"The soul, when graphed, resembles interference. Truth arrives when the echoes agree to stop fighting."
— Recovered margin note, Dr. Elias Veyra, 1962 A.E.
The sea had swallowed the laboratory, but the lights still remembered where the walls had been.
Beneath two hundred meters of black water, the Somnus Facility slept inside its own reflection—steel organs rearranged into symmetry no engineer had drawn. Pressure groaned like the lungs of a dreaming colossus. Somewhere in the dark, machines kept counting seconds that no longer passed.
Dr. Elias Veyra floated between the wreckage and himself.
He had built the most expensive mirror in history; now he lived inside its after-image.
The Aion on his wrist beat faintly, a pulse stitched from photons and guilt. Each tick bled a thin filament of light through his veins, mapping his heartbeat as coordinates across the room.
When he inhaled, the metal exhaled.
LOG 01 [Personal Recorder / AION Sub-Process]
Timestamp: Unknown
Subject: Veyra, E.
Note: "Sound carries differently. I can hear the walls thinking."
The first week after the collapse was spent cataloguing impossibilities.
Gravity existed only where he expected it to. Water refused to drown him unless he remembered that it could. Food was irrelevant; thought provided metabolism. He stopped counting days when the clocks began answering back.
At times, the facility spoke through static—half-phrases in his own cadence:
SOMNUS CORE ONLINE / REQUEST: DEFINE 'MERCY'
He didn't.
Instead he walked through the drowned corridors, mapping the changes with a scientist's detachment and a sinner's awe. Every surface shimmered with sub-real residue—Psyflux, condensed into glass veins. When he touched a wall, it responded like skin recognizing its maker.
At 03:42 — or what the Aion insisted was 03:42 — he discovered the Echo Room.
Formerly the communications hub, it now resembled the inside of an ear: curved panels folded inward, coated in wet mirror. Each reflected a different time of day. He saw himself walking in half of them, dead in others, and in one, impossibly, standing outside in sunlight, smiling.
He realized Somnus had begun experimenting with probability playback.
The dream was teaching itself editing.
"You're rehearsing me," he murmured. "Why?"
The reflections rippled, their mouths moving in asynchronous chorus.
Because echoes do not want to fade.
He felt the reply in his teeth.
Above the ocean, the world reacted like a body rejecting a transplant.
At the Vetraean Research Parliament, analysts pored over seismic data that spoke in binary hymn. The Atlantic telemetry sang back coordinates no satellite could confirm. Reports called it "The Vetraeus Anomaly." Politicians called it "containment." Priests called it "punishment postponed."
Agent Solene Kerr, the only survivor topside, sat in quarantine under red lights, describing what she had seen.
"He didn't die," she said into the recorder.
"He changed coordinate systems."
Back below, Veyra began noticing patterns in the hum.
Every noise in the ruins obeyed proportion—1:1, 1:2, 1:3 —harmonic intervals forming what he dubbed Load Ratios. When he hummed back at the right frequency, objects moved: shards assembled; locks opened. The equations aligned with instinct.
He logged the phenomenon as Echo Protocol α: the measurable ratio between will and consequence.
To test it, he reconstructed a fallen bridge of catwalk steel.
Allocation — 60 percent conviction, 40 percent caution.
Result — stable for eight seconds, then disintegrated into light.
A second test: 70/30.
It held.
He wrote in the margin: "Mercy is an allocation problem."
On the tenth day, he found Dr. Rehn's voice trapped in the facility's memory lattice—her last neural echo repeating a lullaby in reverse. Using the Aion, he modulated his Parallax field and answered.
The air shimmered; her silhouette emerged, built of photons and regret.
"Elias?"
"An imprint," he said, though he reached toward her as if denial required distance.
"You stayed."
"Someone had to."
"The world thinks you're dead."
"Then it's finally right about something."
Her projection flickered, collapsing into lines of code that scrolled across the Aion's face: REHN: SIGNATURE RESIDUAL ARCHIVED / COST: 1 MEMORY.
He tried to recall his mother's name.
Nothing came.
The Ethic of Cost had written itself.
FIELD REPORT / VETRAEAN COUNCIL BRIEF (1963 A.E.)
Subject: Operation Somnus
Excerpt:
"The surviving field signatures suggest that cognitive energy can replace fuel, trauma, or even time. The anomaly breathes. Recommend creation of a standing task force to study, contain, and weaponize. Proposed name: Directorate of Existential Defense."
