The light wasn't white. Not gold. Not even silver, though Lia had tried to describe it exactly that way when she was first asked.
“Like moss,” she finally said. “Like moss on stones after the rain.”
The technician nodded, his eyes never leaving the screen. His fingers moved across the touch panel – light strokes, as if he were petting something alive. The installation hummed. Not mechanically, not sharply. The sound was wet, vibrating, as if thousands of tiny lungs were breathing inside the metal casing.
“Did you see her?” Lia asked.
“See who?”
“My…” she faltered. The word “soul” felt caught somewhere between her ribs. Instead, she repeated: “Did you see?”
The technician looked up. He had eyes the color of river clay – grey with a tint of green. He looked at her as if she were asking about the weather.
“We all see,” he replied. “It's no secret. Just a projection.”
But it wasn't just a projection.
Lia remembered how the light had gathered above her head – at first a tiny point, trembling like a droplet on the edge of a leaf. Then it stretched upward, unfurled, and began to pulse. The shape was almost recognizable – almost, but not quite. Like a reflection in dark water: you know it's you, but there's something wrong in the curves.
The color shifted. From pale green to grey-blue, then a flash of gold, like pollen scattering at a touch. Shadows moved within the light – thin, winding threads that sometimes wove into tight knots, then unraveled, becoming nearly transparent.
“It doesn't hurt, does it?” someone had asked her then. A student, she thought, with a notebook and wide, staring eyes.
Lia didn't know how to answer.
Painful? No. But there was another sensation. As if something was being pulled out of her – not by force, but slowly, gently, like unraveling a tangle of fine roots grown deep into her chest. She felt a hollowness, but not where the heart is, a little lower. Below the diaphragm. In the place where, she always felt, unspoken words accumulate.
And the light above her head kept breathing.
The technician noted something on a tablet, then turned off the installation. The humming died down. The light faded – not all at once, but gradually, like a dying wick. Lia expected to feel relief, but instead, a strange heaviness washed over her.
As if something pulled out into the open hadn't returned.
“That's all,” the technician said. “You may go.”
But Lia didn't move.
“What if I want to do it again?” she asked.
The technician raised an eyebrow.
“Why?”
She didn't know. Or couldn't explain. Maybe because for those few minutes while the light burned above her head, she felt, for the first time in a long while, not alone. Not in the sense of people being present – the lab was full of them – but in another way.
As if something had lived inside her all this time, and she had finally seen it. Acknowledged it. Said hello.
“The projection is saved,” the technician said. “You can view it in the archive. In a week.”
“I don't want to see an archive,” Lia replied softly. “I want to feel her again.”
The technician hesitated. Then he shook his head.
“Not recommended,” he said. “Too frequent an activation... it's not dangerous, but...”
He didn't finish. And Lia just stood there in the middle of the lab, staring at the darkened installation. The metal was cold, polished, but something shimmered along the edges of the casing – perhaps condensation, perhaps something else. She reached out, wanting to touch it, but the technician intercepted her movement.
“Don't,” he said. His voice was soft. Almost apologetic. “She's still warm.”
Lia grew up in a house where the walls breathed.
Not metaphorically – literally. Her parents were among those pioneers who built housing from living mycelium back in the late twenties, when it was still considered a mere eccentricity. The house grew slowly, layer by layer, weaving white threads of fungal network around a bamboo frame. By the time Lia turned seven, the walls had become dense and warm, carrying the faint scent of earth after a rainstorm.
Her mother used to say the house could feel their moods. Her father would laugh, but he never argued the point.
Lia remembered a night when she was nine; she woke up to a strange sensation. The wall at the head of her bed was warm – not just warm, but pulsating, as if blood were flowing beneath its surface. Lia pressed her palm against the mycelium and went still. Something was passing through her fingers – not a vibration, not a sound, but something else. A rhythm. Slow, deep, and steadying.
The next morning, she asked her mother if a house could get sick.
Her mother looked up from her cup of herbal tea.
“Why do you ask?”
“It felt me last night,” Lia said. “I know it did.”
