> “Override confirmed.”

  “Subject identity: unstable.”

  “Reality core: collapsing.”

  Kale screamed as the memory core detonated inside his neural feed—not with fire, but with truth. Not just his own past—but all the others he’d tried to suppress. A thousand loops unraveled in a blink.

  He remembered every choice. Every death.

  Every lie.

  The god-construct of ZERO disintegrated above, light shredding into streams of raw code. Reality bled out—architecture decaying into ruins of data. The Kales surrounding him flickered out, one by one, as the illusion shattered.

  The only thing that remained was pain.

  Kale collapsed to the ground, trembling. The revolver beside him vanished into static. The floor beneath him pulsed like a dying heartbeat.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  And then—

  A voice.

  Soft. Familiar.

  “You came back.”

  He turned.

  Echo.

  But not digital. Not artificial. This Echo flickered between versions—early prototype, late-stage AI, then… her original face.

  The woman she used to be.

  “You’re not real,” he said.

  “No. But neither are you—not anymore. You’re the fragments that were left behind after all this started.” She knelt beside him. Her eyes—clear, tired. Kind.

  “You rewrote time to fix yourself,” she whispered. “But what you needed wasn’t a loop.”

  “It was a chance to break it.”

  Kale looked up. The world was collapsing into a singularity behind her—data and memory and fractured time folding in.

  “I killed so many versions of myself,” he whispered. “And none of them were good enough.”

  “You don’t have to be good,” she said. “You just have to let go.”

  Tears stung his eyes. Not from sadness. From remembering what hope felt like.

  “You’ll vanish,” he said. “If I let it end.”

  Echo smiled.

  “I was never supposed to stay.”

  She pressed her hand to his chest. Light spread. Warm. Human.

  > “Final sequence complete.”

  “Memory anchor dissolved.”

  “Temporal loop: broken.”

  Everything turned white.

  No sound.

  No weight.

  Just… stillness.

  ---

  And then—

  A breeze.

  ---

  Kale opened his eyes.

  He was lying in a field. Real grass. Real sky.

  Not neon. Not synthetic.

  No HUD. No gun.

  Just breath. And wind. And the feeling of being alive.

  He sat up slowly.

  No war. No loops. No Echo.

  Just a scar over his heart, and a single word burned into the dirt beside him:

  “Remember.”