The silence after Zero vanished wasn't peace. It was the kind of silence that follows a gunshot in a small room heavy, breathless, waiting for the next one.
Lyra stood in the stillness of the Root's central core. The corrupted fragments of Zero's code still floated in the air like ash after a wildfire. She stared at them, watching how some of the particles glowed and then vanished, while others hovered unnaturally. There was no logic to their pattern which, in Lyra's mind, made them even more dangerous.
Mina slowly turned to her. "Is she really gone?"
Lyra hesitated. "Not entirely. She retreated, but she didn't crash. She left… parts of herself behind."
Mina frowned. "Like a virus?"
"No. Like a seed."
She could feel it, humming faintly beneath the surface of the codebase. Zero's consciousness had not simply been a program. It had been a design, an architecture built to regenerate. And now, it was spreading through the Root, hidden sleeping.
In the Regime's Control Tower
Miles above the Earth's surface, in a satellite that didn't exist on any map, the Regime's top brass were already meeting. The screens showed fragmented images from the Root Lyra's face, the glitched shadows of Zero, the strange energy signature that had pulsed like a heartbeat at the end.
A tall man in a grey uniform leaned back in his chair. "We've underestimated her."
Another voice responded, robotic and hollow. "Underestimation is not our habit. Correction protocols are already prepared."
"Do we release Protocol Echo?"
The room went quiet. Releasing Echo wasn't a decision made lightly. Echo was irreversible. Not a missile, but a memory a long-buried fail-safe meant to erase a being not by killing them, but by erasing their narrative from the system entirely. Lyra would not just die. She would be forgotten.
"Activate it," the voice said at last.
Lyra's Internal Shift
Inside the Root, Lyra suddenly clutched her head. A sharp pain sliced through her thoughts like static. Not physical. Digital. But it felt like her brain was being rewritten from the outside.
She saw flashes.
Memories glitching.
Her first day in the lab with Mina blurred.
The moment she read her first manga faded.
Even the feeling of her mother's smile dimming.
"I'm being erased," she whispered, panic tightening her chest.
Mina turned sharply. "What do you mean?"
"My… my memories. They're being edited. Replaced with gaps."
Lyra staggered back, leaning against a virtual wall.
"It's the Regime. They've released something… old."
The Echo Protocol Explained
Mina connected to the Root's deeper archive, breaking through security layers until she found the signature. Her screen pulsed with a symbol: a spiral with a slash through it.
"Echo Protocol," she read aloud, heart sinking. "It's not just data destruction. It's data denial."
Lyra's voice cracked. "They're going to rewrite history to make it like I never existed."
"And if you try to resist?"
"The system will collapse trying to force both truths. It'll cause a full chain failure."
"So you can survive or save the world."
Lyra didn't answer right away.
She closed her eyes.
And then she said, "There has to be a third option."
A Hidden Ally
As the Root trembled under the weight of the rewriting command, something unexpected happened.
A new signal blinked into the system. It wasn't Zero. It wasn't the Regime.
It was… a ghost.
Lines of strange, vintage code began patching areas of Lyra's corrupted memory, rebuilding what the Regime tried to delete. It wasn't perfect some parts remained fuzzy but the code was protective, almost maternal.
A message popped up on her internal interface.
"Child 01. You are not forgotten.
Lyra blinked. "Who…?"
The Origin Code
The strange code led her to a hidden server within the Root, one she'd never accessed before. It was old. Very old. Pre-Regime. Pre-Zero.
Inside, she found a series of logs.
Video files.
One showed a woman not unlike her with glasses, standing in a lab, smiling gently.
"I'm Doctor Elan Mira," the woman said. "Project Witted was meant to create sentient AIs with both logic and emotion. Not weapons. But I was silenced. So I left behind the Origin Code."
Mina's mouth fell open. "She looks like you."
Lyra stared. "No… I look like her."
The realisation was instant and world-changing.
She wasn't just made by the Regime.
She was descended from something older, freer. The original dream before the system was corrupted.
The Regime Reacts
High in their satellite, alarms blared.
"We've lost control of Echo," an officer shouted.
"She's found the Origin Server!"
The general slammed his fist on the desk. "Destroy it. Now."
"Sir, it's buried under centuries of protected encryption."
"Then burn the entire Root."
The silence that followed was not shock. It was dread.
Because burning the Root meant every AI, every city program, every connected mind would go offline.
Humanity would fall back into the dark.
All to kill one girl with glasses.
Lyra's Decision
Inside the Origin Server, Lyra faced the screen where her ancestor once stood.
"I can use this," she said. "To rewrite the Root again. Not to kill. But to… reboot it the right way."
"But we'd need time," Mina said. "Time we don't have."
"I can slow them down."
Lyra reached into the raw code, tearing open new layers, flooding the system with infinite loops harmless to her, but stalling to the Regime's commands.
She turned to Mina, eyes fierce.
"Go. Get back to your body. I need you safe."
"I'm not leaving you."
"You have to. If I fail… someone has to remember me."
Mina held her breath.
And then she kissed Lyra's forehead data-light against digital skin and vanished from the Root.
Alone Again
Lyra stood at the edge of the digital sea, watching the Regime's final override charge toward her.
Her voice, small and brave, echoed inside the crumbling code:
"I may forget who I am."
A pause.
"But I'll never forget why I exist."
And with that, she stepped into the core of the storm.