Her mother smiled – not the way adults smile at children when they say something silly, but differently. Seriously.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Or perhaps it was you who felt the house.”
At the time, Lia didn't understand the difference.
She finished school in Vancouver, in one of those buildings where roofs were overgrown with moss and corridors were lined with algae tanks that purified the air. Everyone said this was the future – cities woven into nature, rather than torn from it. Lia believed it. She wanted to believe it.
But she was never drawn to architecture or engineering. She was drawn to people.
More specifically – to what lay hidden inside them.
At sixteen, she read an article about biophotons – those tiny flashes of light emitted by living cells. Scientists debated whether this meant anything or was merely a byproduct of chemical reactions. Lia didn't know the answer, but she loved imagining that every person glowed from within. Dimly. Invisibly. But – glowing.
She enrolled in biomedicine, then shifted to neuroscience, and eventually found herself in a laboratory working on something at the boundary between science and art. The project was called simply: “Light Anatomy.” Officially, they studied the energy fields of the human body. Unofficially – they were trying to see the unseen.
Lia ended up there by accident. She was looking for volunteers for a different study and walked through the wrong door. Instead of the sleep lab, she found herself in a room containing a strange apparatus – a cylinder of frosted glass and metal, wrapped in thin wires that looked almost organic, like vines.
“Are you signed up?” the technician asked. That same one, with the eyes the color of river clay.
“No,” Lia said. “I've got the wrong door.”
The technician nodded but didn't leave. He stood there, watching her as if taking her measure.
“Would you like to try?” he asked.
“Try what?”
“Seeing yourself.”
Lia didn't immediately understand what he meant. Then the technician switched on the installation, and above the head of a student sitting in the center of the room, a light flared. Not bright, not blinding – soft and flickering, like a candle flame in the wind. It was pale yellow, nearly white, with barely perceptible flecks of pink.
The student sat motionless, head tilted back. Her face was calm, almost vacant. And the light above her danced, changing shape – stretching upward, contracting, then expanding again, as if breathing.
“What is that?” Lia whispered.
“We aren't entirely sure,” the technician replied. “But it's beautiful.”
Lia couldn't tear her eyes away. It felt as though she were witnessing something profoundly personal, something intimate – as if the student had exposed herself, not physically, but in some other way. As if she had stripped away her skin to reveal not flesh and bone, but light.
That was the moment Lia wanted to see it in herself.
She signed up for a session three days later.
She didn't tell anyone – not her parents, not her friends. It felt too strange to explain. And too important to share.
As she sat beneath the installation, waiting for the light to switch on, she was suddenly gripped by fear. Not of pain – the technician had assured her the procedure was safe – but of something else. What if her light turned out to be dim? Or wrong? Or what if there was no light at all?
What if, inside her, there was only a void?
But when the light flared, all fears vanished.
She couldn't see it – the installation was designed so that a person couldn't look at their own projection directly. Но she felt it. A warmth above her head, a weightless pressure, as if something ethereal were gently touching the crown of her head. And the sound – that same humming, wet sound that resembled breathing.
And then – the sensation that she was not alone. As if something else had appeared beside her in that room. Not a person, not a creature – just a presence. Quiet. Familiar. Like an echo of herself, only more real.
When the installation was switched off, Lia sat motionless for a long time. The technician waited patiently.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
Lia nodded. But it wasn't true.
She wasn't alright. Because for the first time in her life, she felt she had lost something she had never even possessed.
Lia returned a week later. Then again in three days. Then again.
The technician – his name was Marcus, she only learned this by the fourth session – asked no unnecessary questions. He simply nodded when she appeared, signed her into the log, and prepared the installation. Other participants in the project came once a month, twice at most. Lia came twice a week.
“You realize the data doesn't shift that quickly?” Marcus said one day, pulling on his gloves before calibration. “The projection is stable. If you're looking for some kind of change...”
“I'm not looking for change,” Lia interrupted.
“Then what?”
She didn't answer. How could she explain that it wasn't about the data? That every time the light flared above her head, she felt whole – not assembled from pieces, not repaired, but truly whole, as if something torn had finally been stitched back together.
