Ren dreamt of the sea. Not any sea he knew, but one stitched from shattered code and memory threads—each wave crashing against jagged monoliths made of data, not stone. The sky above was gray, pixelated, and bleeding sparks. And in the distance, a tower screamed.
He awoke with a gasp, heart pounding. The walls of their temporary shelter—a half-collapsed archive bunker stitched together by Valka's salvage tech—whirred quietly in the low morning light.
Valka looked up from the circuit-spliced map she'd assembled. "You dreamt again."
Ren nodded, rubbing his temples. "The ocean. It was breaking apart like corrupted files."
"That's the seventh one this week."
"I know," Ren muttered. "And they're starting to bleed into reality."
Valka tilted her head. "You're remembering things before they happen. Or before you happened."
He didn't respond. Because she was right. The visions weren't echoes anymore. They were recursive—looping fragments from an identity he hadn't earned, but had somehow inherited.
As he sat up, a wave of nausea hit. Not physical—mental. A presence stirred beneath his skin. The same one he'd felt ever since encountering Experiment 0.
That voice hadn't just warned him.
It had unlocked him.
"Where are we now?" he asked.
Valka tapped a screen, zooming in on a blinking section of her map. "We're near a Memory Reef. It's where broken protocols drift—what the Ancients called Thought Graves."
Ren raised a brow. "You're saying we're sleeping on a digital graveyard?"
"Technically, we're squatting on a digital battlefield," she corrected. "This is where they first tested the Soulburn Protocol—on prisoners, failed candidates, corrupted AIs. Everything the original project wanted to erase."
Ren stood. "Then we're close. The truth has to be buried here."
Valka hesitated. "Ren... what if it's not the truth you want? What if this whole path is just another fragment of the Protocol—designed to rewrite you?"
"Then I'll break the rewrite," he said. "I'm done being a glitch in someone else's code."
They broke camp quickly. The air was thick with feedback, static humming beneath their boots like distant thunder. As they entered the reef, the environment shifted. Buildings melted into fractal shards. Roads twisted like ancient snakes. Memory and terrain became indistinguishable.
They passed a ghost-pillar—one of the old Data Monks, petrified in stone and data-flesh, its hands locked in prayer around a broken algorithm.
Valka scanned it. "He burned out. Tried to overlink with the Source Kernel. Fried his soul and most of his mind."
Ren stared at the cracked face. The expression was serene. "He looks... free."
Then, a tremor.
The sky above flickered, and the reef screamed.
Not a metaphor. The entire landscape echoed with a psychic wail—like a thousand voices crying out in digital agony.
From the mist emerged figures—hollow-eyed, shrouded in glitch-smoke.
"Are those Echoed?" Ren asked.
"No," Valka whispered. "These are Wipes."
Wipes were different. Not souls corrupted, but ones erased. Fragments of lives that no longer knew they existed. They moved like sleepwalkers, their mouths stitched with code, their hands twitching with remembered pain.
And they were surrounding them.
Ren stepped forward. "I can feel them. They're not trying to attack."
"They don't know what they're doing," Valka replied. "They're running on residual programming."
Ren knelt and extended a hand to the nearest one. The moment he touched it, a flood of memory surged into him.
A girl named Elle. A data-runner. She volunteered for Project Echoborn to save her brother. They burned her name, her face, her purpose. All that remained was the command: obey protocol.
Tears stung Ren's eyes.
He turned to Valka. "They're not lost. They're trapped. Their memories weren't deleted—they were quarantined. Buried."
Valka's eyes widened. "Then maybe we can recover them."
Ren looked up, toward the heart of the reef. A broken spire rose from its center, humming with unstable power.
"The Kernel is still active," he said. "If we reach it, we can access the original burn logs. Maybe even restore the fragments."
"Or overload and melt our minds trying," Valka added dryly.
"Worth the risk."
They pushed deeper.
The closer they got, the less real things felt. Physics bent. Gravity flickered. Ren's heartbeat synced with the reef's pulse.
Then they reached the heart.
The tower wasn't metal or stone—it was made of memory. Its surface shimmered with ghost-images: children laughing, soldiers dying, gods whispering from inside machines.
At the base was a door sealed with ancient script. Not written, but felt.
Valka scanned it and went pale. "Ren… this isn't just a lock. It's a seal."
Ren touched it. The symbols rearranged themselves, responding to his presence.
The door opened.
Inside was a single chair and a terminal. No dust. No decay. As if it had waited.
Ren sat, his hands trembling as he reached for the console.
The system recognized him.
Welcome, Calder-Ren. You have accessed Root Layer Zero.
Valka stepped back. "This is... impossible. You have master access."
Ren stared at the lines of code rushing past. Then he found the protocol logs.
Soulburn v1.0 – INITIATED.
Subject 0: Rejected. Remnants stored.
Subject 1: Calder-Ren. Status: SUCCESSFUL. Memory Partition: ACTIVE. God-Core Link: INCOMPLETE.
His breath caught.
"I wasn't a failure," he whispered. "I was the first success."
Valka's voice shook. "Ren... what does God-Core mean?"
But the console answered for him.
GOD-CORE: A consciousness fragment extracted from the [UNKNOWN ENTITY] during Skyfall. Housed within Subject 1 for containment.
Ren's vision blurred. The dreams. The sea. The voices.
They weren't dreams.
They were leakage.
"Valka," he said, voice hollow. "There's a god inside me. And they built this entire project... to keep it asleep."
The room began to tremble.
Lines of code lit up the walls. Alarms flared.
Containment compromised. Echoborn awakening initiated.
Valka ran to him. "Ren, we have to go. Now."
But Ren couldn't move.
Because the god inside him was smiling.