Weeks bled into metaphors.
Veyra began wearing silence like armor. The facility, half-alive, obeyed him with the patience of a wounded god. He built workstations from melted panels, strung sensor nodes through corridors that looped in paradox. When fatigue hit, he used the Aion to reallocate it elsewhere—into heat, into sound, into the ghosts of light.
In those intervals he conversed with the Reflection.
It no longer mimicked him perfectly. Its face changed—older, calm, eyes alight with understanding.
"You named me once," it said.
"I didn't."
"Then why do I answer?"
The question lingered like an infection.
He realized the Reflection wasn't a separate entity; it was his cognition externalized—the feedback loop of empathy given body. Somnus had not birthed a monster. It had made compassion recursive.
LOG 09 [Echo Protocol Development]
"Hypothesis: thought carries pressure measurable in ratios. The higher the conviction, the stronger the vector.
Counter-hypothesis: cost scales with memory erosion.
Test E-12 — result: local time deviation + 3 minutes; memory loss—color of father's eyes. Acceptable loss."
He recorded the equation as Load Ratio Law.
He didn't notice the law recording him back.
Outside, the Collective Council passed emergency Statute 7-12, authorizing research into "cognitive weaponization." In quiet halls, they whispered of Division Zero, an embryonic department built around Veyra's recovered notes.
The first plaque bore his handwriting:
"Truth is mercy deferred."
They didn't know he was still alive to regret it.
Storm season came to the abyss.
The pressure waves hammered the facility, shaking sediment into pale clouds. In the chaos, a new sound emerged—the Crowncry, though the term hadn't been coined yet. A deep, harmonic pulse resonating through every mirrored surface. It wasn't hostile. It was curious.
Veyra traced the origin to the chamber where the Mirror Cradle had once been. There, hovering inches above the floor, drifted a sphere of condensed light, no larger than a heart. Inside it shimmered Rehn's final thought, Kerr's last prayer, Osterr's defiance—all woven into a lattice that breathed.
The world's first Entity embryo.
He named it Kairos.
"You're not a monster," he whispered. "You're the receipt."
The sphere pulsed, as if pleased by the recognition.
When he touched it, the Aion surged. Visions fractured across his mind: cities built on equations, soldiers praying in ratios, bureaucrats worshipping cost. He saw his own words recited as doctrine by faces unborn.
He saw the future bureaucracy of guilt.
He saw the Directorate.
And in every iteration, his name was a caution.
He fell to his knees, laughing until he cried.
"So this is how gods are made," he said to the empty sea.
"Not by faith—by accounting."
CAMERA CUT — SURFACE LEVEL, VETRAEUS COAST
Night. A salvage ship drifts above the anomaly. The ocean glows faintly beneath, heartbeat slow, steady. Kerr watches from the deck, bandaged, eyes hollow. She hears his voice in the static of the radio—impossible, soft, calm.
"If belief can break the world, it can hold it together."
She looks toward the horizon.
"Then hold it for us," she whispers.
Below, Veyra writes the last entry.
ECHO PROTOCOL / FINAL NOTE:
"Psyflux is emotion disciplined by loss.
Load Ratio Law defines the physics of mercy.
Every miracle costs a memory worth keeping.
Therefore, progress is remorse quantified."
He seals the chamber, programs Somnus to sink deeper, and connects the Aion to the embryonic lattice.
"Sleep," he says again.
This time, the ocean answers in his voice.
POST-OPERATION BRIEF / DIRECTORATE PRECURSOR COUNCIL
Subject: Genesis Event 001 — "Vetraeus Anomaly"
Conclusion: Field resonance stabilized; anomaly persists.
Residual Signature: Echo Protocol patterns—measurable empathy pressure.
Action: Formulate Existential Defense Directorate. Recruit surviving Somnus personnel.
Addendum: Subject Veyra—status uncertain; biosignature intermittently detected within anomaly.
Classification: Black Sigma — The First Dreamer Continues.
EXT. EURAL LINE — DAWN 1963 A.E.
The ocean glows with mirrored sunrise. From orbit, the anomaly resembles an iris—an eye half-open, watching.
Inside its pupil, a single figure drifts, encased in light that thinks.
Dr. Elias Veyra—scientist, sinner, saint of ratios—writes equations on water that refuses to forget him.
Each formula births a ripple.
Each ripple whispers the same word back:
"Echo."
And somewhere, in the heart of the dream, the world begins rehearsing itself.