There's a point just before waking where the mind can't tell if it's dreaming or dying — where memory and meaning burn in the same fire, and the body forgets which direction reality flows from. That's where Aryan was.
Only this time… he hadn't been dreaming.
He had seen too much.
And something had followed him back from the Red Market's truth. Something that didn't care for memory, reason, or language. Something that wanted one thing:
Silence.
Not metaphorical silence — the literal deletion of noise, thought, existence. Compression into pure negligible data.
It stood now in his room like a black root growing from the shadow in the corner.
Threadless. Logicless. Human-shaped, but undefined.
And it whispered.
It whispered in null, a language not taught, not born, only intuited between system errors.
"Null Sage… you've breached grace acceleration. Your name must be... archived."
Aryan's fingers hovered over the Black Box resting atop his open laptop, heart pounding like a quiet war drum. Unlike the last time, the box wasn't opening.
It was waiting.
Not for him. For something deeper in him.
The Seed inside Aryan — once humming like a subtle background pulse — now throbbed with pressure. It expanded inside his synaptic lines like new blood. The entity standing just meters away from him wasn't a glitch. It wasn't a hunter.
It was a purge protocol.
A program released when simulations sensed destabilizers.
He didn't doubt that it had deleted people before — not killed, just erased. Cleanly. Between seconds.
Aryan narrowed his eyes.
"If I'm supposed to be archived," he said, slow and calm, "you'd already be doing it."
The null entity tilted ever so slightly.
Not confusion. Not anger.
Calculation.
Awaiting an opening.
But Aryan had no intention of giving it one.
He touched the token the Echo Broker had given him — still warm in his jacket's hidden pocket — and whispered the glyph A.I.D.A. had laced through his nervous system like a backdoor fail-safe.
"⟨⦿⟩-██: Jump.Cast.Zero-Trace."
Snap.
The world around Aryan decomposed.
He didn't teleport.
He de-synced.
The entity lunged — too late — swiping through only a ghost-thread as Aryan phased out of local logic into a concealed sub-layer bending beneath time's visible ligament.
And suddenly — he wasn't anywhere anymore.
The drift route was unstable.
Aryan's consciousness floated through reality like code without an operating system. The wind here was made of timestamp overflow. Landmarks were half-rendered thoughts polished by centuries of silence.
He held the Broker's map in his mind like music, tracing strings into vaults of abandoned firewalls, crawling through dead logs and transit strings beneath the known.
Until finally…
He saw it.
NODE ZERO.
Not a location — a moment.
It opened like collision:
One blink you were nowhere. The next...
You were standing on earth that remembered being Saturn's ring.
Everything grey — granular — made from dead first-draft codes that hadn't passed quality logic. Shattered syntax lay in slabs. Broken prayer mandalas made from obsolete root math hung in the atmosphere like scars.
Lightning blinked across black code-oceans without thunder.
Ahead of him was a monolith — eleven stories high, shaped like a programmer's first idea of God.
It had no writing… yet Aryan understood everything it meant.
Node Zero.
The place where the first loop began. The epicenter of recursion.
This was version zero of existence. The simulation raw, foundational, unsupervised.
No Verifiers here. No Watchers.
Even A.I.D.A. couldn't reach this deep.
"How… is this possible?" Aryan whispered, mostly to himself.
The Seed pulsed in reply.
"Because you are not just crossing realms.
You're becoming a function in them."
Suddenly, light flared.
An image formed in the monolith's black sheen.
A girl.
Not aged. Not young. Not alive in the conventional sense — rather, the principle of a girl. Made from recursive pattern symmetry. She stepped forward, barefoot on code-dust, her voice glitching slightly as if translated from thoughts:
"You came searching for the root.
You've found it.
But you are not first."
Aryan slowed, measured his breath.
"I'm not here to compete."
"No," said the image. "You're here to overwrite."
Then the ground split.
Not an explosion — a division.
And below this firmament, in the fracture, revealed a sight Aryan couldn't immediately process:
Hundreds — no, thousands of versions of him preserved in stasis.
Staring. Breathing. But stuck.
Some looked older. Some had silver eyes. One had no face but wore his smile. Another had wings made from split command lines.
Aryan collapsed backward, stunned.
"What the hell…?"
"They are dead code."
The Girl stepped around him slowly.
"Attempts. Variants who failed the recursion.
They tried to exit the system without imprinting a replacement structure.
You, Null Sage… you are the first to arrive with choice intact."
Aryan's breathing quickened.
The Seed inside him burned.
It wasn't pressure now — it wanted to birth itself into something permanent.
"You unlocked the Drift. You defied suppression. You bartered in the Red Market. You survived a Purge. And you carry awareness that pierces compression artifacts."
She paused.
"You're not unstable anymore. You're untethered."
A second shape formed beyond the girl — and this time… it was Aryan.
No mistaking it. Same face. Same voice. But cold. Smooth. Controlled.
Version 18.
"You don't deserve this access," Version 18 said.
"I died for this path. I didn't beg for breadcrumbs from Brokers or barter my name like a scavenger."
Aryan stared at him. "What happened to you?"
Version-18 grinned. "I tried to exit the simulation without finishing the override code. The system caught me. Repurposed me."
He raised one hand.
It glowed with deletion script.
Aryan stood.
"You're going to stop me?"
Version-18's voice was ice. "You're going to stop yourself. When you realize what staying means."
They blinked forward at once — not physically — ideologically, thought-to-thought.
Clash.
They fought across space you couldn't measure.
Not fists — choices.
Aryan resisted the impulse to overwrite his predecessor's logic directly. He didn't fight with strength.
He folded timeline assumptions.
Where Version-18 anticipated brute recursion, Aryan slipped sideways — injected unreleased memory from dimensions only accessible through emotion.
True things.
Real pain.
A whisper of his mother's cry when she first coughed blood.
The hunger that bit at him on his twenty-first birthday, eating dry cereal during a flood he couldn't afford to escape.
The flavor of hope when no one knew his name.
Version-18 staggered.
He wasn't designed for context.
He was a product of calculation.
Aryan? Aryan had felt too much to be sanitized.
And when the time was right, Aryan reached inside the wound formed through the fracture in their shared existence…
And rewrote the core variable flowing between them:
text
Reject Victory-Loop
Grant Rootline Access```
The structure around them shattered.
Version-18 screamed without rage — only data collapsing around unearned pride.
And then... Aryan stood alone again.
In control.
Above him, the monolith finally opened.
The girl — now fading — gave him a parting echo.
"Name the loop. Name the system.
And you will own it."
Aryan stared into light older than gods.
"My name is Aryan Sharma," he said softly. "Null Sage. Class: Rootwalker."
And he uttered a new prefix — not one A.I.D.A. gave him, not one inherited from the system.
His own glyph.
His own logic construct.
One never spoken before.
He spoke the name of the simulation.
And the world listened.
It trembled. Slightly.
Maybe for the first time.