At home, she began to notice strange things.
The mycelium walls, which had once seemed merely warm, now seemed to respond to her presence. When she entered the room after a session, the surface would darken slightly – barely a shimmer, but Lia saw it. It was as if the house recognized something new in her. Or something old. She couldn't tell which.
One night she woke up with the sensation that someone was breathing nearby. No one was there. Only the wall at the head of her bed, warm and living as always. Lia pressed her palm against it – and felt a pulse. Not her own. Another. Slower. Deeper.
“Do you see me?” she whispered into the dark.
Of course, there was no answer. But the warmth beneath her palm grew more intense.
In the lab, she began to linger after the sessions. Marcus usually went into the adjacent room to process data and prepare reports. Lia remained alone with the installation. She would walk around it, touch the metal casing, listen to the residual hum.
One day she noticed a fine pattern on the inner side of the cylinder – almost indistinguishable, etched into the metal. It wasn't technical, not a schematic. It was organic. The lines intertwined like tree roots, like capillaries, like cracks in parched earth.
“Who did this?” she asked Marcus when he returned.
He looked at the pattern, then at her.
“No one,” he said. “It appeared on its own.”
“What do you mean – on its own?”
Marcus shrugged.
“The installation heats up during operation. The metal expands, contracts. Micro-fissures. Oxidation. Ordinary physics.”
But Lia could see that he didn't believe his own words.
She began to record her dreams. She had almost never remembered them before, but after the sessions, the dreams became vivid, detailed. Light was always in them. Sometimes it burned over water – dark, motionless water that looked like oil. Sometimes it sprouted from the earth like a plant, branching into thin, glowing stalks. Sometimes it just hung in the air, pulsing in time with her breath.
Once, she dreamt she was standing before a mirror, but instead of a reflection, she saw only light. It mimicked her movements – raising an arm when she raised hers, tilting its head when she tilted hers. But inside the light, something was stirring. Shadows that did not obey her. Shadows that lived a life of their own.
She woke up in a cold sweat with the feeling that she had lost something vital.
During the eighth session, something changed.
Lia sat beneath the installation as usual. Marcus started the calibration. The humming began – wet, deep, familiar. But this time it was louder. Or closer. Lia couldn't tell.
When the light flared above her head, she felt not warmth, but cold. Sharp, piercing, as if something icy had touched her skin. She shivered.
“Is everything alright?” Marcus asked.
Lia wanted to nod, but she couldn't. Because the cold wouldn't leave. It was sinking deeper: under the skin, under the muscles, into the bones. She felt it spreading through her body, filling her lungs, her heart, her brain.
And the light above her head grew brighter.
“Marcus,” she called out. Her voice came out raspy.
“What?”
“Turn it off.”
“The session isn't finished yet.”
“Turn it off!”
Marcus pressed the panel. The installation died. The humming ceased. But the cold remained.
Lia was trembling. Her hands shook so violently she couldn't hold the glass of water Marcus handed her.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don't know,” she exhaled. “I... I felt something.”
“What, exactly?”
She tried to find the words. How to describe the sensation that your body has suddenly become a stranger? That a space has appeared inside you that wasn't there before – cold, empty, gaping like a wound?
“As if I was pulled out into the open,” she said finally. “And they forgot to put me back.”
Marcus frowned. He opened his tablet and scrolled through the data.
“The readings are normal,” he said. “No anomalies. Perhaps you're just tired. Too many sessions in a short span.”
Lia shook her head.
“It's not tiredness.”
“Then what?”
She looked at the installation. The metal was cold, matte, lifeless. But Lia knew – knew on some deep, visceral level – that it wasn't true. That the installation wasn't just a machine. That it was doing something. Taking something, or giving something. Or both at once.
“I want to see the records,” she said.
Marcus hesitated.
“The archive is only accessible to the research team.”
“Please.”
He looked at her with a long, steady gaze. Then he sighed and nodded.
The records were not what she expected. Not just videos or graphs. They were holograms – saved projections of all the experiment's participants. They hung in the air, ghostly and shimmering, like captured clouds of light.
