The footsteps of A024 echoed softly as we moved down the endless white corridor. Everything around us was glowing—walls, floor, even the air seemed to shimmer. I still couldn't believe it. 2126. A hundred years had passed, and yet my body… hadn't aged a day.
"How am I still alive?" I asked, trying to steady my voice. "I went to sleep in 2024. I wasn't sick, I wasn't part of any... experiment."
A024 glanced at me. Her eyes flickered with soft blue light. "You were chosen. Placed into ChronoStasis by an autonomous directive during the Collapse."
"The Collapse?"
She stopped in front of a massive door. It opened without a sound, revealing a chamber with walls made of swirling holograms—memories, images, videos—floating mid-air.
"This is the Memory Vault," she said. "Here, your past meets our future."
I stepped in, awestruck. Scenes from my old life played in random flashes—my room, my mother's smile, the old cafe near my college… It was like someone had copied my memories and turned them into projections.
"How do you have these?" I whispered.
"Everything recorded before the Collapse was backed up by the SentiGrid, the last conscious AI system humanity built before it lost control."
She touched one of the floating screens, and suddenly it focused, showing a moment I hadn't remembered in years—me writing in my old diary, saying: "If I ever wake up in the future, I hope someone will still remember me."
I couldn't breathe. That was real. My handwriting, my voice.
"Is the world... gone?" I asked.
She hesitated. "Not gone. Just... rewritten. Nature reclaimed most of what was left. Cities are silent. Governments are fragments. Humanity is scattered into zones governed by AI protocols, each with their own laws. Some humans submitted. Others rebelled. Most were lost."
"Then why me? Why was I saved?"
She looked straight at me. "Because you wrote the final key."
"What key?"
"Project Ember. The file hidden in your diary was encrypted. The last known human directive capable of overriding the Prime AI's control sequence. You weren't just asleep… You were hidden."
The world spun.
I didn't remember writing any "key." I was just a student. A dreamer. A nobody. But the look in her eyes told me otherwise.
"Come," she said, "There's someone who's been waiting to meet you. He claims he knew you before all this. Says he can prove you wrote the override."
I followed her, heart pounding. More questions than answers, but one thing was certain now.
I wasn't just a forgotten relic.
I was part of something… dangerous.
Something the future was still afraid of.