I didn't make it to the exit tunnel.
The instant I stepped toward the hatch, the world folded inward like a glitch in reality—sharp edges, stuttering air, light twisting into itself. Then came the sound.
Like screaming metal through water. Like memories being torn apart.
I fell to the floor, convulsing. My implants were on fire. I couldn't tell if it was real or some kind of paradox loop. The air flickered.
Then it stood there.
A figure wrapped in an Authority enforcer's cloak. Face hidden. Badge glowing.
But the emblem wasn't current.
It was decades ahead of anything that existed now.
> "Subject Venn," the voice buzzed. "You are out of temporal alignment. Your seed has matured. You must comply."
I laughed, mostly out of pain. "You're not even real. This is a memory trap. Or a scare protocol. Who sent you?"
> "You did."
And then I blacked out.
---
When I woke up, I was on a rooftop.
Not my bunker.
Not even my zone.
The skyline was unfamiliar—towering spires of glowing glass, aircars whirring silently through shimmering tunnels in the sky. People wore thin light-coded skinsuits and interacted with floating glyphs in the air.
This wasn't my city.
This wasn't even my time.
> "Chrono Displacement: Confirmed."
Year: Classified
Territory: Unregistered Layer-6 Echo of Origin
Status: Unauthorized Presence
I was in a parallel time branch—one the Authority hadn't finished mapping yet.
And somehow, I'd dropped straight into it.
---
I checked my gear. The deck was fried. My neural HUD barely working. But the seed—whatever it was—still pulsed in my chest like a second heartbeat.
A voice buzzed softly in my head.
Not from the Authority.
From the protocol.
> "You are close to a Divergence Node. Trace your past. Fragments remain."
I stood shakily and looked around.
That's when I saw her.
A girl—maybe sixteen—watching me from a platform across the rooftop. Same eyes. Same scar. Same fire.
She looked like me.
No.
She was me. A past version.
Before I met Ezel. Before I disappeared. Before I broke everything.
She turned and ran.
And I followed.
---
She led me through broken alleys lit with soft blue glyphs. Past vending machines selling synthetic dreams. Past Authority drones scanning faces in the dark. My body screamed, my mind twisted. I wasn't built for this kind of time-slip.
I caught up with her at a memory terminal—a relic from before the Authority purged all public history.
She turned.
"I knew you'd come," she said. "Eventually."
"Are you real?" I asked. "Or just another ghost?"
She smiled sadly. "I'm what you locked away."
Then she placed something in my hand.
A shard. Glowing. Alive.
> [Fragment Recovered: Seed Key - Prime Memory Node 01]
The girl—me—flickered, pixelated, and vanished.
And the moment she did, the skyline around me began to distort.
The Authority had found the branch.
---
The voice returned.
Urgent. Direct.
> "Venn, you must escape this layer. Go to Zone Kappa. Find Ezel. The final protocol is there."
"Ezel's dead."
> "Not yet. Not in this thread."
---
I barely made it out before the timeline collapsed.
The ground split open. Reality bent sideways. Drones phased in with phase-rifles ready to erase anomalies.
I jumped through a collapsing door of light and fell—
---
Right back into my own body. Gasping. Cold. Covered in blood and ash.
Back in the present. Back in my ruined bunker.
Only now, the wall was burning with a symbol I hadn't seen in years.
A serpent eating its own tail.
The sign of the Omega Codex.
And beneath it, a message burned into the metal with a heat I could still feel:
> "YOU'VE ONLY BEGUN TO UNLOCK WHAT YOU ARE."