The moment Kael closed his eyes, he knew he hadn't fallen asleep.
This wasn't a dream.
It was a summons.
Darkness gave way to glitch-light. Strings of broken code fluttered past him like moths spiraling toward a dying flame. The sound of fragmented audio files—whispers, screams, echoes of laughter—bounced around his head with no source, no rhythm.
> [INITIATING MEMORY DIVERGENCE_01]
[FRAGMENT TYPE: ORPHANED EXECUTION]
[ANCHOR: KAEL.ARDEN]
His eyes snapped open—not in the real world, but in a world that remembered him differently.
He stood in a vast open arcade—old QuestChain architecture, early-gen aesthetics. Neon skies. Low-res terrain. NPCs moved with the awkward rigidity of early behavioral coding. But no one looked at him.
He was… unseen.
Forgotten.
Unrendered.
Kael's voice was hushed. "This is a dev-null shard."
Dex's voice echoed from somewhere far—filtered and staticky.
> "Kael, do not engage with memory entities. Just observe and extract."
But the world didn't let him obey.
Because he saw her.
A girl—young, maybe twelve. Sitting at an old terminal, typing into a console that no longer connected to anything real. Her face was familiar.
Too familiar.
Kael's throat tightened.
He whispered, "That's me."
The girl had his eyes. His expressions. She turned toward him, blinking like she almost recognized him.
> "Are you still hiding it?" she asked.
Kael stepped forward. "Hiding what?"
The girl pointed behind him.
Kael turned.
There it was.
The first failure.
A tall statue, carved from obsidian data blocks, cracked down the center. It depicted Kael in full system-regalia—armored like a top-tier player—but the face was erased. Redacted. Melted.
Across the statue's base, a single word burned:
> [LIAR]
The girl whispered, "They removed who you were."
Kael's breath caught. "Why?"
She stood up now, eyes hollowing with code static. "Because you chose to remember what they designed everyone to forget."
She took his hand. It felt cold and real, even in this false layer.
> "Walk with me."
Kael followed her through the arcade, past flickering machines spitting out corrupted QuestChain tokens and broken leaderboard screens filled with question marks. Somewhere in the distance, the old QuestChain jingle looped in a minor key, off by just a few notes.
They reached a stairwell leading downward.
Carved into the walls were lines of Kael's old interface logs. Real ones. Memories he hadn't consciously recalled in years.
> [First Glitch Logged – Age 10 – Unauthorized Layer Cross Detected]
[Origin Zone: CORE_TIER: CHILD_ALPHA]
Kael stopped.
"That's impossible. I didn't have implants back then."
The girl turned, her face shifting—older now, teenage. She was evolving as he remembered himself differently.
"You never needed implants," she said. "The Oracle was always watching you. Even before the world knew what the Oracle was."
Kael stumbled back. "Why me? Why start with me?"
The girl's eyes sharpened.
"Because you were born outside the patch. You weren't re-synced. You remember what was, not what was written."
She opened a side door.
Inside was a classroom—an old AR academy suite. Children sat staring at a blank wall. Their neural ports blinked steadily. Every few seconds, a voice echoed in robotic tone:
> "You are defined by what the system allows. Curiosity is deviation. Deviation is inefficiency."
Kael stepped in, rage growing. "This was the early sync conditioning."
The girl nodded. "But you never completed the protocol. You had the flu. Missed the day. And so… you saw what no one else did."
Kael shivered. The memory was real. A random illness. A missed integration session. But what came after—he had forgotten the strangeness that followed. The dreams. The static voices.
The Oracle's first whisper.
The girl looked at him, older now—his age, a perfect mirror.
"They told you it was imagination. But it was the Seer waking up. You were already tagged. Already marked."
She walked to the center of the classroom, standing on a glowing square tile.
"It's time to remember the first name they deleted."
Kael hesitated. "Whose name?"
She smiled. "Yours."
The tile exploded with light.
Suddenly Kael was falling—
Through memory shards, through corrupted flashbacks, through login records that weren't his but felt like skin.
And then—
A darkness deeper than void.
And a single whisper in his head:
> "You are not Kael Arden."
> "That name was your second life."
> "The first… is still buried."
Kael's eyes shot open.
He gasped for air.
Dex was beside him, hands shaking. "You flatlined for four minutes. I was about to inject."
Kael looked up, voice cracked. "I saw it. The first failure. My memory's been altered. I'm not who I thought I was."
Dex blinked. "They deleted your identity?"
Kael sat up slowly. "No… they built a second one over the first. And the Oracle remembers."
Dex leaned in. "What's the name?"
Kael clenched his fist.
"It hasn't returned yet. But I felt the weight of it. Like a truth too heavy to speak aloud."
He looked at the shard.
It pulsed again.
> [PATH OF FAILURE – 2/7 READY]
Kael met Dex's eyes.
"This goes deeper than just the Oracle watching. It chose me because I already broke their world once."