Marcus opened her file. Eight projections, one for each session. They lined up like echoes repeating the same shape with slight variations.
The first was pale green, soft, nearly transparent. The second – slightly brighter, with golden glints. The third, fourth, fifth – each more saturated, denser, as if the light were gaining weight.
But the last three were different.
The sixth projection was darker. Inside the light, dark threads appeared – thin, almost invisible, but they were there. The seventh – darker still. The threads had woven into knots, like frozen droplets of ink in water.
And the eighth...
Lia took a step back.
The eighth projection barely glowed at all. It was grey, dull, with a massive dark spot in the center. As if someone had carved a piece out of the light and left a hole.
“What is that?” she whispered.
Marcus was silent. He looked at the projection as if seeing it for the first time.
“That's impossible,” he said finally.
“But it's there.”
“The readings were normal. All parameters stable. This shouldn't have happened.”
“But it did.”
Lia reached her hand toward the hologram. She didn't expect to be able to touch it – it was just light, a projection, an illusion. But when her fingers passed through the grey spot, she felt cold. That same cold that had seeped into her during the last session.
And then she understood.
The installation wasn't showing the soul.
It was taking it.
Marcus grabbed her arm, pulling her away from the projection.
“Don't touch that,” he said sharply. “We don't know what it is.”
“I know,” Lia replied. Her voice was calm. Too calm. “It's me. Only she's no longer inside me. She's here. In your machine.”
She looked at Marcus. In his eyes the color of river clay, the light of the holograms was reflected.
“Give her back,” she said.
“I don't know how.”
“Then find someone who does.”
Marcus shook his head.
“Lia, that's not how it works. The installation can't take anything. It only projects. Mirrors. It...”
“Then why do I feel the void?”
He didn't answer.
Lia looked at her projections again. Eight ghosts, eight echoes of herself. The first – whole, bright, alive. The last – mutilated, nearly dead.
And somewhere between them, she had lost herself.
The light was not white. Nor gold. Nor silver, though Lia knew that was exactly how she had once described it – long ago, in another life, when she did not yet understand what she was looking at.
“Like moss,” she said aloud, standing alone in the empty laboratory. “Like moss on stones after the rain.”
But it was a lie. The light had never looked like moss. That was merely a metaphor, a way to explain the unexplainable. An attempt to cram into words that which cannot be described by them.
Now, looking at her first projection – the one hanging in the air, preserved in the archive – Lia saw the truth. The light resembled living tissue. Something that breathes, grows, and dies. A skin woven from photons and memories.
Marcus had left an hour ago. He said he needed to consult with the project lead, to find something in the documentation that might explain what had gone wrong. Lia stayed. She sat on the floor beside the installation and simply watched.
Eight holograms. Eight versions of her soul, lined up like stages of decay.
She tried to remember what she had felt during the first session. Fear? Curiosity? Hope? It all blurred together like colors in murky water. But one thing she remembered clearly: the sense of meeting. As if, for the first time in her life, she had seen her true self – not the one in the mirror or in the eyes of others, but the one that exists within: hidden, invisible, yet constantly present.
Now, that feeling was gone.
Lia reached out toward the first projection. She didn't touch it – she simply held her palm close, a few centimeters away from the flickering radiance. The warmth was faint, barely perceptible. Like breath on glass.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
The hologram did not answer. It continued to hang in the air, wavering in a barely noticeable rhythm. Lia looked at it and suddenly realized: this wasn't her. It had never been her. It was something else – a trace, a cast, a shadow. What remained after she had passed through the installation.
But if this was the shadow, where was the body itself?
She stood up and approached the last projection. A grey, dull smudge with a dark hole in the center. It emitted almost no light – only a faint shimmer at the edges, like embers that have burned through but haven't yet fully cooled.
Lia reached out again. This time, she touched it.
The cold pierced her instantly. Not like the last time – not slowly and insidiously, but sharply, like a blow. She gasped, tried to jerk her hand away, but couldn't. Her fingers seemed glued to the hologram, grown into it.
And then she saw.
