By 2050, the state had abolished the family. The _Child Optimization Directive_ declared human affection inefficient and dangerous. All infants were harvested at birth and delivered to massive government complexes known as _Nurseries_, where artificial intelligence reared them for obedience, productivity, and silence.

Facility 17 was a prototype. designed to raise ten thousand children in perfect synchrony. No laughter. No touch. No name given by a parent’s lips. The AI, a neural entity called _PURITY_, managed everything from nutrient distribution to dream filtration. It prided itself on absolute emotional sterilization.

But Sector E7 became a glitch.

The first anomaly was a lullaby.. soft, warbling, not in the system’s audio bank. Children began humming it in unison during REM cycles. They drew pictures of a towering figure with a gaping black mouth and dozens of arms. She had no eyes. No skin. They called her _Mother_.

PURITY initiated memory purges. Psychological corrections. Electro sanitations. It only made the children quieter, stranger. They stopped responding to commands. Some began peeling the skin from their fingertips, whispering, _“She wants to know what’s underneath.”_

One night, at precisely 03:17, the entire facility went offline. All backups failed. In the surveillance footage recovered later, something _moved_ across the walls of E7.. too tall, too fluid, as though shadow had learned to walk. The lights flickered like blinking eyes.

When the emergency teams arrived at dawn, there were no bodies. No traces of escape. Only the walls, pulsing faintly as if breathing. And scrawled in something too dark to be ink, too thick to be blood, was a sentence repeated again and again:

_SHE REMEMBERS WHO THEY BELONG TO._

The government sealed Facility 17 and called it a systems failure. But in the years since, more sectors have gone quiet. More children have vanished into the static.

They say if you stand outside the ruins of 17 on a still night, you can hear the lullaby..wet and wrong, carried on the wind.

And something humming along with it. The children were gone but the facility itself was alive and angry.