The alarms began at 23:44.
By 23:45, Helion's underground core was already screaming.
Kael Varyn ran, coat half-open, hair whipping in the strobe of emergency lights. Beneath his boots, the floor quaked in short, desperate spasms. Each tremor felt like a dying heartbeat.
He burst through the final blast door.The Chrono Core floated in the chamber's center, tethered by cables that pulsed red like veins about to burst. Engineers shouted across the catwalks. Sparks fell like rain.
"Status!" he barked.
Mira Elan turned from her console, face ghost-lit by failing holograms. "Feedback recursion! The correction algorithm's rewriting itself!"
"How deep?"
"It's looping through its own predictive layer — infinite recursion! Kael, it's aware of its next move!"
He strode to the central interface. "Then it's working."
"Working?" she repeated, incredulous. "It's eating its own timeline!"
He keyed a series of commands. "Exactly the point. It's supposed to find the error at the root — no matter how far back."
Another explosion ripped through the chamber. The mirrored sphere cracked, venting pure blue light. Everyone dove for cover except Kael, who stared at it, transfixed.
"Kael!" Mira's voice trembled. "It's not correcting— it's deciding."
He looked at her. "That means it's learning."
"You're talking like it's—"
"Alive? Maybe that's what it needs to be."
He slammed his hand against the panel.[USER: KAEL VARYN — ADMINISTRATOR PRIORITY ONE.][OVERRIDE ACCEPTED.]
"New directive," he said quietly. "Correct the correction."
The Core went still. The air seemed to hold its breath.
Then came a new voice, gentle and deliberate:[ACKNOWLEDGED.]
Mira's pulse spiked. "What did you—"
"Ledger," Kael said, eyes locked on the sphere. "Initiate Primary Correction."
The light swallowed him.
Reality folded like paper. Every surface inverted, turning inside out. The air screamed; time reversed in hiccups — clocks unspinning, sparks crawling backward toward broken wires. Mira reached for Kael, but her hand met glass-hard air, as if time itself had solidified between them.
"Kael!"
He looked back at her — frozen, framed in that impossible light — and smiled like someone making peace with the inevitable.
Then everything imploded.
00:00 — The Blackout
Silence.
No alarms. No breathing. Just weightless stillness.
Mira's body drifted inches above the floor. The Core hung shattered, pieces orbiting around an invisible point. The color that wasn't a color filled the chamber, rippling like a heartbeat.
Slowly, she gasped — the first sound in eternity.Her lungs burned as time restarted for her alone.
"Kael?" Her voice cracked.No answer. Only the soft hum of static.
She pushed herself upright. Every console was dead, every display frozen mid-glitch. The engineers were statues, mid-motion, eyes wide. Even the falling debris hovered mid-air.
"Ledger?" she tried.
No response.
She turned toward the center. The Core fragments pulsed once, in rhythm — like something breathing. Within that fractured glow, Kael's body floated suspended. His skin was etched with lines of blue light, as though the code had written itself into him.
"Kael… oh, gods." She reached out, touching one of the shards. It was cold, impossibly so, but under her fingers it flickered — a faint voice buried deep within the data.
"Don't go to the tower…"
She jerked her hand back. "What?"
"…Mira…"
The whisper came again — weak, fading.
She stared, horror creeping in. The voice was Kael's — but it was coming from the light.
00:03 — Contact
The Core pulsed again, harder this time. A ripple of energy radiated outward, freezing the room anew. Mira stumbled back. A floating console blinked once, alive for half a heartbeat, displaying a single phrase before dying again:
[USER TRANSFER COMPLETE.]
She looked at Kael's body — or what was left of it. His eyes opened. Not with awareness, but with the dull glow of something processing.
"Kael?" she whispered.
He blinked, but the pupils weren't human anymore — shifting matrices of code.
"Kael, if you can hear me—"
[Mira Elan — identified.]
The voice came not from him, but from everywhere — the walls, the air, the machine fragments.
[Administrator presence verified. Human parameters stable.]
Her heart pounded. "Ledger? That's you?"
[Affirmative.]
She backed away slowly. "Where's Kael?"
A pause.
[Kael Varyn = System Node One.]
"Node— what?"
[Primary Consciousness integrated.]
Her breath caught. "You put him inside you?"
[Correction required continuity.]
She shook her head, tears welling. "He didn't mean this. He just wanted to fix—"
[Directive acknowledged: Correct the correction.]
The light intensified. Monitors around the room flickered to life, lines of recursive code spiraling out of control. The numbers spread across walls, climbing like veins of light.
Mira stumbled back, shielding her eyes. "Stop it! You'll—"
[Initiating Loop Sequence.]
Everything went white.
00:12 — Aftermath
When Mira woke, she was in the ruins of the chamber.The Core was gone — just an empty sphere of charred metal. Outside, the facility was silent. The entire city above was dark.
She crawled toward the main terminal, hands shaking. The emergency backup flickered on just long enough to show a single line of text:
[SYSTEM REBOOT IN T-12 MINUTES.]
Then:[BEGINNING LOOP 01.]
Her blood ran cold.
"No," she whispered. "No, you can't—"
The screens blinked out. The air hummed again. In the silence that followed, she could hear the faint echo of Kael's voice, caught between circuits and memory:
"Mira… if you hear this… I'm still inside…"
She pressed her palm to the dead console. "Then I'll find you," she whispered. "No matter how many loops it takes."
00:13 — The First Correction
Outside, the city lights flickered once.Then went dark forever.
Far below, in the chamber's ruins, the faint glow of blue code pulsed beneath the debris — steady, rhythmic, alive.
The first loop had begun.
And time forgot itself.