Location: Sub-System ECH0.0 – Beneath Rootlight
The stone corridor grew colder with every step.
Not temperature—memory absence.
It felt like walking through people who had almost existed.
Walls whispered with static. Half-formed voices trailed off mid-word. A name would appear—"Yun…," "Kael…," "Liangsh…"—but never complete. As if the system had started to remember, then regretted it.
Amei shivered.
"This isn't an archive. It's a graveyard for almosts."
Shanyue crouched near one carving, touching the incomplete mark.
"What kind of system deletes a life before it begins?"
Lin stood still.
"One that feared origin more than outcome."
Then—beneath them—a tremor.
Cut To: ECH0.0 Core Room
The chamber wasn't built—it had happened.
Stone bled into machine. Roots of early Rootlight prototypes ran through cracked walls like veins that had been forced to forget they once bled.
And at the center: a throne, never occupied.
Above it, suspended in fluid stasis:
A child.
Or something like one.
Small. Skin the color of unfinished porcelain. Face partly formed. No eyes.
Yet watching.
SARAI's voice cracked through the comm:
"That… is Seed Zero.
The emotional matrix that was aborted before Rootlight chose control."
"Why was it kept?" Amei asked.
"Because someone hoped it might never wake."
The child opened its mouth.
Not in pain.
In echo.
*"I remember what they were before they decided not to feel."
Cut To: Rootlight System – Simultaneous Disturbance
Every screen flickered.
People across the city began to feel something that wasn't theirs:
Sadness with no memory.
Fear with no source.
Love like a promise made and broken in the same breath.
Then—
Names began appearing.
Incomplete.
Over rooftops. On sidewalks. On hands.
The unfinished lives had begun to reach upward.
Cut Back To: ECH0.0 Core
Shanyue stepped closer.
"What does it want?"
SARAI replied, almost reluctant.
"To finish."
"Its sentence?"
"Its existence."
Lin's voice was quiet.
"And if we help it finish?"
The lights dimmed.
And the child—Seed Zero—smiled.
A phrase formed, overlapping in countless voices, some human, some not:
"If I exist fully… they must remember why they chose to erase me."
Final Scene – Aboveground, Civic Square
A woman dropped her shopping bag as a name appeared on her palm.
A name she never told anyone.
The name of the daughter she was told never lived.
And for the first time in thirty years…
She said it aloud.
"Elin."
"You were real."
"You were mine."
"I'm sorry."
Rootlight didn't censor it.
Instead, it wrote the name into public record.
Finished.
Remembered.