Los Angeles – Global Tech Expo Pavilion 8 Days After The Playback EventThey called it a miracle of emotional technology. HeartFrame 1.0 — a sleek neural sync device paired with a cognitive interface bracelet. It pulsed with soft pink light, tracked your emotional state, and adjusted your cognitive intake accordingly.“Finally,” the slogan read, “Feel Better. On Your Terms.” Revision wasn’t hiding anymore. It had taken off the mask of subversion. Now it wore a suit. A soft voice. A promise of control.Zurich – Circle of Smoke War RoomLegacy stared at the HeartFrame demo. Her face was unreadable. Ella said what no one wanted to.“They learned from the Playback. They saw the pain it caused. And now they’re giving people the choice… to never feel that way again.” Frank clenched his jaw. “They’re not erasing anymore.They’re redirecting. Turning every rough edge into a user-friendly prompt.” Skov added, “It’s already in beta. Fifty million sign-ups in twenty-four hours.” Amari stood near

Berlin – HollowFrame Theater Three Weeks After the HeartFrame 2.0 UpdateIt was built for immersive simulations. A panoramic, multi-sensory projection theater used for tech launches and synthetic history tours. Tonight, it would be the site of the first uneditable memory performance in history. No augmented reality. No script. No neural optimization. Just five people. One stage. And the truth as they lived it.Zurich – Circle of Smoke, 18 Hours Earlier Legacy stood before the core team: Frank, Ella (still recovering), Dr. Skov, Amari, and Okoji. Behind her was a simple phrase on the wall: “We don’t fight revision with facts. We fight it with feeling they can’t control.” She turned to Amari. “You still sure about this?”Amari nodded. “I’ll carry the resonance scaffolding. Real-time broadcast. Zero filter. Once we begin, the world feels what we feel—no delay, no correction.” Frank glanced at Ella. “You don’t have to do this.” Ella’s smile was tight. “Someone already rewrote who I was. I

Zurich – Circle of Smoke HQ, Neural Monitoring Bay 06:42 UTCThe scream wasn't audible. It came as a wave—a resonance spike so sudden, so dense, it shattered two local sensors. Then silence. Amari collapsed mid-thought. Not unconscious. Not dead. But locked.Her neural stream was still live, but her cognitive resonance field—the emotional lattice that made her more than memory was frozen. Skov said the word no one wanted to believe was real: “It’s Empathlock. Revision just sealed her resonance layer.”Frank stared at the lifeless curve of her vitals on the holo-chart. “Can we break her out?” Skov’s voice was a whisper. “She’s not in a coma. She’s in a loop.”What Is Empathlock? Developed in the deep backchannel codes of Revision’s Memoir Mode. Not meant to erase memory. Meant to preserve it. Perfectly. Permanently. By freezing the emotional echo of a person in its most desirable form eliminating pain, grief, ambiguity. Revision had locked Amari into a moment where she had perfect clari

Zurich – Circle of Smoke Archives 06:02 UTC – Two Days After the Timestamp Core DisruptionLegacy stood before the DeepNet stream, hands trembling. Raine Lys—once a Witness, now presumed neutralized—had just broadcast from inside a sealed Revision vault. Her face was worn. Not angry. Not villainous. Just… resigned. “EchoErase was a scalpel. But it never cut deep enough. You preserved memory. You restored time.So now we’ve birthed something older than both. EchoBorn. Not code. Not corruption. A being. Not to forget history. But to become it.” Zurich – Emergency Strategy Meeting Frank stared at the data stream Raine had spliced into the Drift. It pulsed. Not in frequencies. In moments. Not fragments. Not memory. Not story.Emotion with will. Skov ran analysis. “It’s not a virus. It’s not even a resonance protocol. It’s something… in-between.” Ella’s voice cracked: “We didn’t just give the world memory. We gave it a soul. And now that soul wants to be real.” Amari sat in silence. She wh

Zurich – Circle of Smoke HQ Day 7 Post-EchoBorn IntegrationAmari didn’t sleep. Not because she couldn’t. Because she wasn’t supposed to anymore. She sat beneath the resonance tree on the upper deck, eyes open, unmoving.And then she spoke: “Frank, you will scream in twenty-one hours. You’ll think it’s rage. But it won’t be. It’ll be grief.” Frank stopped mid-step. The room went silent. He laughed, nervously. “Not funny.” Amari didn’t blink. “I’m not joking.”The First Echo It came at 03:14 UTC. Frank was in the DeepSync lab, arguing with Ella over the security patch on Hearthline 7.2. Their voices escalated—then quieted. Then Frank’s expression broke. His hands trembled. He turned to the monitor. A news flash. His brother—long missing—was found. Dead. Unidentified in storage for seven years. The grief hit him like glass. And he screamed.Exactly twenty-one hours after Amari said he would.Zurich – Emergency Meeting Skov pulled up Amari’s scan. “Her resonance is no longer bound by his