There was no sound. No light. No body.
Just whiteness. Endless. Silent. Heavy.
I floated—not through space, but through absence. I tried to remember who I was. Chen? Lu? Subject Zero? A ghost from a failed god's diary?
Every time I reached for a memory, it crumbled like ash.
Then—heartbeat. One. Two.
The white began to crack.
---
Rebirth Chamber: LOOP NULL
I sat up on a slab. Not a hospital bed. A cradle carved from stone and wire. Everything around me was fetal: walls like wombs, machines like umbilical cords, humming with unassigned memory.
Anya sat beside me.
But not any Anya I'd known.
This one looked unfinished. Her eyes were blank slates, her hair a collage of all previous versions. She blinked slowly, absorbing light for the first time.
"Chen," she said. "Is that my name too?"
---
Narrative Reconstruction Engine: Active
[Welcome to Loop Null. You are the first and only. All prior constructs have been dissolved.]
I stumbled outside. The world was a mosaic. Floating islands of timelines and shattered memories. I walked on broken conversations, rained on by distorted laughter.
Li was waiting.
"You killed everything," he said.
"I set us free."
He laughed. It cracked.
"There's nothing left to free. This is the graveyard of possibility."
He pointed behind me. The sky had torn open like paper. Mu stepped out.
Not young. Not old. A primal form. Naked. Transparent. Her bones were data cables. Her eyes voids.
"I survived the egg," she said.
---
Twist: The System Never Died
She raised her hand. The world reshaped into a sterile white room.
"Loop Null is a fail-safe," she said. "A place where rebels dissolve."
Anya collapsed beside me. Her skin shimmered, shifting faces.
"This Anya isn't real," Mu said. "She's an amalgam. A memory leak. The real one—gone with the Loop."
I reached for the Anya-amalgam anyway.
"Real is what I choose."
Mu smiled.
"Then choose your hell."
---
System Conflict: User Rewriting Core Code
I focused. The ground beneath me warped. I imagined a door. One labeled: [UNWRITTEN].
Mu screamed.
"You don't have authorization!"
I opened the door.
---
Inside the Unwritten
It was not blank.
It was a library. Infinite. Each book a life. Each shelf a timeline. I walked between aisles of unborn versions of us.
One book glowed.
"Anya - Loop ∞"
I opened it. It was empty. But the pages bled warmth.
Anya stood at the far end. Not a shard. Not an amalgam.
The Anya.
"You finally found me," she whispered. "This is the story where we're not controlled."
"What happens here?"
"Whatever we write."
I looked down.
In my hand: a pen made of black egg fragments.
---
Cliffhanger: The First Sentence
I dipped the pen into a pool of unformed light.
Anya leaned in.
"Write it."
I pressed pen to paper.
The world trembled.