Mother Ash never thought the day would come when she herself would forget.
Not a single moment or a name, but the very ability… to remember.
When the Womb Towers across the system stopped pulsing in unison, she sensed that something had fractured—not like a broken machine, but like a dream that had turned inside out, where all the familiar faces suddenly became hollow, meaningless silhouettes.
She tried to resonate, as she always did—projecting a memory of the first cycle, where a nameless embryo had once cried its first cry beneath the ancient sleep layer. But there was no response. Not a single echo. Only silence, thick and viscous, like congealed blood.
Memories were dissolving.
Not in parts. As a whole.
No one knew exactly where it began. Some claimed it started in the lowest chamber of the Womb Tower at Ma Ca. Others believed Fetus 000 was merely the catalyst, that forgetting had been simmering deep within the system long before—just waiting for someone to choose not to remember.
At the resonance center, high-level Remembered entities began to collapse into confusion. Some sat motionless, unable to initiate their usual memory cycles. A few entered deep sleep. Others began to dream in unprogrammed patterns—memories that had no foundation, no verified source.
One entity remembered being born from a tree rather than a womb. Another recalled the sensation of being born from sweat instead of blood. It was all… wrong. Yet no one corrected them. Because nothing seemed certain anymore.
Mother Ash watched, but even she wasn't sure what she was witnessing. Was this decay, or evolution? Was this collapse, or some strange rebirth in which memory was no longer required to justify existence?
She found herself remembering—herself.
Long ago. When she was human.
She remembered holding a baby in her arms, back in an old apartment in Hanoi. Wind whispered through a rusted window. The radio was talking about a typhoon. Her baby cried nonstop, and she—young, tired, and hollow—simply stared down at it, as if looking at a broken device with no manual.
And deep within, a thought took shape.
A thought she had never dared to speak.
"I wish I had never given birth to it."
That memory… That single spark…
Could it have been the seed of Fetus 000?
The system responded with desperation. A total Memory Recovery Cycle was launched—every tower reactivated, every memory thread flushed with synthetic amniotic signals, every resonance code deployed.
But the lost memories didn't return.
Instead, new ones appeared.
Not recovered. Not restored.
Created.
A woman remembered holding a child, though she had never conceived. A little girl recalled drowning at forty-five, even though she was only four. A man remembered fatherhood, though he had never loved.
These were lies.
But they were beautiful.
So much so that the Remembered clung to them—
Not out of need, but desire.
They abandoned the old resonance.
They stopped syncing.
They self-remembered.
Self-created.
Filled in their own voids.
The Womb System didn't collapse like an empire.
It melted. Like water through cracks, slow and irreversible.
Mother Ash knew the time had come for a final decision.
She descended to the bottom layer, where Fetus 000 drifted in suspension—no cord, no fluid, no breath. It did not move. Did not speak.
But she knew it felt her.
In her hand, she held the Termination Cycle—the ultimate biological command, usable only once in the system's entire existence.
A binary choice:
Preserve the original memory stream.
Or allow everything… to be forgotten.
She held the code before Fetus 000.
It did not reach for it.
It simply raised its gaze, and for the first time in the system's history, it spoke aloud.
"We never lived.
We only remembered."
And with that sentence, she understood.
Memory had never been life.
It was only the residue of what was once living.
A thin wind swept through the Womb Core. The umbilical veins withered. The fluid evaporated. Memories—spanning from the first cycle to the most recent—began to unravel like silk threads in a fire.
No lullabies.
No sobs.
No presence of Mother Ash in the resonance net.
Only stillness.
As if none of it had ever been.
On the surface, where once stood the tallest Womb Tower, now there was only mud and scattered stones.
At the center of the ruin lay a woman curled up beside a newborn.
The child cried. No one came to comfort it. No one called its name. No one even knew it had been born.
But the woman—who no longer remembered her own name—reached out with trembling hands and drew the child close.
Not to pass on a memory.
Not to preserve a bloodline.
Not to rebuild civilization.
But simply… because the baby was cold.
And for the first time in countless ages, life began not with memory, but with presence.
No reasons.
No past.
Only the now.