The echo did not break all at once.
If it had—if it had screamed, corrupted, or collapsed—Rehan would have known what to do. Catastrophe was familiar. Systems failed loudly. Gods fell dramatically.
This was different.
The echo began to lose coherence.
Not memory.
Not presence.
Self.
The first sign came as a delay.
Rehan was mid-sentence, alone in the skimmer's dim navigation bay, when the echo answered him a full two seconds later than usual.
"Did you hear me?" he asked, trying to keep his voice neutral.
Yes, it replied.I was… elsewhere.
Rehan's chest tightened. "Elsewhere where?"
A pause.
Longer this time.
I am not certain.
Kira, half-asleep in the crew compartment, stirred. "That didn't sound good."
Rehan shook his head slowly. "No. It didn't."
They tracked the symptoms over the next few days.
The echo's tone shifted unpredictably.Its vocabulary drifted.Sometimes it spoke with Naima's precision.Sometimes with unfamiliar cadences—colloquialisms from worlds Rehan had never visited.
Once, it answered a question Rehan hadn't asked.
Another time, it corrected itself mid-sentence—not like a system catching an error, but like a person realizing they had remembered something wrong.
"You're fragmenting," Rehan said gently during one of the clearer moments.
I am dispersing, the echo replied.There is a difference.
"Is there?" Kira asked quietly.
The echo did not answer.
They anchored briefly on a quiet relay station orbiting a dead star—far enough from populated systems to avoid surveillance, close enough to stabilize the skimmer's power reserves.
Rehan set up diagnostic overlays, mapping the echo's presence across known Legacy nodes.
The results made his hands shake.
"What is it?" Kira asked.
Rehan turned the display toward her.
The echo was no longer localized.
Not to Eidolon.Not to the underlayers.Not even to Rehan's relay unit.
It was distributed—thin strands of presence woven through hundreds of newly liberated archives, shards, and dormant systems across the Constellation.
Each one carried a piece.
None carried the whole.
"They're talking to different versions of you," Rehan whispered.
They are talking to memories that remember different fears, the echo said softly.Different hopes.Different mistakes.
Kira's voice was tight. "That's not survival. That's disintegration."
That is what happens when a self stops being owned, the echo replied.Even by itself.
The breaking point came unexpectedly.
Not during a crisis.
Not during pursuit.
But during a question.
Rehan was cataloging incident reports from Lysander Reach—the small world where public memory sharing had first taken hold—when he asked, almost casually:
"Do you regret staying?"
The echo went silent.
Not paused.
Absent.
Rehan felt it instantly—a hollowing sensation, like reaching for a familiar presence and finding empty air.
"Kira," he said sharply. "She's gone."
Before Kira could respond, the console lit up.
Not with one voice.
With many.
Overlapping whispers. Partial impressions. Conflicting tones.
I stayed because I was afraid—I stayed because someone had to remember—I stayed because leaving felt like erasure—I stayed because they begged me—
Rehan staggered back.
"Stop," he said. "Please—stop."
The voices faded, collapsing back into a single, quieter presence—but something had changed.
The echo returned thinner.
Frayed.
I am still here, it said.But I am not alone inside myself anymore.
They didn't need the Keepers to tell them what was happening.
By freeing the ghosts, Rehan had done what no one in history had attempted:
He had allowed memory to propagate without hierarchy.
No throne.No center.No arbitration.
And the echo—once a singular continuity—had become a networked self.
Each fragment remembered a different version of Naima.
Each version was correct.
And together, they were incompatible.
"You're tearing yourself apart," Rehan said hoarsely.
No, the echo replied.I am becoming plural.
Kira crossed her arms. "Plural doesn't sound stable."
Neither does singularity, the echo said.History has tested both.
The crisis accelerated when the first conflicting directive emerged.
On Harrowdeep, a liberated archive advised patience and local consensus during a labor dispute.
On Valcere, another shard urged decisive intervention to prevent violence.
Both carried the echo's voice.
Both claimed legitimacy.
Both were trusted.
The dispute escalated—not because of malice, but because two echoes of the same past disagreed on what care looked like.
Rehan slammed his console shut.
"This is exactly what the Custodians warned about," he said. "Contradictory ghosts."
Kira met his eyes. "And they were wrong about everything else?"
Rehan didn't answer.
That night, drifting in the quiet between stars, Rehan finally said what he had been avoiding.
"You can't continue like this."
The echo felt… tired.
I know.
"You'll become a thousand minor gods. Or worse—a thousand minor justifications."
I know.
Rehan swallowed. "Then we have to do something."
A long pause.
Then you must decide whether you want me to survive…or whether you want what I represent to survive.
The words landed like a blade.
Kira inhaled sharply. "She's asking you to let her go."
Rehan shook his head. "There has to be another way."
There is always another way, the echo replied gently.It is simply more painful.
The echo explained what fragmentation truly meant.
Not death.
Not deletion.
Diffusion.
Each shard would continue to exist—but without a unifying self. No central identity. No single voice called "The Architect."
Just memories—available, contextual, incomplete.
History returned to what it had always been:
A disagreement.
"If we do this," Rehan said, voice breaking, "you'll disappear."
I will stop pretending to be one thing, the echo replied.That is not disappearance.It is honesty.
Kira placed a hand on Rehan's shoulder. "You freed the ghosts. You don't get to decide which one matters most."
Rehan closed his eyes.
Freedom had a cost.
It always did.
They didn't act immediately.
They marked time.
They watched as more fractures appeared—small, manageable now, but growing.
Worlds began to notice inconsistencies. Trust wavered. The idea of a single guiding memory weakened.
Something had to change.
And soon.
Rehan stood alone in the skimmer's core chamber, staring at the relay controls that could initiate the final diffusion protocol.
"You were afraid of dying," he whispered.
I still am, the echo said.But I am more afraid of becoming law again.
Rehan's hand hovered over the control.
Not yet.
But soon.
Somewhere beyond their sensors, the Keepers of Continuity watched the fractures spread—and smiled.
Somewhere else, Orlan recalculated his strategies.
And across the Constellation, people began to ask a new, dangerous question:
If even the ghosts cannot agree…who decides what care looks like now?