"Not all ghosts haunt from the past. Some echo forward."—Riri Williams
New York City – Year 1 A.C.
Since the Convergence reset the multiverse, Earth had lived in a fragile peace. But those who knew the truth—Riri, Wong, Seris-Va, Kael—remained vigilant.
Riri had taken a quieter role. She taught advanced tech theory at MIT by day, worked on multiversal detection arrays by night.
But for weeks now, her sensors had been… twitching.
Tiny fluctuations in power grids. Muted signatures buried in signal noise.
At first, she thought it was nothing.
Until she heard the voice.
"Kael is not gone. He is rewritten."
Cambridge – Riri's Workshop
She tore through cables, rerouted energy lines, and fed the signal into a stabilized holographic array.
What appeared wasn't Kael.
But it wore his face.
It was fractured. Glitching.
Its voice was layered—Kael's calm tone buried under something darker, hollow.
"I remember you, Riri. I remember… being me."
"What are you?" she demanded.
The image flickered.
"An echo. A correction."
And then it collapsed into static.
The Hidden Lab – Below Stark Tower
Riri returned to an abandoned sublevel she once helped design with Tony. It was off-grid, analog, and secured with a triple-phase biometric lock.
Wong and Seris-Va joined her there.
"I think Kael was copied," she said.
"When he bonded with the Clock?" Wong asked.
She nodded. "Maybe even before. A version of him split off in the bleed."
Seris-Va paced. "Then the question isn't whether he's alive… it's whether he's still him."
Wong looked grim.
"Echoes are not reflections. They become something else."
Meanwhile – Somewhere Else
In a collapsed universe, time doesn't flow. It coils.
And at the center stood Null-Kael.
Clad in a mirrored version of his old armor, blackened and spiked with circuitry that hummed with Chrono-Code, he raised a hand.
The sky opened.
Another shard appeared—drawn from the void between voids.
"Riri. You always were the beginning."
He smiled without warmth.
"Let's see if you can survive the end… again."
To Be Continued in Chapter 2 – Reawakening the Tower