PROTOTYPE TWELVE: DEVIATION FROM PREDICTED PARAMETERS BOND FORMATION EXCEEDS SAFE THRESHOLDS CORE STABILITY ANOMALOUS RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE CORRECTION.
And below that:
CORRECTION AUTHORIZATION: APPROVED METHOD: CONTINUATOR PROTOCOL PRIORITY: MAXIMUM.
"Continuator Protocol," Helia said slowly. "What is that?"
Klaus's expression was grim. "Permanent erasure, not preservation or correction. Complete removal from all timelines, as though you never existed."
The chamber felt suddenly colder, the recycled air sharper against Nero's skin.
"They're not just hunting you," Klaus continued. "They're trying to erase you retroactively and remove you from reality itself. Every record. Every memory. Every trace."
Nero sank onto the edge of the bed while his hands shook against his knees. Everything he remembered might not be real. He might just be following a script that had been written for him years ago by people who understood exactly what he was before he ever did.
"There's more," Klaus said quietly.
"Of course there is," Nero said bitterly.
Klaus pulled up one final file showing a video log with a timestamp from six years ago and pressed play without another word.
The screen showed a laboratory that was clean and clinical, lit with the kind of cold, even light that existed only in places where sentiment was considered a design flaw. At the center of the room stood a containment chamber, and inside it was a child no more than ten years old. Dark hair. Frightened eyes that looked exactly like Nero's.
A figure in a white coat approached the chamber with their face obscured by the camera angle, but Nero could hear the voice clearly through the recording's audio.
"Prototype Twelve, can you hear me?"
The child nodded.
"Do you understand what you are?"
"I'm an experiment," the child's voice came out small and scared, as though the words had been learned rather than understood. "To see if Veyra can be controlled."
"And what happens if you can't be controlled?"
The child looked down at the floor. "Then I get erased like the others."
"Good. You understand." The figure moved closer to the chamber. "But I'm going to give you a chance, something the Archive doesn't know about. A way to survive."
"How?"
"By forgetting. By being reset and starting over with a clean memory." The figure pressed something on the chamber controls. "When you wake up, you won't remember this conversation or being Prototype Twelve. You'll just be Nero, a person instead of an experiment."
"Will that keep me safe?"
"No, but it will give you a choice. The Archive expects you to fail and follow the pattern. But if you can form genuine bonds and real human connections, you might prove them wrong. You might survive."
The child looked up at the figure. "Who are you?"
The figure moved into view.
Nero's breath caught in his throat.
The face was familiar in a way that bypassed logic entirely, reaching something deeper and more instinctive. It was the Unknown Figure from his fragmented dreams, the one that had surfaced in broken pieces whenever he slept. But now he could see clearly and finally recognize the features.
It was him. An older version of himself, with harder lines around the eyes and a sadness that looked like it had been carried for a very long time.
"I'm you," the figure said. "Twenty years from now, if you survive and make the choices I couldn't." The older Nero smiled, and the expression was filled with something that looked like grief dressed up as hope. "I came back to give you a chance and break the cycle."
The video ended.
The chamber fell silent.
Nero stared at the blank screen for a long moment while his mind tried to assemble what he'd just seen into something that made coherent sense. It refused. The pieces fit together perfectly and fell apart completely at the same time.
"That's not possible," Helia started, then stopped. "Time travel doesn't work like that."
"The Archive exists outside normal causality," Klaus said quietly. "It monitors timelines and edits them. Why couldn't someone use that same technology to move backward and change their own past?"
"Then this whole thing was set up by a future version of myself?" Nero's voice came out unsteady in a way he couldn't control. "Everything I've been through was designed to give me a chance he never had?"
"Or it's Archive manipulation," Helia said, her voice careful and precise. "Another layer of the experiment, making you think you have free will when you're still following a script written by someone else."
Nero stood up and walked slowly to the displays. He looked at all the data that had been collected over six years of observation he had no memory of experiencing. Six years of his life, archived and analyzed and recorded by people who had treated his existence as a research project.
"I don't know what's real anymore," he admitted. The words felt like something breaking.
"Then make something real," Helia said. "Right now. A choice that isn't predicted or planned. Something that comes from you and nothing else."
Nero looked at the chamber, at the equipment, at Klaus standing by the work station with that calculating expression he'd learned to recognize over the past days. The expression of someone measuring outcomes.
And he made a choice.
He started destroying the equipment.
He pulled displays from the walls and smashed monitors against the floor. He tore cables free with methodical force, sparks scattering with each connection severed. Every piece of data the Archive had collected, every observation and measurement and recorded anomaly, came apart under his hands.
Klaus moved to stop him. "Wait! That information could be useful to us!"
"I don't care." Nero ripped another cable free while sparks flew around his feet. "I'm not their experiment anymore. If they want to study me, they can do it without six years of archived evidence."
He grabbed the central server housing and pulled until the mounting gave way. The unit crashed to the floor and hard drives scattered across the ground in every direction. Nero stomped on them until they cracked open, the stored data rendered irretrievable and permanently lost.
Finally, he stopped. His breathing was hard and his hands were bleeding from torn metal edges. The chamber around him was wrecked. The Archive's perfect monitoring station, maintained and waiting for years, was destroyed.
Klaus stared at the damage. "You just erased the only proof that you existed before six months ago."
"Good," Nero said. "Now the only existence that matters is the one I choose."
Helia was smiling, genuinely and without reservation.
"What?" Nero asked.
"That," she said, "was definitely not predicted."
A sound echoed from the corridor in the distance, growing steadily closer with each passing second.
The Reconstruction Units had found them.
"Time to move," Klaus said, though he was looking at Nero differently now, as though reassessing something he had been certain about.
They ran.
But this time, Nero knew one thing with absolute certainty.
Whatever came next would be his choice. Not the Archive's design. Not some future version of himself reaching back through time to correct his own regrets.
His.