The memory was not linear.
Aiden stood in a construct where time pulsed in nonlinear loops. Before him was a landscape carved from memory-fractures, unreal shapes made of sensation: the taste of ozone, the feel of cold metal against his child-skin, the pressure of unknowable eyes staring into the core of his eleven-year-old soul.
Lira and Isaiah landed behind him, panting from the effort of breaching the boundary.
"This is the source?" Lira asked, her voice echoing strangely.
Aiden nodded. "This is where they first took me."
The place was alive with echoes of his trauma. Ghosts of other abducted children flickered in and out of view—each trapped in a stasis loop, each running through the nightmare of their own fractured reality.
In the center, the child—young Aiden—sat curled in a nest of wires and light. Unlike the others, he was not screaming. He was waiting.
Older Aiden stepped forward.
"Why did they stop your memory?" Isaiah whispered.
"Because it's not mine alone," Aiden said. "It's the seed of their destruction."
As he reached out to the child, the entire construct shifted. The memory resisted. Tendrils of dark light shot down from unseen corners of the void, trying to intercept, to sever, to erase.
But Aiden was no longer just a boy. He was a being who remembered.
He took the hand of his younger self—and the moment they touched, memory exploded.
A cascade of visions hit them:
The abduction craft, a living organism.
The experiments—not physical, but existential. They tore apart his soul, rewrote his identity, then patched him up and placed him back on Earth as a carrier.
The transmission implanted in his subconscious: a message not meant for humans, but for the Architects themselves. A virus of remembrance.
The younger Aiden looked up at his future self. "You came back for me."
"I never left," Aiden whispered. "We just forgot."
The child smiled—and vanished.
In his place, Aiden held something crystalline. The Core Memory. The first and last truth.
Suddenly, the environment fractured. The void was no longer stable.
"We have to leave!" Isaiah shouted.
But they were not alone. Dozens of beings appeared—fragments of the Architects themselves, sent into the memory to destroy the seed.
Lira activated her null-field. "We fight."
"No," Aiden said. "We remember harder."
He held the Core Memory high, and spoke a word not in any human tongue, but one he had known since his first scream into the alien darkness. A Truth Word.
The fragments froze, then cracked apart.
The void collapsed.
And they were flung through the spiral—back toward reality.
They landed in a field outside Prague. Cold dew on their faces. The world unchanged.
Or so it seemed.
People stared up at the sky—not with fear, but recognition. Dreams had become memory. The Earth was remembering.
"We've started something," Lira said.
"We've only just begun," Aiden replied. "And the Architects will now know... they can bleed."