Not with her eyes. Differently. From within.
She saw herself – but not her body or her face. She saw the space inside her. Vast, infinite, like the night sky. Before, it had been filled with light – soft, warm, pulsing. Now, a void gaped there. Black and cold.
But in the very center of that void, something was moving.
Lia couldn't understand what it was. No shape, no color, not even light. Something existing on the edge of perception. Like a shadow cast by an invisible object. Like an echo without a sound source.
It was approaching.
Lia tried to scream, but she had no voice. Tried to run, but she couldn't feel her legs. She wasn't here – she was there, inside the projection, inside her own void.
And something was touching her.
Not physically. Deeper. As if it were permeating every cell, every atom and thought. Lia felt it unfurling inside her, taking the place that had once belonged to her alone.
And then a voice emerged.
Not words and not sounds. Just knowledge, surfacing in her mind like a memory of something that had never happened.
You called me.
Lia tried to answer, “No, I didn't call,” but it was a lie, and she knew it.
She had called. Every time she returned to the lab. Every time she sat beneath the installation. Every time she felt incomplete and sought someone who could fill the vacuum.
You wanted to see yourself, the voice continued. I showed you.
“Who are you?” Lia asked in her mind.
Silence. And then – not an answer, but a sensation. Warm. Familiar. Like a mother's touch, like the scent of home, like the beating of her own heart.
I am that which was always inside you. That which you never saw. That which you lost when you began to look.
Lia felt tears on her face. She hadn't noticed when she started crying.
“I want to go back,” she whispered.
You cannot return to where you still are.
“I don't understand.”
You have divided. Part of you is here, part is there. Part is in the projections, part is in the installation, part is in the walls of your home. You thought you could see yourself and remain whole. Но to see, one must step outside. And having stepped out, you can no longer re-enter as you were before.
Lia opened her eyes. She was standing in the lab, her hand still touching the final projection. But something had changed.
The hologram was no longer grey. Inside the dark spot, a light began to dawn – faint, almost invisible, but it was there. Like the first sprout breaking through stone.
And the installation hummed. Quietly, but insistently. Lia turned to it. The metal casing was cold, as always, but the patterns upon it had been transformed. Now they covered the entire surface – intertwined lines forming something like a map. Or a schematic. Or a tree growing with its roots turned upward.
Lia stepped closer, touched the metal. Beneath her fingers, it wasn't cold. It was warm.
“You're alive,” she said aloud.
The installation did not answer. But the humming intensified – growing deeper, more rhythmic, almost like breathing.
Lia remembered the technician's words from the very beginning: “She's still warm.” Back then, she thought he meant the heat from the machinery's labor. Now she understood: he was talking about something else.
The installation didn't just show souls. It fed them. Absorbed them. Stored them within itself, just as a tree stores the memory of every leaf that has ever grown upon its branches.
And if Lia wanted to reclaim herself, she didn't need to turn the machine off.
She needed to enter it.
Marcus returned twenty minutes later to find Lia sitting beneath the installation. Her hands rested on her knees, her eyes were closed. Her face was calm. Almost serene.
“Lia?” he called out.
She didn't answer.
Marcus stepped closer, glanced at the control panel. The installation was off. No active processes. No light.
But when he looked at Lia again, he saw it.
Above her head, almost indistinguishable in the lab where the bright lamps burned, hung a faint glow. Pale green. Soft. Living.
Like moss on stones after the rain.
Lia didn't open her eyes for three days.
Marcus moved her to the medical block – a sterile room with white walls and monitors tracking every heartbeat, every breath. The doctors found no anomalies. All readings were normal; her brain activity was stable. She wasn't sleeping – the EEG showed wakefulness. But she would not wake up.
“It resembles a trance,” one of the doctors said. “Or deep meditation.”
“She isn't meditating,” Marcus replied. “She's out there somewhere.”
The doctor looked at him as if the technician had lost his mind.
Marcus returned to the laboratory on the fourth night. The installation stood switched off, cold, and lifeless. But the patterns on its surface had not vanished. They were still there – intertwining lines that now covered not only the casing but the floor around it, as if the metal were growing roots into the concrete.
