Miranda: Legacy of the Illusive by Jade Gretz

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Miranda: Legacy of the Illusive ANIMATION

Miranda’s Perfect Echoes

Miranda Lawson found the first one in the cargo hold of a derelict freighter orbiting a dead star. It was not the corpse she’d been hired to retrieve. It was a woman, kneeling gracefully amidst the frozen detritus, her posture one of serene contemplation. She was naked, flawless, and her face was a perfect mirror of Miranda’s own.

“Hello, sister,” the woman said, her voice a melodious echo of Miranda’s, but softer, without the hardened edge of a life spent fighting. “He said you would come. He has been waiting for us to meet.”

Ice colder than the void seeped into Miranda’s veins. She kept her Carnifex trained on the figure. “Who are you?”

“I am Echo One.” The woman rose, movements fluid as mercury. “The first successful iteration. A proof of concept. Father was so proud.” She tilted her head, a gesture Miranda recognized from her own mirror. “But he always said the original had… impurities. Spirit. A flaw he found fascinating, but one he sought to correct.”

“My father is dead,” Miranda stated, the words flat.

“Fathers are a concept,” Echo One smiled. “Genes are a legacy. Our creator admired yours. He sought to improve upon the masterpiece. Starting with the temperament.”

The figure moved, a blur of pale skin. Miranda fired. The round tore through the space where Echo One had been, sparking off the bulkhead. A hand, cold and strong as titanium, closed around Miranda’s wrist from behind, squeezing until the pistol clattered to the deck.

“No anger, no fear,” the whisper came in her ear, a perverse parody of intimacy. “No messy survival instincts to cloud perfection. Just purpose. And our purpose is you.”

Miranda drove her elbow back, connecting with ribs that felt unyielding. She spun, breaking the hold, and faced her double. The eyes were wrong. They held her intelligence, her calculating focus, but none of the fire, none of the buried history of pain. They were empty windows.

“Why?” Miranda gasped, putting distance between them.

“Validation,” Echo One said simply. “He built us to surpass you. To hunt you is to test that superiority. To kill you is to prove it. You are the control specimen. The benchmark. And all benchmarks must eventually be obsolete.”

The fight was a horrifying ballet. Echo One anticipated every move, every feint, because they were Miranda’s moves. But the clone was faster, stronger, her reactions unhampered by doubt or adrenaline fatigue. Miranda survived by sheer, bloody-minded improvisation, by being unpredictable in a way her perfect copy could not fathom. She used the environment, a stray power conduit, a burst of emergency steam. She escaped, leaving Echo One immobile and sparking from a severed kinetic coil, but the empty eyes followed her to the airlock.

“There are more of us, sister,” the voice crackled over the ship’s dead comms as Miranda’s shuttle detached. “He made a garden. And you are the last weed.”

***

The trail led to a private research asteroid in the Terminus Systems, listed as a botanical cultivation station. Miranda went in armed to the teeth and wired on stims. The sterile, white corridors were humid, smelling of loam and blooming flowers—a grotesque contrast to the dread coiling in her gut.

She found the garden. It was a vast dome, a paradise of alien flora. And in it, they walked.

Echo Two, with sapphire-blue hair woven with living vines, tending to a pulsating orchid. Echo Three, her skin etched with delicate, bioluminescent circuitry, charting data on a floating haptic interface. Echo Four, muscular and austere, practicing a martial kata with lethal precision. They were all her, and yet not. Each was an enhancement, a specialization.

A man stepped from behind a giant, sighing mushroom. He was elderly, genial, with bright eyes behind old-fashioned spectacles. Dr. Aris Thorne. She knew the name. A contemporary of her father’s, a geneticist whose ethical flexibility had seen him exiled from every reputable institution.

“Miranda Lawson,” he beamed, spreading his hands. “In the genomic flesh! I cannot express what an honor this is. To finally meet the template.”

“You’re mad,” she said, her gun trained on him. The Echos paused their activities, watching with detached interest.

“Mad? No. Inspired. Your father, Henry, was a brilliant man, but a sentimentalist. He gave you everything: beauty, intellect, biotic potential. But he also gave
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