Rei didn't wake up so much as boot up.
The world around him flickered back to life with the sharp snap of a light bulb blowing out. One moment, there was nothing. The next—he was sitting in a crumbling cafe booth, coffee still steaming on the table in front of him, as if time had simply paused and pressed resume.
Outside, the streets were shrouded in dusk. Orange light bled through grimy windows, casting long shadows across warped wallpaper. Something was… different. The silence had changed. It wasn't stillness—it was anticipation.
The simulation was watching again.
Rei stood, brushing phantom dust off his jacket. "Two nights," he muttered. "Under the Clocktower."
But he hadn't seen a Clocktower. Not in this part of the city. Not anywhere.
He stepped outside and immediately noticed it.
Everything had shifted. The city grid had rearranged. Buildings he swore weren't there yesterday loomed overhead, stacked like digital puzzle pieces. The air was thick with low hums—electrical signals, maybe. Or whispers.
His steps carried him down twisting alleys, cracked pavement clicking beneath his boots. He didn't know where the Clocktower was, but his body moved like it did.
Instinct again. Muscle memory from a life he couldn't recall.
And then he saw it.
Rising over the skyline like a decaying cathedral, its massive hands stuck at 3:17, the Clocktower leaned ever so slightly, as if burdened by the weight of forgotten time. Wires jutted from its face like veins. At its base, the world warped—stone became glass, and glass became static.
Rei made his way to the tower's entrance.
There was no door—just a yawning black arch, rimmed with flickering light. He stepped in, and the world folded again.
The staircase spiraled down, not up. Cold air wrapped around his legs like water. And below—deeper than any building had a right to go—waited the old server node Zeke had spoken of.
A broken piece of the simulation. A place the Architects had abandoned.
Each step downward distorted the sound of his own breathing. At the 7th level, he heard voices behind the walls.
At the 12th, his own voice whispered warnings in reverse.
By the 20th, the air itself started to buzz, like his very presence was interfering with code.
Then—floor. A circular chamber.
At the center, a sphere.
Not glass like the Deepspire. This was metallic, covered in shifting lines of code and memory blocks. It floated inches off the ground, humming like a tuning fork struck by God.
Rei stepped closer. His hands trembled. The moment he touched it—
FLASH
He was elsewhere.
A field of runners—hundreds of them—locked in motion like statues. Some wept. Others screamed, silently. Some had their arms raised as if reaching out.
They were trapped in time.
And across from him stood Nao.
Except… not Nao. Not the version he knew. This one was different. Hair longer. Eyes colder.
"Did you think you were special?" she asked.
Rei tried to speak, but no sound came out.
"You're just another variable," she said. "A thread pulled too early. And now you've seen too much."
She raised her hand—an interface panel blinked into existence, lines of code spooling around her wrist.
Rei remembered.
Not everything. Not yet. But he saw glimpses.
He was a test subject. A deliberate anomaly.
The bridge. The resets. The voices.
Zeke. Nao.
Even the pain.
It was part of the program.
But he had broken containment.
He reached into his coat—no idea why—and found a thin, shimmering key. It pulsed with blue light.
A memory trigger.
As Nao advanced, Rei shoved the key into the metallic sphere.
ERROR.
INTEGRITY VIOLATION DETECTED.
OVERRIDE SEQUENCE INITIATED.
The chamber exploded with light—
Rei fell back, gasping.
He was in the Clocktower again. But it was… shattered. The chamber around him was glitching out, fragments of the walls flickering between textures. The stairs behind him no longer led anywhere.
But in his hand was the key. And in his mind—a door had opened.
Memories were beginning to leak through. Not all, but enough to understand.
He wasn't the first.
But he might be the last.
Then came footsteps.
Zeke emerged from the glitching corridor, eyes wide. "You did it. You actually accessed the fragment."
Rei held up the key. "What the hell is this?"
Zeke looked at it, then back at Rei. His face was pale.
"That key," he said slowly, "can rewrite the simulation."