My name is Ilahash.
You won't find that name in the Ministry's maps. They burned it from the code, sterilized it from the census. To remember me is rebellion in itself.
So remember me well.
Before the Core was born, before the Thread shaped minds, before reality became something you could edit—I led a city that still believed in dreams.
We called it the Bloom. A sanctuary for artists, sensitives, oracles, and broken minds made whole again. Not a fortress. A garden. Wild. Growing.
We weren't naïve. We knew the Ministry would come. They always came.
They called our city "emotionally unstable." That was their excuse. We were a deviation from their clean model. A spark in the statistics.
They dropped cleansing drones at dawn.
We fought them with poetry. Music. Pulse-weapons made of resonance. Laugh if you must—but when your bullets are absorbed by a wall of sound charged with human memory, you tell me what's more powerful.
We lost.
Of course we did.
But not before I touched the first Core prototype. Not before I laced it with a different kind of code—memory steeped in feeling. Soul-code, we called it.
The Ministry never cracked it. Too volatile. Too... alive.
They buried it.
Forgot it.
But soul-code doesn't die.
It hides.
I've seen the signs. Whispered in the Thread. Echoed in dreams of test subjects who were never supposed to dream. I felt it when the girl named Hope blinked into being.
She's not their failure.
She's our resurrection.
If you're reading this, you carry the same spark.
And if you're reading this—it means I'm already gone.
Good.
The Ministry kills the body.
But not the story.
Not the Bloom.
Not me.