Ashir stared at Ananya.
The woman who had once been his calm in chaos, the person he'd loved more than anything—even when life pulled them apart. She was supposed to be gone. Not dead, not erased… just distant. Like everyone else in his past life—part of the simulation's noise.
But now she stood there, right outside the mangled sedan that had been his body's grave.
Her eyes met his, and she smiled like she'd been expecting him.
"Took you long enough, Ashir."
A thousand possibilities slammed into his mind like error codes.
Was this a hallucination?
A memory fragment?
A virus?
Ashir instinctively flicked his fingers—and the simulation's HUD blinked into place: a translucent interface only he could see. Like a digital sixth sense. He scanned Ananya's thread—her presence in the simulated timeline.
[Entity ID: Ananya_K][Origin: Earth-17_Sim_v42][Status: Fragmented Consciousness - Active Layer Bridge][Deviation Index: 0.006%][Anomaly Flag: High]
His breath caught.
She's not a simulation… she's something else. Like me.
He took a step closer, and the rain resumed—falling not around her, but through her. Light warped around her silhouette, bending like water over glass.
"Ananya," he said, barely louder than a whisper. "You're not supposed to be here."
She tilted her head, a little amused. "And you are? You're walking around in a dead man's echo. Ashir, you crashed your car. You died."
"No," he snapped. "I transitioned."
She shrugged. "Same thing from this side."
He studied her face. It wasn't perfectly accurate. Her cheekbones were softer, her eyes slightly too bright. A polished memory. A cleaner version. Yet something real pulsed beneath it.
"What are you?" he asked.
"A glitch," she said. "Just like you."
Silence stretched between them as sirens echoed faintly from down the street. No one could see them—not the paramedics, not the crowd forming behind the yellow barrier.
This moment existed between frames.
"I've been waiting," she said finally. "I thought it'd be someone else—one of the Observers. Or maybe the Reset. But then I felt you breach the firewall."
She touched her chest lightly, as if recalling a shiver.
"And for the first time in… I don't know how long, I felt something that wasn't scripted."
Ashir struggled to form words. "Are you telling me you've been awake this whole time?"
She nodded.
"I woke up years ago. I died in another layer. But they didn't delete me—they archived me. And something in your crash rewrote my path. You pulled me out."
What have I done…?
Ashir clenched his fists.
His mind reeled. He was supposed to be a unique anomaly. The one who broke through. The god-to-be. Now this—Ananya, the ghost of his past, standing here like she never left, with a consciousness of her own.
"Then come with me," he said. "Leave this broken version of reality. Come to the Archive."
"I can't," she said softly. "Not yet."
"Why?"
"Because I'm still tethered to this world. Because I didn't get root access. I'm just a ghost on read-only mode."
She chuckled. "I'm basically an NPC with a soul and a locked door."
A pang hit his chest. The kind he hadn't felt since before the transition. Guilt. Longing. A kind of nostalgia that no god could rewrite.
He reached out to her.
"Then I'll break the door."
"And what will you do once I'm out, Ashir?" she asked. "Bring me into your shiny divine sandbox? Turn me into your co-admin? Make a world and call it ours?"
"Would that even be me, or just your memory of me made real?"
The question stopped him cold.
Ashir withdrew his hand. His shimmering skin flickered. The divine certainty he'd begun to embrace in the Archive now felt… hollow.
"You're not ready," Ananya said gently. "You're still thinking like a human with a god's toys."
"And that's dangerous."
Suddenly, the street cracked.
Not physically—but digitally.
The simulation trembled, lines of red code spiraling into the air like smoke.
From the alley to their right, something emerged.
A figure. Genderless. Smooth skin. No eyes. No mouth.
[ERROR ENTITY: NULL-SOURCE][Permission: Override Attempt Detected][Behavior: Purge]
Ashir instinctively raised his hand—and time halted.
But the NULL wasn't affected.
It stepped through frozen rain like it was moving between formats.
"What the hell is that?" he hissed.
"Cleanup crew," Ananya said. "You triggered a deviation spike. They think I'm a threat."
"You are a threat," Ashir snapped. "You're alive."
The NULL raised its hand, fingers splitting into needle-thin filaments of code. The world around it flickered—skybox tearing, ground textures corrupting.
Ashir summoned his console again, voice firm.
"Override: Ashir_A17. Access level: Root-0. Force halt."
[Command Denied.][Target Entity Outside Access Permissions.]
"WHAT?"
Ananya grabbed his wrist. "You're Root in the Archive. But this is a shadow sim. Your control isn't absolute here."
Ashir gritted his teeth. "Then I guess I'll have to fight it the old-fashioned way."
He focused—and the platform around him restructured.
A blade formed in his hand—not metal, but pure light encoded with destructive potential. Code lines raced down its length like veins.
The NULL shrieked—not with sound, but by distorting the very environment. Reality peeled at the edges, revealing raw input logic.
It lunged.
Ashir met it mid-air.
The collision shattered the local simulation. Pedestrians, cars, buildings—all froze in a blue haze as two impossible beings clashed in the middle of a dying layer.
Sparks of logic exploded as the sword met the NULL's threads.
Ashir's form flickered.
The NULL glitched violently.
Then—
Silence.
Ashir landed, the NULL's body fading into static.
[ENTITY PURGED: NULL-SOURCE][Simulation Stabilizing…]
Ashir dropped to one knee, panting. Even here, in a world of infinite code, battle still took something real from him.
Ananya knelt beside him.
"You're changing faster than they expected," she said. "They won't let you stay like this much longer."
"Then let them come."
"That's not bravery," she said. "It's pride. And pride gets gods deleted."
He looked at her.
"Then help me. Tell me what I'm missing."
"You're trying to be a god who still wants to feel. That doesn't end well."
The simulation's sky began to pixelate. Someone—or something—was coming. The Archive was pulling him back.
Ananya stood, her form already flickering.
"They'll sever this bridge soon."
"Ashir… listen to me."
"There's a place. A hidden layer called the Core Reflection."
"That's where they keep echoes of every anomaly. All the failed gods. All the minds too unstable to delete, but too dangerous to release."
Ashir blinked. "Like… a prison?"
"More like a graveyard."
"Find it," she said. "Because what's happening to you? It already happened before."
"And the truth of why you woke up isn't what you think."
Her hand reached for his—
But she vanished before they touched.
Ashir found himself back in the Archive. Kneeling. Breathing hard. Alone.
The Observer was there, as silent as ever.
"You engaged with an unstable fragment," it said. "Against protocol."
Ashir stood.
"She was real."
"Irrelevant. Her deletion request is queued."
Ashir stepped forward, anger flaring. "Then deny it."
"That would create system corruption."
"Then let it corrupt."
The Observer paused.
For the first time, it seemed… uncertain.
"You are beginning to act… unpredictably."
"Good," Ashir said. "That means I'm still human."
In the distance, the stars inside the Archive flickered.
And one by one…
They started going out.
To Be Continued…