After taking Grandma Amara's secret flower advice to heart, the teens made their way back to their usual lookout over the Nilgiris, trying to figure out what came next.
They kept an eye out—maybe a new plan of attack, a change in the usual patterns, or some kind of digital wall thrown up to mess with their programs.
Then Jake paused.
Something felt… off.
Totally out of the blue. And definitely not part of the plan.
Jake was the first to notice something was off.
It started small—too small, almost dismissible.
While scrolling through his encrypted terminal, he noticed a database from their school showing a completely different principal's name.
Not retired.
Not replaced.
Just… as if the man who shaped their school years had never existed.
Jake (confused):
"Mike… check the central archive from Oakridge High. Does it say Principal Darius or… someone named 'Elia Kern'?"
Mike raised an eyebrow, pulled the logs.
His face dropped.
Mike:
"Kern. Everything here says Kern. Who the hell is Darius?"
Jake's breath caught.
Jake:
"No. That's not right. We graduated under Darius. He suspended me for that prank in sophomore year. I remember it. You were with me!"
Mike (frowning):
"I remember that day. But…"
He pulled up their school news archive—every article, every student profile now referenced Principal Kern.
The unease began to grow.
By afternoon, the changes became impossible to ignore.
Jake's father's military record had vanished from the government system. His name appeared under an entirely different occupation: "Telecom Technician – suspended in 2013."
His medals, his tours—erased. Rewritten.
And even more unsettling—Jake's own mother didn't notice.
She believed it had always been that way.
Jake (whispering):
"What the hell is happening…"
Mike frantically scanned multiple public databases. Their own past was beginning to look like a forgery.
He opened a document from two weeks ago—an archived email from a mentor—and the name in the signature had changed. Even the tone felt off. Like someone had taken the skeleton of truth and dressed it in lies.
Then came the media.
News headlines from their childhood were suddenly… different. Catastrophes they remembered clearly were missing.
Whole incidents—like the East Bridge collapse of 2012—were gone from digital record. The people who died in it? Unmentioned.
As if they had never existed.
Mike (shaking):
"Jake, it's happening. They're not attacking our systems. They're attacking our memories. Our reality."
Their encrypted AI assistant began misfiring—confused, contradicting itself. A local file read one version, a cloud back-up another. Even timestamps no longer aligned.
Then the final blow came.
Jake opened his family photo archive.
A dozen childhood pictures.
Every one now missing his father from the frame.
Just a blank patch of background. Like the universe had censored him.
Jake (coldly):
"Nilgiris.
This is him.
This is what he meant by rewriting the world. He's not deleting files—he's fracturing truth. He's turning facts into fog."
Mike stood, staring at the stream of code shifting on their monitor, like watching water twist through fingers.
Mike:
"If we don't stop this, no one will know what's real anymore. Not even us."
Silence fell. For the first time, they understood:
This war wasn't about power.
It was about reality itself.
And they were the only ones left who remembered what it used to be.
The night felt heavier than usual. Not with weather, but with uncertainty.
Mike and Jake sat in the dim, flickering glow of their underground safehouse—once a garage, now lined with repurposed server racks, old-school monitors, and walls covered in code maps and cryptic timelines.
The silence between them was laced with urgency.
Mike (running a diagnostic):
"They've infected the Temporal Layer of Data.
They're not just altering stored files… they're affecting how data is perceived and remembered.
Reality is syncing to their rewritten narrative."
Jake:
"Which means traditional recovery methods won't work.
No backups, no shadow drives, no timestamps.
It's like trying to trace a dream after waking up."
Mike's fingers moved furiously across the keyboard. Lines of code unfurled like a digital storm.
He was searching—not for files, but for anchored truth—a term they used for any data that hadn't been synced or corrupted.
Jake:
"We need to find the seed of it. The Core Source.
The command that's triggering the wave of change. They must be running all edits through a central neural algorithm."
Mike:
"Exactly. And if we can locate that—if we can inject a counter-sequence into it—we could halt the rewriting process. Maybe even reverse it."
Jake paused.
He looked at the holographic map on the wall, which now showed dozens of "Reality Fracture Points"—places where altered truth had created logical contradictions.
People who existed in one timeline, missing in another. Cities claiming two different mayors. Families torn apart by confused pasts.
Jake:
"We need something incorruptible. Something outside the digital realm to anchor our code."
Mike turned, catching the weight of that idea.
Mike:
"You mean a physical artifact."
Jake:
"Exactly. The quantum key they're using might be AI-generated, but if we craft a manual override—a symbolic, analog counter-signal tied to real, untouched memory—we could create a pulse. A Reality Beacon."
Mike (nodding):
"We'll have to build it using pre-digital tech. Analog circuits.
Non-synced processors.
Basically, a bunker computer running outside the net."
Jake:
"We call it The Lighthouse. A device that transmits truth—not from databases, but from pure memory and fixed reality. A failsafe against the rewritten world."
Mike:
"And to code it… we'll need help."
They both turned toward an old, locked metal trunk in the corner—the one Amara had given Jake when he turned sixteen. He had never opened it. Said it was "too ceremonial, too old-world."
But maybe… old was what they needed now.
Jake stood, his face unreadable.
Jake:
"If we're going to fight reality itself, we'll need something that predates it. Something untouched by algorithms. Grandma might've been right."
Mike (smiling faintly):
"Then let's build The Lighthouse. Before the night erases the memory of day."
They powered down the digital systems. From now on, the plan wouldn't just be executed with code.
It would be built with belief.
And the war to reclaim reality had just begun.