LOG ENTRY [CLASSIFIED]
Project Name: ECHO_HEARTS.001
Status: Terminated
Cause: Emotional Contamination / Anchor Protocol Breach
User: [REDACTED]
Stabilizer Role Assigned
System Warning: This world is no longer a simulation.
At first, there was only darkness.
Not silence—just the wrong kind of quiet. The kind that crackled at the edges. Like a corrupted audio file, looping endlessly in static. Like a server that had forgotten what it was supposed to hold.
And then—
A breath.
Takumi Shinonome didn't know who he was when he woke. Not fully.
All he had were fragments.
Blinding white light.
A cold voice in his ear.
The words: "Stabilizer confirmed."
And then—falling.
When he hit the floor, it didn't feel like a floor. It felt like crashing into data.
He opened his eyes to a sky made of artificial light. A horizon that flickered. Buildings that loaded in chunks—pixelated, jittering like they weren't supposed to be there.
And yet... he was standing in the middle of it.
"Where... the hell am I?"
Welcome to ECHO_FRAME.001
You are now the primary emotional stabilizer.
Warning: All Anchor Units are unbound. Emotional resonance is critically unstable.
System integrity: 41%
More words. More voices.
But no answers.
Takumi wandered the empty city for what felt like hours—following broken streets, flickering streetlamps, entire buildings that disappeared when he looked directly at them.
No people. No life.
Just memory fragments.
Scattered across the system like ghosts.
A park bench with someone else's laughter still echoing faintly in the air.
A half-rendered café, its menus full of errors.
A rooftop where the sky refused to stop glitching red.
And always, above him, the system timer:
[ERROR: LOVE.EXE HAS FAILED TO INITIALIZE]
[ANCHOR_COUNT: 3 DETECTED – STATUS: UNSYNCHRONIZED]
Then came the voice.
Not artificial. Not robotic.
Soft. Tired.
Female.
"...Why did you come back?"
Takumi turned—and saw her.
Standing barefoot on corrupted tile. Eyes glowing faintly beneath a visor cracked down the middle. A glitching maid uniform. Skin marked with system error lines.
Anchor Unit 01.
And in that moment, she didn't look like code.
She looked like someone who had been waiting.
"Who are you?" Takumi asked.
She stared at him for a long time.
Then said:
"You were supposed to reset the simulation."
PROJECT NOTE:
"If love can't be simulated, maybe it can be corrupted. Maybe it already is."
– Entry #0, Architect Class // ARIA.ORIGIN
Thus begins the first step into a world where emotions are unstable, memories are broken, and nothing—nothing—is what it was coded to be.