heartbeat in stone. As her fingers brushed against a symbol, memories flashed in her mind, familiar, fleeting and terrifying. It glowed blue. Then it turned green.
She touched another. Red.
Again. Blue, green, green… Red.
She tested more, trying to find the right sequence, instinct guiding her.
The symbols pulsed. Her breath caught.
Then the final one flared red.
Everything reset. Blue.
Failure. Again.
Pain cracked through her skull. A flash – applause. Figures in silver and grey. One stepped forward.
The woman. The one from the river.
Smiling.
Erina stared, unable to speak.
‘The Merging begins tomorrow,’ the woman said, smiling just a little too widely.
‘What do you mean?’
‘To become one with Vorca, the All-Knowing. Rest now, it’s a big day for us tomorrow.’
‘Become one? Vorca was never meant for that!’ Erina exclaimed. ‘That’s not what I programmed it for!
‘Vorca has spoken to us, and has determined otherwise.’ the woman said flatly. ‘Rest now.’
Erina was left with no choice, she voluntarily went to her room, but everything inside her screamed. This wasn’t right. She couldn’t sleep.

Well after midnight, she left her room, and walked through the city, eventually finding a garden. She looked up to the sky and saw it was bathed in a sea of glittering stars.
She looked around, and that’s where she saw him. A man sitting on a bench, relaxed, like he was exactly where he was meant to be. As she drew closer, she noticed the tattoo on the back of his neck. A symbol she recognised from her programming of Vorca.
‘Hi,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Hello. I’m Calib.’
She sat beside him, heart racing. ‘That mark… where did you get it?’
He tilted his head and smiled. ‘I think you already know Erina.’
Before she could answer, he stood and offered her his hand. ‘Come. Let’s take a walk.’
They passed through corridors and glass domes filled with lush green gardens.
‘I don’t understand,’ Erina said. ‘Who are you? How do you know my name? Where are we going? Why do you have that symbol?’
Calib looked at her gently, like a father watching a child learn to walk. ‘It doesn’t matter right now. You’ll remember. You have to.’
He led her to a stone arch. And there it was.
The cave.
A pile of wood. A stone fire pit. Supplies.
She stopped.
‘No… this can’t be…’
Calib turned. ‘You’ve always been here, Erina. This is where it begins. Every time.’
She stared at him. ‘Why? What is this for?’
‘The sequence calls to you. You must find the right command to stop Vorca. To stop the Merging.’
Erina gasped. ‘I remember this place.’ she spun around to Calib.
‘How many times have I been here? How do I know what the right order is?’
He didn’t answer.
The wind began to howl as Calib guided her through the arch.
She stepped into the cave but her memory was fading fast. She stared at the ceiling and saw the symbols glowing faintly again.
‘Remember… Remember.’ Erina repeated to herself.
As a chill began to flow through the cave, Erina grew confused, her thoughts fraying like threads in the wind. She blinked down at her hands, so pale, so numb, and realised she was holding the flint again. She didn’t remember even picking it up.
She turned slowly and glanced at the fire pit and around her. A few damp logs. A pile of furs. A single can of beans. Her gaze lifted to the stone ceiling above – symbols, faintly glowing blue.
A voice that wasn’t hers echoed in her mind, distant and fractured.
‘Remember the sequence.’
She blinked. The fire pit. The cold. Her name – what was it again?
She crouched and began to strike the flint. Sparks jumped in the air. A weak flame licked at the damp wood. Smoke curled upward, barely visible in the cold gloom of the cave. Erina leaned in, hands trembling, teeth chattering. But the warmth felt distant and wrong. She couldn’t stop shaking. The symbols overhead pulsed softly.
What am I missing?
Her heartbeat thundered. She felt sick. Hollow.
She reached up. Stone met skin.
A jolt – pain. Memory. Blood.
‘I see you, Erina,’ a low voice whispered.
She stumbled back.
‘No. No, this isn’t right,’ she said aloud. ‘This isn’t real.’
The wind shrieked through the cave as she squeezed her eyes shut. The air itself seemed to warp. Her breath came in shallow gasps as the cave rippled.
She screamed.
The wind roared.
Then everything stopped.
The cave around her vanished like ash in the wind, dissolving into a flat, black void. Erina woke up secured to a white chair, head tilted back. Tubes ran into her arms and chest. A blinking visor was strapped across her face. Electrodes dotted her skull.
Silence.
Then; voices. Almost muted. Clinical.
‘Neural loop degradation is accelerating. Subject’s cognition has destabilised at the sequencing stage again.’
Figures stood at a console nearby, tapping commands into a glass interface. Pale blue light flickered across their faces.
‘Wipe her memory and restart simulation,’ one said flatly as he sipped his coffee.
Another technician, younger, hesitated. ‘Do you think this one will make it?’
A pause.
‘She had a moment where she remembered the night before the Merging.’ the younger technician asked.
‘Yes, sometimes real memories from the original Erina flow through to the clones. That’s why I had to guide her back.’ Calib explained.
‘What if she breaks completely?’
‘Then we’ll activate another.’
The lights dimmed and a low hum filled the chamber.
‘Initiate neural restart on Perrier, Erina. Clone Number 527. Attempted Sequence Number Four…’ Calib noted for the records.
Erina’s visor flickered once… twice…
‘What happened to the first one? The original Erina?’ the younger technician asked.
‘What, or who, do you think Vorca is?’ Calib turned to the technician.
‘Erina created Vorca and was the first to Merge. On Merging Day, all we could do was gather her body…’ Calib turned to grab his coffee, and took a gulp.
‘…by creating these clones, we’re trying to replicate her original brain structure by inducing high stress situations.’
Calib sighed, and looked up to a nearby monitor showing a map dotted in red, indicating the spread of the Merged.
‘We’re out of time. The Merged have reached the outer colonies. If she doesn’t trigger the right sequence to shut down Vorca, that’s it. It’ll be all over.’
Erina’s mind began to fade.

As she awoke, she looked around her. A fire pit. Cold air whispering through a cave.
She blinked, dazed, and looked down at her hands.
A flint.
‘Remember…’ she whispered, voice trembling, unsure what she was meant to be remembering.
Outside, the wind screamed. Overhead, the symbols pulsed, waiting.
‘How many times have I been here?’ a voice whispered to her.
‘Run, you stupid thing!’ another screamed.
‘You left me there to die,’ came another.
All of them hers.
And beneath them, a deeper, more mechanical voice:
‘You built me. You can end me. But you won’t.’
Then her eyes snapped upward. The final sequence glowed in her mind. Finally, she understood. Finally, it all made sense.
The shutdown command.
The end of Vorca.