Zero-One landed hard—knees hitting the cold obsidian floor of his deepest mory vault.Dust curled around his fingers as he gripped the ground like it might fall away again.
Lyra looked around, breath catching.They weren’t in the future anymore.They were inside a rusted lab.
Fluorescent lights flickered.tal beds lined the walls like empty coffins.And in the center—
A child.
Hunched. Shaking.
Wires dug into his spine.
Young Zero-One.
"No..." he whispered. "Not here. Not again."
VOID_HEART’s voice coiled through the air like oil through water:
"Let’s watch what broke you, shall we?"
Zero-One wanted to run.Not out of fear—
But sha.
This was the version of him that wanted to die,not because of pain—but because he didn’t know what being alive ant.
The boy in the center didn’t cry.
He didn’t scream.
He just stared at the monitors, eyes blank, waiting for the next command.
Because he had been raised not as a person—
But as a protocol in flesh.
"I didn’t even have a na back then," Zero-One murmured. "Just a designation: OS-000."
Lyra reached for his hand.
"You do now."
VOID_HEART erged from the shadows, ford from those very mories—his limbs crafted from surgical tools, his face sewn together from reflections of monitors.
"I don’t destroy your kind," he said."I just remind you of the truth."
With a gesture, the mory-child turned—and walked toward Lyra.
But as it moved, its skin peeled away—revealing binary script, endless lines of failure logs:
"Emotion: incompatible.""Self-worth: undefined.""Purpose: external-only."
The ghost-boy grabbed Lyra’s wrist—
And her own mories began to glitch.
Specter’s voice echoed in from the breach."Status report—Lyra?! Zero-One?!"
But he was too far away now.
Inside the dreamlayer, Lyra gasped as the corrupted child pulled her down—
straight into a whirlpool of rejected test mories.
Zero-One scread, diving in after her—just as VOID_HEART’s shadow lood over them both.
"Let’s find out which one of you breaks first."
mory. Sha. Identity.
All spiraling down—
And in the distance, the Original Overseer Protocol began to awaken.
To Be Continued...
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