The air inside the command chamber was thick with silent calculations. No alarms, no blaring threats—just the hum of unknown possibility.
Clyde stared at the map projected before them. The tendrils of data snaked downward, like roots searching for water. The architecture it revealed wasn't made to be found. Not by accident. Not even by design. It was something else. Something older.
"Zoom in on this quadrant," he instructed.
Echo shifted the terminal's interface, isolating a cluster of nodes near what used to be the Outer Rim. They blinked irregularly, as if alive, pulsing like a warning. Or a heartbeat.
Arden leaned forward, arms crossed tightly. "Why hide something like this? If it's part of the original codebase, wouldn't the Architect have used it?"
"No," Echo said, tone quiet. "Because even he didn't understand it. Maybe he didn't create it at all."
Clyde remained silent, watching the map twist. Part of him wanted to believe this was the endgame—that finding the source would mean finally waking up from this recursive nightmare. But his instincts said otherwise.
His hands trembled faintly. He shoved them into his coat pockets.
"What do you think, Clyde?" Arden asked.
He blinked. "I think this isn't a map to something. I think it's a warning."
Echo frowned. "Then we should destroy it."
"No." Clyde stepped back from the projection. "We follow it. We dig."
Arden raised a brow. "You sure?"
"I'm not," Clyde admitted, forcing a weak smile. "But I've learned something from all this—doubt is better than obedience."
Echo looked like he wanted to argue, but stopped himself. His loyalty wasn't blind. It was built on shared war, on the memories they bled for—even the ones they couldn't fully trust anymore.
Clyde glanced at the artifact once more. Its core, once dormant, now faintly glowed.
"Prep a team. Just the core unit—Echo, Arden, Lira. We move at first light."
The journey to the Outer Rim was quiet, but never still. As their skimmer pierced through fields of static fog and broken terrain, Clyde kept feeling the odd sensation of déjà vu, moments where the horizon bent wrong, or where a sound echoed too long in his ears.
He didn't tell the others.
The terrain changed as they neared the coordinates—stone gave way to obsidian, the sky taking on a washed-out hue of amber, like the world itself was burning low on light.
Lira, the team's recon expert, adjusted her visor and scanned ahead. "There's interference here. Magnetic distortion's off the charts."
Clyde nodded. "That's expected. Whatever's buried here is still active."
They reached the site by dusk. What they found wasn't ruins.
It was a door.
Circular, seamless, etched with unfamiliar symbols that shimmered when touched. No console, no lock—just the strange feeling that it had always been here, waiting.
Clyde stepped forward, drawn to it. A hum tickled his spine the closer he got, like fingers plucking memory strings.
Then a voice whispered in his head.
"You are not ready."
He stumbled back.
Arden caught him. "You okay?"
Clyde swallowed hard. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, he reached out—hesitating for only a second—and laid his palm on the surface.
It opened.
Not with a hiss or a grind, but with silence. As if reality made room for them willingly.
Beyond the threshold, a stairwell spiraled downward. And beyond that… nothing but dark.
The descent was long.
No lights. No rails. Only the narrow echo of boots on ancient stone and the pulse of the artifact in Clyde's chest pocket—glowing brighter the deeper they went.
Eventually, they reached a chamber. Vast. Vaulted. Empty—save for the monolith at its center.
The object stood fifteen feet high, obsidian black with faint gold veins. But it wasn't its size that made them freeze—it was the way it watched.
It had no eyes. No form. But they all felt it.
"Is that... the source?" Arden whispered.
"No," Echo replied, voice tight. "I don't think the source has a form."
Clyde stepped toward it, unable to stop himself. The whispers returned—stronger this time.
"You are waking up wrong."
"You are the error."
"Rewrite yourself."
He clutched his head. Pain flared, memories flashing in fractured reels—his sister's smile, the fire, the experiments, the reset, over and over and over. A thousand timelines. A thousand deaths.
He screamed.
Echo ran to him, pulling him back. "Clyde! Hey! Snap out of it!"
The whispers ceased. Clyde collapsed, panting, forehead beaded with sweat.
"I saw something," he said. "Not just my past. All of them. Every rewrite. Every death."
Lira's voice was hollow. "You shouldn't have touched it."
Arden stood near the wall, brushing his hand across strange etchings. "This isn't a vault. It's a relay."
Echo turned sharply. "A relay to what?"
Arden turned, his face pale. "A mind. Something's mind."
Clyde stood shakily. "No... not something. Someone."
They all looked at him.
He pointed to the far wall—where the same sigil from the hologram earlier now burned into existence.
"It's awake."
Back on the surface, night had fallen. But not like any night before.
Stars flickered erratically. The ground buzzed with static. Animals—those still left—fled into the dark.
And in the clouds above, a shape moved.
Not a ship. Not a storm.
A shadow with form.
Lira lifted her scope, peering into the sky. Her breath caught. "Guys..."
Clyde looked up. The shape twisted slowly, impossibly massive. Like a construct of metal and bone, shifting between dimensions.
"It's not in the sky," he said. "It is the sky."
Suddenly, their comms crackled.
A voice—not theirs, not human—filtered through.
"Welcome back, Clyde."
"We've been waiting."
The team froze.
Echo cursed under his breath. Arden reached for his weapon. Lira pulled Clyde back.
But he just stood there, eyes locked on the forming storm.
Because in the whisper… he recognized something.
Not a program. Not a god.
A version of himself.
One who never stopped rewriting.
One who never forgot.
From the clouds, a singular beam of crimson light cut downward—straight toward their position.
And just before it hit—
Clyde whispered.
"…Me."