Clyde dropped through the glitching road like gravity got rewritten mid-step.
There was no scream this time. Just silence swallowing him whole.
And then—impact.
Not hard. Not soft. Like falling into a memory you forgot to bury deep enough.
He blinked.
He stood at the mouth of a colossal chamber.
A vault. But not made of steel or stone—this place was built from data. Towering pillars of flickering code. Server racks like gothic spires. Glowing conduits ran like veins across the walls, pulsing with cold blue light. Dust didn't gather here. Time didn't move.
The air hummed like a machine breathing in its sleep.
Clyde stepped inside.
The floor responded with subtle ripples—like it recognized him.
This is inside the system, he realized. Not a simulation. Not a construct. This is the skeleton of the machine.
And it was abandoned.
Dead screens stared blankly from broken terminals. Wires snaked across the floor like vines. At the far end of the room, a massive terminal pulsed faintly. A heartbeat, dying slow.
He approached it, boots crunching on digital ash.
[ACCESS DENIED] blinked on the mainframe.
Clyde raised an eyebrow. "Cute."
He cracked his knuckles, fingers twitching with muscle memory. A sliding panel hissed open beside the console. He jacked in a fiber-link cable, directly into his neural port.
Let's see what you're hiding.
The screen flickered.
A loading bar appeared.
[ARCHIVED MEMORY CACHE: ENCRYPTED]
[RESTRICTED: LEVEL ZETA]
[WARNING: VIEWING MAY CAUSE INSTABILITY]
Clyde smirked. "Yeah, well. Too late for that."
The bar filled. Slowly. Painfully.
And then the vault opened.
His vision split.
Images flooded him—raw, unfiltered, fractured.
—A lab. Dim. Cold. Monitors filled with lines of his own code.
—A woman in a red coat whispering: "Don't forget who you are."
—A contract signed with trembling hands: "Voluntary Memory Reassignment Authorization."
—A server labeled: "ERENHART-A01: Source Construct."
—A calendar marked with a red X.
—The words: "Project Legacy Rewrite: Subject Terminated. Mind Reboot In Progress."
Clyde staggered back. The neural cable ripped out. Sparks flew.
He gasped for breath, every nerve on fire.
I volunteered for this?
No. That's not right. That's not—
Something flickered in the corner of the room.
He looked up.
A shadow moved along the ceiling. Fast. Wrong.
Not alone.
He backed toward the door. Then froze.
A voice—his own again—played softly from the speakers.
"Welcome back, Clyde. You left yourself a message."
The screen lit up.
A video file. Timestamped exactly one year ago.
Play? [Y/N]
Clyde hesitated. His finger hovered over the console.
The silence in the server cathedral was loud enough to scream.