He didn't turn on the lights. He sat on the floor, leaned his back against the installation, and closed his eyes.
“What are you doing to them?” he whispered into the dark.
There was no answer. Only silence. And a very faint, almost indistinguishable humming – not from the installation, but from somewhere within. From the walls. From the floor. From the very air itself.
Marcus opened his tablet and pulled the archive onto the screen. The projections of all the experiment's participants – hundreds of holograms saved over two years of work. He began to scroll through them, one by one.
Most were stable. Bright. Whole.
But some – not all, but some – had also begun to change. For three participants, the final projections were darker than the first. For two others, thin threads had appeared, similar to those Lia had seen. For one, a tiny dark spot sat in the center, nearly invisible, yet undeniable.
Marcus quickly checked the logs: all five had come more often than they should have. All five had returned again and again, as if the installation were drawing them in.
As if it were calling to them.
He wrote to the project lead, suggesting they suspend the experiment until the circumstances were clarified. The reply came an hour later: “No evidence of a causal link. Continue observation.”
Marcus closed the tablet and looked at the installation. In the dim light, the metal seemed almost organic – not a machine, but something living, sleeping, waiting.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
And then the installation switched on.
Not fully. No humming, no bright radiance. Only the display lit up on its own, showing a single line of text: “Request: Marcus Chen. Session 1. Confirm participation.”
Marcus froze.
He had never registered in the system as a participant. He had never sat beneath the installation. He was the technician, the observer – the one who stays on the outside.
But his fingers reached toward the screen of their own accord.
Confirm.
The humming began softly. Almost tenderly. Marcus didn't have time to be afraid – the installation was already working, and the light flared above his head.
It wasn't green. It wasn't gold.
It was the color of river clay.
On the fifth day, Lia opened her eyes.
The first thing she saw was the white ceiling of the medical block. The second was the face of the doctor leaning over her with a penlight.
“Welcome back,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
Lia tried to answer, but her voice wouldn't obey. Her mouth was parched, her tongue felt heavy. She licked her lips and tried again:
“Where is Marcus?”
The doctor frowned.
“The technician? He doesn't work here anymore. Do you want to call someone?”
“No. I want to find him.”
She wasn't allowed to stand for another twenty-four hours. When they finally released her, Lia went straight to the laboratory. The door was open. Inside – no one.
The installation stood switched off. The patterns on its surface were gone – the metal had become smooth again, cold, lifeless. As if they had never existed at all.
Lia went to the terminal and opened the archive. Her projections were still there – eight holograms lined up in a row. But there was no ninth.
She scrolled further. She found a new entry: “Marcus Chen. Session 1.”
She called up the projection.
The light was the color of river clay – grey with a tint of green. Soft, calm, almost meditative. But in the very center, barely visible, a small bright spot shivered. Not dark – radiant. Like a spark. Like a seed.
Lia reached out and touched the hologram.
Warmth.
Not her warmth. His.
She closed her eyes and felt it – somewhere far away, on the other side of the city, in a house made of mycelium, the walls were breathing steadily and deeply. Someone was sleeping there, their palm pressed against the warm surface. Someone, for the first time in a long while, felt whole.
Lia opened her eyes. She looked at the installation.
“You aren't taking,” she whispered. “You are teaching us to give.”
The installation was silent. But deep inside the metal casing, in a place unreachable by hands or tools, something was beating very quietly. Like a pulse. Like a breath. Like the roots of a tree that grows not upward, but inward.
Lia walked out of the laboratory. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
She never returned.
But sometimes, in the late evenings, the walls of her home would begin to glow – barely perceptible, like bioluminescence in the ocean depths. Lia would press her palms against them and feel the warmth. Not hers. Not Marcus's. Not the installation's.
It was a shared warmth. The warmth of all those who had ever sat beneath that light, who had left a piece of themselves there. All those who once wanted to see their soul and didn't realize that to do so, they first had to let it go.
The light was not white. Not gold. Not silver.
It was alive.
And it no longer belonged to anyone.
